Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia's Fin de Siecle

5. Transcending Gender: The Case of Zinaida Gippius

5 Transcending Gender The Case of Zinaida Gippius Zinaida Gippius (1869–1945) met Dmitrii Merezhkovsky (1865–1941) in the Caucasus resort town of Borzhom in 1888. A capricious, provincial young woman of eighteen, she was surrounded by local admirers and at first seemed indifferent to Merezhkovsky’s attentions. If anything, their encounters were adversarial. She wrote many years later that she was not attracted to the young Petersburg author and was annoyed by the fact that he considered her uncultivated. During a local dance on July 11, Gippius and Merezhkovsky decided to get married, but not because he had proposed to her, or she to him. “There was no ‘proposal’ or ‘declaration [of love],’” wrote Gippius. “Yet, both of us suddenly began to talk as if it had been decided long ago that we would marry” and as if “nothing unusual had happened.” The decision to marry was not followed by a wedding announcement.1 Gippius and Merezhkovsky were married in Tiflis (Russian for Tbilisi) on January 8, 1889. They did not see eye to eye on many things, but both shared contempt for weddings: veils, white dresses, and wedding feasts. Despite their effort to minimize the amount of ritual, they had the obligatory crowns held over their heads. Gippius later complained that unfortunately they couldn’t simply be worn like hats. Instead of a white gown and veil, the bride wore a dark gray suit and a hat of the same color. The bridegroom was asked to take off his greatcoat in church, because it just wasn’t worn in wedding ceremonies. There was no deacon or choir.Afterward, the married couple returned to Gippius’s home and had an ordinary lunch in the company of her immediate fam162 ily and a few guests. When the guests left, their day proceeded as usual: “D. S. [Dmitrii Sergeevich] and I continued to read the book we were reading yesterday in my room. . . . Dm. S. went back to his hotel rather early, and I went to bed and forgot that I was married” (Gippius-Merezhkovskaia , 34). Written fifty-four years after the fact, this is the only available description of Gippius’s wedding. It is taken from her unfinished biography of Merezhkovsky, He and We (On i my), begun in Paris in 1943 and published under the title Dmitrii Merezhkovsky (1951) after her death. Like most symbolist biographies, it presents a mythologized version of the Merezhkovskys’ life. This chapter focuses not on Merezhkovsky, but on Gippius, her perspective on sex, gender, marriage, and life creation, and on her image as a cultural icon of the turn of the twentieth century. The key to my examination of Gippius is not her poetry but her diaries, biographical writing, and epistolary prose. I read them as documents concealing as well as revealing her enigmatic gender in an unconventional marriage and her equally unconventional love affairs premised on Solov’ev’s ideal of erotic celibacy. I consider Gippius’s private writings the record of her Solov’evian project of transfiguring the body by means of erotic fusion with God in divine love. Gippius’s uncertain sexual identity and unconventional marriage helped define the Merezhkovskys’ erotic utopia. Living together for fifty-two years without parting from each other except for a few days— in Dmitrii Merezhkovsky she claimed they never parted at all—the Merezhkovskys constructed the most celebrated turn-of-the-century celibate marriage based on a “common cause.” Celibacy was not the only unconventional aspect of their marriage. It was combined with collectivity in love—the opposite of celibacy, at least on the face of it—which first took the form of multiple romantic triangles, apparently also unconsummated . Later, when the Merezhkovskys began to promote their apocalyptic vision of Christianity, a celibate triple union, a term for an ideological ménage à trois, became the vehicle of their collective erotic ideal. Members of a generation in transition, characterized by an ideology that commingled populism, decadence, and religious utopianism, the Merezhkovskys were eclectics. They stitched together a life practice from a variety of cultural and historical sources with the purpose of reinscribing the body of Christ into a new church that sought to restructure the individual and collective body of society. Underlying the Transcending Gender 163 metaphoric outer garment of the project was Gippius’s “deviant” body: its uncertain biological sex and gender. What Is to Be Done about Gippius...