Z. N. Gippius and O. Mirtov (Olga Negreskul): Literary and Gender Parallels

Abstract

In 1893, a story Apple Trees Are in Bloom by Z.N. Gippius was published in the journal Nashe vremya (Our Time). In 1911, a novel by O. Mirtov (pseudonym of the writer Olga Emmanuilovna Negreskul-Rosenfeld) under the same title Apple Trees Are in Bloom was published in the leading literary and political journal Russkaya Mysl’ (Russian Thought), edited by P.B. Struve. A close friend of the Merezhkovsky’s family, D.V. Philosophov in his 1914 essay The Feast Trunk pointed out the similarity of titles, reflecting on the secondary nature of literary and philosophical findings of Negreskul. An analysis of the Gippius’ story of 1893 and Mirtov’s novel of 1911 in the context of philosophical and gender ideas of the turn of the century makes it possible to speak of some literary parallels, both genetic and typological, characteristic of two female authors’ work, one of whom wrote under her own name, and the other worked under a pseudonym. The commonality of the plot arc of the two works, the similarity of philosophical and aesthetic statements, made in the spirit of modernist artistic quest, the proximity of the Negreskul to the symbolist picture of the world, as evidenced by her first literary experiments, make it possible to identify a common artistic concept of the formation of worldview and artistic motives in the work of two modernist writers.