Thought and Vision: Zinaida Hippius’s Letters to Greta Gerell

This volume of the letters of the Russian poet and religious thinker Zinaida Hippius (1869-1945) guides the reader through the upheavals in her life in exile (1919-1945). Her complex genre of epistolary art has its own inimitable technique and its own internal code of aesthetics. These letters in French reveal the inherent dialectics of Hippius’s ideas and aspirations and identify features of continuity and change in her earlier thoughts and vision and her later attitudes. Hippius’s letters also reveal her literary endeavor to glorify the idea of beauty, grace, and refinement in art.