Poetry
Собрание стихов. 1889–1903
Not translated into English
Zinaida Gippius · 1904
Synopsis
The author's first collection brings together ninety-seven poems written from 1889 to 1903. Its tone is serious and its religious concern constant: the poems question the divine and the demonic, and follow a spiritual evolution in which religious contemplation meets modernist aesthetics, and in which elements of Christian and Buddhist mysticism mingle. Written with great intellectual rigour, they form the itinerary of some fifteen years.
Context
The volume was printed in Moscow in October 1903 by the Skorpion press and bears the date 1904; it runs to about one hundred and seventy-five pages. It gathers the poems of fifteen years and shows a poetry fully formed from the start, with no visible apprenticeship. The author said she wrote only when she could not do otherwise. A second series, devoted to the years 1903 to 1909, appeared in 1910.
Who it is for
Short, grave poems, to be read in Russian: no French or English translation of the collection.
Prizes and reception
Her first major book of verse, welcomed by the modernist critics as the work of an already accomplished poet.