Volume 18, Number 5 · March 23, 1972
Art in spite of Polemics
By Helen Muchnic
Zinaida Hippius: An Intellectual Profile
by Temira Pachmuss
Southern Illinois University Press, 491 pp., $12.50
The Life of a Useless Man
by Maxim Gorki, translated by Moura Budberg
Doubleday, 240 pp., $6.95
The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky
by Sheila Fitzpatrick
Cambridge University Press, 380 pp., $13.50
The White Guard
by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Michael Glenny, with an Epilogue by Viktor Nekrasov
McGraw-Hill, 320 pp., $7.95
Zinaida Hippius, who lived from 1869 to 1945, is considered one of Russia's finest poets, perhaps her greatest religious poet. D. S. Mirsky speaks of the major cycle of her lyrics as 'unique in Russian literature…so original that I do not know anything in any language that resembles them.' Pure in diction, unique in form, they are a despairing lament on the soul's failure to conquer pettiness, on what Mirsky calls 'the Svidrigailov theme' (the idea which, in Crime and Punishment, Svidrigailov tries out on Raskolnikov, that eternity itself may be nothing more than a dusty bathhouse filled with spiders). There is, for example, in a lyric called 'She,' a sense of evil and self-hatred even more harrowing, because more articulate, than Svidrigailov's:
Review, 3799 words
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