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

This enslaved "creature" of both "Вечная женскость" and "Женскость" provides
an absolute contrast to the three-crowned Freedom of "Рождение." By placing these
poems next to each other, Gippius demonstrates the tremendous vacillations of her faith
and spirit. In "Вечноженственное" Gippius attempts to reconcile these opposites within
her own spiritual journey. She strives to escape the banal "женскость" of her earthly life
and to approach the perfection of the eternal feminine. These three poems form
something of a trinity—a personalized dialectic. "Рождение" announces the goal of
spiritual freedom; "Женскость" represents one of Gippius's many falls back to the cruel
world; "Вечноженственное" describes Gippius's journey toward the truth of
"Рождение," having experienced worldly "Женскость." The personalization of this
journey is suggested in the gender of the poems' titles. The neuter titles of the positive
poems, "Рождение" and "Вечноженственное," combine the masculine and the feminine
and suggest the possibility for an androgyne like Gippius to reach the ideal of eternal
femininity. Gippius reserves the feminine gender for the negative "Женскость" which
represents her fallible, fickle, nature as an all-too-human woman. 146
The obstacle of exile: "Неотступное" and "Южные стихи"
In Сияния, Gippius's spiritual journey toward God is disrupted by her physical
separation from her home, Russia. Gippius left no detailed record of her life in
emigration, only occasionally keeping sporadic diaries, primarily of her first months in
146 While grammatical gender often carries significance in Gippius's writing, it is particularly evident in the
case of these titles. Gippius originally gave "Вечноженственное" a feminine title, "Вечная
женственность," and "Женскость" was initially the neuter "Падающее." By changing the titles, she
highlights the spiritual promise of the neuter while denigrating the feminine.
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