Zinaida Hippius

Born Nov. 8 (20), 1869, in Belev, in present-day Tula Oblast; died Sept. 9, 1945, in Paris. Russian writer. Wife of D. S. Merezhkovskii.

Hippius published her first poems in 1888. A typical representative of decadence in Russian literature, she combined advocacy of sensual love, Nietzschean motifs of the exaltation of the individual, and religious humility in her poems. She wrote the novels The Devil’s Doll (1911) and The Roman Tsarevich (1913), the plays The Poppy Flower (1908; with D. S. Merezhkovskii and D. Filosofov) and The Green Ring (1916), and memoirs, Living Faces (1925). Hippius wrote literary criticism under the pseudonym Anton Krainii in defense of symbolism (Literaturnyi dnevnik, 1908). She greeted the October Revolution with extreme hostility. An émigrée after 1920, Hippius harshly attacked the Soviet system in her articles and poems.