Sunlight at Midnight by Bruce Lincoln

Author:Bruce Lincoln [W. BRUCE LINCOLN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

In those days Gippius dyed her long blond hair a flaming red and favored white or black dresses that fitted her like a second skin and sometimes featured pink-lined pleats that gave the impression that she wore nothing underneath.44 Her Tuberose-Lubain perfume hung heavily on the drawing room’s thick rugs and dark brick walls, and she waved the long holder through which she smoked scented cigarettes as if it were a wand for working her charms. Her green eyes and sensuous mouth drew men to her, and so did her slenderness and her unusual height. Arising late in the afternoon, she went to bed at dawn after spending hours stretched on a settee, as one visitor remembered, with “her luxuriant red-gold tresses illuminated by the red flames of the fireplace.”45 Her cruel tongue, capricious moods, and propensity for spreading vicious gossip endowed her with great power. Many felt drawn to her, others feared her, and some truly hated her. The great Petersburg poet Anna Akhmatova remembered her as “nasty and mean,”46 and the thinker Nikolai Berdiaev, who was in the process of exchanging the gospel of Marx for the Gospels of Christ, remembered her salon as “a place where you would not meet a real person.”47 At first infatuated with her, Belyi later called her “a wasp in human attire.”48 But Gippius was a brilliant poet, had a sixth sense that allowed her to perceive the weaknesses of humankind, and never ceased to be the axis on which the world she ruled turned.49

While Gippius held court, Merezhkovskii shuffled back and forth in his gown and slippers. Surrounded by a haze of cigar smoke, he spent much of the time closeted in his study, from which he emerged to issue pronouncements that Gippius would often dismiss with the exclamation: “Dmitrii, you are out of order!”50 Yet Gippius and her husband continued to share the hope that God and humankind could be united in a new religion that would lead to a higher form of freedom. She spoke of a Third Testament that would proclaim the Kingdom of the Third Humanity in which people would be free and strong. Especially with Belyi, she would speak about religion, the Trinity, and the flesh throughout the night. “For God’s sake!” Merezhkovskii would call out from the other room. “It’s four o’clock in the morning! You’re not letting me sleep!”51

Although an ardent Muscovite who did not actually visit St. Petersburg until 1905, Andrei Belyi was an important part of the Gippius- Merezhkovskii circle. Gippius insisted that he “never walked . . . but danced,” and other friends remembered him as being “thin, slight, with a high forehead and a chin that jutted forward [so that] with his head always slightly tilted back he seemed not to walk, but to fly.”52 He was a passionate disciple of the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev, whose belief in the redeeming power of a Beautiful Lady “clothed in the sun” he shared. Belyi believed that music held the key to understanding

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