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

Chapter Two: Zinaida Gippius's Radiances
In most studies of Gippius, critics have focused on the philosophical and religious
foundations of her verse rather than on its formal aspects. 94
This is due not only to the
rich content of her poetry, but also to its apparent “stylelessness.” Vladislav
Khodasevich wrote that Gippius related to form the way an intellectual woman relates to
her clothing—she loves it, but she doesn’t respect it:
Она формально усложняет и украшает свои стихи, но лишь между делом, не
вдумываясь и нацепляя на себя, что попало. В конце концов ее стихи
оказываются еще более манерными, чем у других символистов, и отсутствие
стиля становится ее стилем… Как бы ни были велики прегрещения Гиппиус
перед формой,—возлюбленное содержание платило и платит ей за любовь и
верность взаимностью. 95
In addition to this emphasis on content over form, critics have maintained that
Gippius’s poetry does not evolve, but rather remains consistently distinctive
(своеобразная) over the course of her poetic career. Aside from a brief flirtation with
Nadsonian verse, her early poetry can be considered mature in terms of both content and
poetic form. She struggles with the same major themes throughout her poetic career
(love, death, and the devil), and this struggle is distinctly marked by paradox—she
regularly shifts between moods of ecstatic faith and hopeless despair.
In this chapter, I will attempt to show that Gippius's final book, Сияния, defies
both of these assumptions. While remaining true to the thematics of her earlier work,
Gippius provides a new form for her poetry, paying close attention to the structure of her
book. For the first time, she provides a single dedication for the entire work. While the
dedicatee is left unnamed, evidence points to Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus whose
94 An exception is James Orville Bailey's 1965 dissertation, The Versification of Zinaida Gippius (Harvard,
1965), a detailed statistical study of Gippius's verse.
95 Zinaida Gippius, Stikhotvoreniia (Saint Petersburg: Novaia biblioteka poeta), 517.
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