Information about the author:

Abstract:

The intension of this article is to reveal the influence of Honoré de Balzac’s mystical and philosophical novel Séraphîta (1835) on the life and work of Zinaida Gippius and Dmitri Merezhkovsky. Based on bibliographical data and the document of the Foreign Censorship Committee, stored in the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA), and published for the first time, it clarifies the history of distribution and reception of the French writer’s novel in the 19^th century Russia. Using textual analysis, it demonstrates the influence of Hippolyte Taine’s essay “Balzac” (1865), particularly his method and his evaluation of the novel Séraphîta on the work of Merezhkovsky in the early 1890s. The first traces of the influence of Balzac’s text discovered on the work of Gippius go back to 1895, time of the publication of her story “Miss May”. Comparison of the artistic assimilation of the image of Séraphîta-Séraphîtüs by the spouses reveals significant differences: when Merezhkovsky uses the transparency of the “corporeal envelope” of Balzac’s hero to transmit the highest spirituality of his chosen characters, Gippius, however, focuses her attention mainly on the androgyny of Séraphîta-Séraphîtüs, which becomes in her artistic universe an essential sign of “new people”. In conclusion, the discovery of the novel Séraphîta by the Merezhkovskys is included in the chronology of the genesis of their concept of tripartite union as well as in the accomplishment of the couple’s life creation (zhiznetvorchestvo).