The most famous and influential of the modernist poetesses was Zinaida Hippius, the “decadent Madonna.” All Petersburg was talking about the tall beauty with green eyes who dressed extravagantly and presented herself in an outlandish way. Bunin’s description may help us understand why Hippius’s mere appearance caused a sensation: “a heavenly vision walked in slowly, an angel of astonishing thinness in snow-white garments and golden loose hair, along whose bare arms something akin to sleeves or wings fell to the very floor.”44
Along with her husband, Merezhkovsky, Hippius imperiously “ran” Petersburg’s symbolist movement for many years by receiving a steady flow of visitors after midnight in her apartment, recumbent on a chaise longue, smoking long, scented cigarettes and unceremoniously peering at her guests through her famous lorgnette. Her opinions and declarations were epigrammatic and beyond appeal. The denizens of literary Petersburg respected, hated, and, most important, feared Hippius.
For beginning modernists a visit to the Merezhkovsky salon was mandatory, almost a ritual. But Akhmatova avoided that ritual. The reason was the reception the Merezhkovskys had given to young Gumilyov in 1906. Hippius described his visit devastatingly in a letter to Bryusov:
Twenty years old. Deathly pallor. His sententious ideas are as old as the hat of a widow visiting the cemetery. He sniffs the ether (about time!) and says that he alone can change the world. “There were attempts before me … Buddha, Christ…. But unsuccessful.”45
After a reception like that, it’s no surprise that when Akhmatova wanted to show her poems to Hippius in 1910, she was dissuaded: “Don’t go, she’s very nasty to young poets.” Later Hippius made a point of calling Akhmatova and inviting her to her salon, but even then there was no meeting of the minds. And in the last years of her life, Akhmatova was still hostile toward Hippius, saying that she was “a clever, educated woman, but nasty and mean.” Merezhkovsky also displeased Akhmatova. “Typical boulevard writer. How can you read him?”46
There was also the scandalous affair of the poetess Cherubina de Gabriac in 1909, which made a big impression on Akhmatova. The sensational hoax caused one of the last famous duels in the history of Russian culture. What mattered most for Akhmatova was the fact that one of the duelists was Gumilyov.
The stage on which this spectacle, so symbolic of the era, was played out was the editorial office of the new modernist journal
In Petersburg Makovsky was considered an arbiter of taste. No one else in the capital had such long, starched collars or such glossy patent leather shoes. Gossip had it that the flawless part in his hair had been permanently etched by a special lotion from Paris. His waxed mustache stood out challengingly. Makovsky, a mediocre poet, considered himself the highest authority in literature as well and edited Blok’s poems because they were “grammatically incorrect.”
In 1965, Akhmatova characterized Makovsky flatly and quite unjustly as a “world-class philistine and a total idiot.”47 It turns out that he asked her an embarrassing question when she and Gumilyov returned from their Parisian honeymoon: “Are you satisfied with your sex life now?” After that, Akhmatova told me, she avoided being left alone with Makovsky.
In early September 1909 an elegant envelope sealed with black wax and imprinted with a coat of arms and the motto
Makovsky was impressed by the poetry but even more so by the letter, and immediately replied, also in French, with a request that more work be sent. The next day the mysterious Cherubina called Makovsky. That was the start of their affair by phone, which the entire staff of
