page_title: Zinaida Gippius
section_title: 1917–1919
hierarchical_section_title: Zinaida Gippius / Biography / 1917–1919
caption_attribution_description: Д. В. Философов, Д. С. Мережковский, З. Н. Гиппиус, В. А. Злобин. Исход из Советской России. Конец 1919 — начало 1920 года
context_page_description: Zinaida Nikolayevna Gippius was a Russian poet, playwright, novelist, editor and religious thinker, one of the major figures in Russian symbolism. The story of her marriage to Dmitry Merezhkovsky, which lasted 52 years, is described in her unfinished book Dmitry Merezhkovsky.
  She began writing at an early age, and by the time she met Dmitry Merezhkovsky in 1888, she was already a published poet. The two were married in 1889. Gippius published her first book of poetry, Collection of Poems. 1889–1903, in 1903, and her second collection, Collection of Poems. Book 2. 1903-1909, in 1910. After the 1905 Revolution, the Merezhkovskys became critics of Tsarism; they spent several years abroad during this time, including trips for treatment of health issues. They denounced the 1917 October Revolution, seeing it as a cultural disaster, and in 1919 emigrated to Poland.
  After living in Poland they moved to France, and then to Italy, continuing to publish and take part in Russian émigré circles, though Gippius's harsh literary criticism made enemies.
context_section_description: The Merezhkovskys greeted the 1917 February Revolution and denounced the October Revolution, blaming Alexander Kerensky and his Provisional government for the catastrophe. In her book of memoirs Dmitry Merezhkovsky. Him and Us Gippius wrote: 
  Like mice for whom the world amounts to just themselves and cats, and nobody else, those 'revolutionaries' knew but one sort of distinction: that between the left and the right. Kerensky and his kind intrinsically saw themselves as the 'left', regarding their enemies as 'the right'. As the Revolution happened (not 'made' by them), the left triumphed, but – again, like mice in a basement where there are no more cats, they were still wary of the 'right' as the only source of fear, having in sight just one danger that in 1917 there was none of. They weren't afraid of the Bolsheviks – they belonged to the 'left' too. They never believed the Bolsheviks would be able to keep the power they had taken, and failed to notice how the latter, having stolen their slogans, started to use them with ingenuity, speaking of 'land for peasants', 'peace for everybody', 'the Assembly reinstated', republic, freedom and all that...
  Gippius saw the October Revolution as the end of Russia and the coming of the Kingdom of Antichrist. "It felt as if some pillow fell on you to strangle... Strangle what — the city? The country? No, something much, much bigger," — she wrote in her 26 October 1917, diary entry. In late 1917 Gippius was still able to publish her anti-Bolshevik verses in what remained of the old newspapers, but the next year was nightmarish, according to her Diaries. Ridiculing H. G. Wells ("I can see why he is so attracted to the Bolsheviks: they’ve leapfrogged him"), she wrote of Cheka atrocities ("In Kiev 1200 officers killed; legs severed, boots taken off." — 23 February. "In Rostov teenager cadets shot down — for being mistakenly taken for Constitutional Democratic Party cadets, the banned ones." — 17 March), of mass hunger and her own growing feeling of dull indifference. "Those who still have a soul in them walk around like corpses: neither protesting, nor suffering, waiting for nothing, bodies and souls slumped into hunger-induced dormancy."
  Expressing some sympathy for 'the weeping Lunacharsky' (the only Bolshevik leader to express at least some regret concerning the cruelties of the repressive organs), Gippius wrote: "The things that happen now have nothing to do with Russian history. They will be forgotten, like the atrocities of some savages on a faraway island; will vanish without a trace." Last Poems (1914–1918), published in 1918, presented a stark and gloomy picture of revolutionary Russia as Gippius saw it. After the defeats of Alexander Kolchak in Siberia and Anton Denikin in Southern Russia, respectively, the Merezhkovskys moved to Petrograd. In late 1919, invited to join a group of 'red professors' in Crimea, Gippius chose not to, having heard of massacres orchestrated by local chiefs Bela Kun and Rosalia Zemlyachka. Having obtained permission to leave the city (the pretext being that they would head for the frontlines, with lectures on Ancient Egypt for Red Army fighters), Merezhkovsky and Gippius, as well as her secretary Vladimir Zlobin and Dmitry Filosofov, departed to Poland by train.
caption: Filosofov (left), Merezhkovsky (center),  Gippius, and Zlobin, circa 1919
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