Gippius was born in Belova, Tula province in central Russia. My father's distant ancestor is a German immigrant, I am a lawyer, and my mother is the daughter of the police chief of a county in Siberia. Gippius spent his childhood and adolescence in Nielin County. In order to get her daughter a formal education, her father tried to send her to a women's college in Kiev. However, because she couldn't bear the sadness of leaving her relatives, she had to spend most of her time in the affiliated hospital of the college. Faced with this situation, my father had to give in and take her home again. Therefore, Kipius began to learn knowledge and wisdom through self-study. Although gippius's self-study is not systematic, she reads an amazing amount. She has read almost all the famous Russian literary works, and knows Nikolai Nikolai Gogol and Turgenev like the back of her hand, especially Dostoevsky.
1889 65438+1On October 8th, gippius married the famous writer de Merezhkovski. The wedding is very simple and simple. According to her memoirs, this is "a bit like the wedding of Katie described by Tolstoy in anna karenine". However, the next scene is beyond Tolstoy's imagination. The night after the wedding, the couple still read books separately. Then Melezh kowski returned to his hotel; But Kipius fell asleep and completely "forgot that he was married". Until the morning, my mother knocked at the door: "You are still sleeping, your husband is here. Get up! " And this is the beginning of their marriage-alliance-gay friendship. For them, spiritual attachment seems to be far greater than physical closeness. It is this couple who have been married in Tbilisi for 52 years and have never been separated for a day.
Shortly after their marriage, they came to Petersburg. On the recommendation of her husband, gippius soon entered the literary circle of Petersburg, and she published her first novel in the Northern Herald. 1904 published the first collection of poems, Poems 1889- 1903. This collection of poems contains many works that shocked the world at that time, such as: "My road is cruel and heartless, leading me to death. But I love myself, just like I love God, and love will save my soul ","Love is only once, just like death ","I pursue what I know nothing about, … what I pursue, there is nothing in this world ". On the theme, Kipius's poems are basically the same as those of the "old generation" symbolist poets, describing loneliness, love, death, personality, human powerlessness, the interweaving and entanglement of divinity and beast, and so on. In poetic language, she likes to express her thoughts directly with imperative sentences, but at the same time, she pays attention to injecting profound philosophy into her poems and paying attention to the fundamental problems, trying to pursue infinity in the finite, contingency in the inevitable and hope in the depths of despair.
190 1 year, the philosopher berdyaev organized a religious-philosophical association, in which Kipius and his wife were the first participants. As for their apartment "Moroz House", it became one of the cultural centers of Petersburg and was regarded as an oasis of Russian intellectuals at that time. The hostess of the salon also won the titles of Sappho in Petersburg, Madonna in decadence, Luther in skirt in Russia, Mermaid with Green Eyes and Cassandra in Russia. According to his religious views, Kipius divided human history into three stages. The first stage is the father's stage, that is, the Old Testament era, which is the stage when human beings realize the power and authority of God and the truth of the world. The second stage is the stage of the son Jesus, that is, the era of the "New Testament" and the era we are currently in. Love becomes a symbol of truth at this stage; The third stage is the holy spirit stage, the eternal female-virgin stage, that is, the era of the "Third Covenant", which is the future of mankind, and freedom will become a symbol of love. By then, all the contradictions in human existence-sex and abstinence, slavery and freedom, hate and love, atheism and religion, etc.-will be solved. In the whole history of Russian poetry, Kipius is one of the great poets with the most religious feelings. She believes that the most natural and urgent need of human nature is prayer. In her mind, truth or exploring truth is higher than human happiness, so she declared in her poem: "I don't pray for happiness for you, and the content of my prayer is far more noble than happiness."
Dissatisfied with the autocratic rule of the czar and the corruption of bureaucrats, Kipius sincerely longed for changes in his motherland and revolution, hoping to create a new Russia from revolution and change. To this end, she warmly cheered 19 17 the arrival of the February revolution. However, she was soon disappointed and wrote in her diary: "This' freedom' that weighed heavily on former slaves is too cruel." The revolution she understands is a spiritual revolution, which belongs to the religious level. However, the vulgarity, violence and bloodiness of reality are so far from her ideal that she simply can't accept the October Revolution that followed. 1920 at the beginning, gippius and her husband Merezhkovski smuggled out of the country. He has lived in Paris since 192 1. In Paris, they continued to publicize the spirit of the Third Covenant and the New Christianity, organized a religious-philosophical group "Green Light Society" and held a salon "Literature Sunday", and gathered a large number of overseas Chinese elite intellectuals around them, which played a role in fueling the first wave of overseas Chinese literature.
In her later years, she continued to write, leaving two excellent memoirs, The Living Face and De Merezhkovski. The last poem she left was: "The last pine tree was illuminated. /The black wooden pier stands out below. /Now, it is about to disappear. /the end is gone forever. /Disappeared during the day. What's in the daytime? /I don't know, it flew away like a bird. /This is just an ordinary white day,/But, after all, it's gone forever. "