Autograph poem, ‘Posledniy krug’ (‘The last circle’). 1943-44

Zinaida Nikolayevna Gippius (1869-1945)
Autograph poem, ‘Posledniy krug’ (‘The last circle’). 1943-44
Autograph manuscript poem, ‘Posledniy krug’ (‘The last circle’), n.p. [Paris], n.d. [c.1943-44].

In Russian. 80 three-line stanzas on 8¼ pages, 220 x 173mm, with extensive cancellations and emendations; in a spiral-bound notebook also containing (in reverse orientation) a long autograph draft of a letter to the poet Georgy Adamovich, 8½ pages, and (interleaved with the poem) part of an article in French on the atypical nature of Stalin’s dictatorship, 2²⁄₃ pages, card covers.

Gippius’s Dantesque vision. ‘The Last Circle, which Hippius wrote shortly before her death, portrays the poet’s last years and reveals her ultimate views on human life and its end – in Hell … The work is rich in philosophical ideas, and it is a poignant presentation of Hippius’s own death agony. The indisputable value of The Last Circle lies in the final elucidation of the poet’s basic metaphysical concepts concerning Love, Faith, Time and Death’ (T. Pachmuss. Zinaida Hippius. An Intellectual Profile (1971), 287). As Gippius wrote in a letter to Gerell on 5 June 1943, ‘I wrote a long poem recently … I wanted to imagine a modern Dante … [who] enters the deepest circle of Hell, and there he finds people whom he had once known. At the end he goes to Paradise. But I stopped here, for what do we know about Paradise?’ (quoted in Pachmuss, op. cit., 288). Gippius worked on several versions of the poem during her later years: an earlier version in iambic pentameters was published in Vozrozhdenie, 1968, no.198, 199.

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