Severny Vestnik
Merezhkovsky and Gippius made a pact, each promising to concentrate on what he or she did best, the former on poetry, the latter on prose. The agreement collapsed as Zinaida translated Lord Byron's "Manfred", and Dimitry started working on his debut novel "Julian the Apostate". In Saint Petersburg Gippius joined the Russian Literary Society, became a member of the Shakespearean Circle (the celebrity lawyer Prince Alexander Urusov being its most famous member), and met and befriended Yakov Polonsky, Apollon Maykov, Dmitry Grigorovich, Aleksey Pleshcheyev and Pyotr Veinberg. She became close to the group of authors associated with the renovated "Severny Vestnik", where she herself made her major debut as a poet in 1888.