THE BOOK OF POEMS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ... - TopReferat

feminine soul (невинная душа) of the poem. When his mother does not understand or
condone his act of forgiveness, he comes to the following conclusion: "she, too, was one
of those creatures who are given to the world but whom it is not given for others to
understand; one of those creatures who are not endowed with a capacity to understand,
for his mother, too, was—a woman." 142
Ivan recognizes the signs of this inescapable
"женскость" even in the eyes of his little sister, Lena: Her "two beautiful, dark eyes,
intelligent in their own way, righteous, wonderful, yet mysterious, and perfect in their
own undying mysteriousness, glanced at him. They were the eyes of a creature whom
everyone has agreed to consider and to call a human being, and everyone actually does
call her that, trying to regard her as a human being, although from this designation
nothing but suffering and pain results for anyone." 143
Still a child, Lena has not yet been
fully corrupted by her "женскость." Her beautiful mysteriousness could lead to
something greater than human nature, perhaps an aspect of the eternal feminine. 144
In
Ivan's view, however, she seems doomed to the fate of his mother and his wayward
wife. 145
142 Zinaida Gippius, "The Eternal Woman" in Selected Works of Zinaida Hippius, trans. and ed. Temira
Pachmuss (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 165. Page numbers for subsequent quotations from
the story will be noted in parentheses in the text. For the Russian text, see Zinaida Gippius, Chernoe po
belomu (Book V of Short Stories. Reprint edition.), (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1977),
108-123.
143 Ibid., 164.
144 I.L Savkina discusses the commonality of Gippius's seemingly opposite descriptions of femininity:
"интерпретация природы женственного остается у Гиппиус неизменной—как в презрительно
ироническом, так и в возвышенно-символическом контекстах." For example, the emptiness of
женскость can be seen as the purity of женственность. I.L. Savkina, "Obraz Bogomateri i problema
ideal'no zhenskogo v russkoi zhenskoi poezii XX veka," Preobrazhenie (Russkii feministskii zhurnal) 3
(1995): http://www.a-z.ru/women/texts/savkinar.htm#. This positive nature of desertedness is evident in
Gippius's 1896 poem, "Любовь моя—одна": Однообразно и пустынно,/ Однообразием
сильна,/Проходит жизнь... И в жизни длинной/Любовь одна, всегда одна.
145 Gippius treats the infidelity of Bunin's mistress, Galina Nikolaevna Kuznetsova, in a similar way. While
Kuznetsova appears to exercise her freedom by leaving Bunin for the singer Margo Kovtun, she remains a
slave to her passion. In a 1927 letter to Berberova, Gippius writes about Kuznetsova, "Да, вы правы: все
равно она будет раба." Zinaida Gippius, Pis'ma k Berberovoi i Khodasevichu (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978),
23.
109