Gippius, Zinaida (ГИППИУС, ЗИНАИДА) (1869–1945)

Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius (Hippius) was a poet, prose writer, playwright, literary critic, religious thinker, and editor. Together with her husband Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941) and fellow poet Valery Briusov (1873–1923), she co-founded the Symbolist Movement in Russia. In fin-de-siècle St Petersburg she hosted an influential literary salon and was one of the major organizers of the famed Religious-Philosophical Meetings (1901–1903). She established and edited the journal The New Path (Novyi put; 1903–1905) in which she and her husband publicized their Neo-Christian beliefs, printed the works of their fellow Symbolists and reported on their Religious-Philosophical Meetings. After 1919, when the couple was forced to leave Bolshevik Russia, Gippius continued her literary and religious activities in the Russian émigré community in Paris, France, where she died in 1945.