“The World of Writers” in Z.N. Gippius’s Prose Works and Her Strategies at the Turn of the Century

Abstract

The paper discusses Z.N. Gippius’s formation as a prose writer. Her position in literature was ambivalent: she published her prose in “thick” magazines, was a friend of some old generation writers and at the same time was associated with decadence and new directions in literature. It was important for her to get support of respectable writers and at the same time she criticized their outdated positivistic world perception from her modernist point of view. She also published her prose in thin illustrated magazines just to provide the Merezhkovskys’ financial position. All of these items are reflected in her letters of this period and as well in her prose, in which she represented various types of writers and showed her attitude to them. The analyses reveals that among the writers that were ironically shown by Gippius there were no authoritative figures; to the author’s opinion, for Gippius such figure was Leo Tolstoy, who would appear in her prose under his own name.