Метафоры творчества в лирике З. Н. Гиппиус

Abstract

The ways of expressing the authorial subjectivity of women writers in a literary text is one of the challenging and underexplored problems in the literature of Russian Modernism. The poetry of Z. N. Gippius seems to offer an instructive case study. It provides a plethora of material for under-standing the specific techniques that the poetess resorted to in order to reflect on her own creative practices in the context of the nodal gender and philosophical ideologies of the era, that informed the complex process of constructing female authorship. The article deals with specific metaphors of creativity, such as spinning, sewing, weaving a wreath, prayer. The semantic content of these metaphors is analyzed through the prism of O. Weininger’s theory and Gippius’ own constructs, put forth in her article Zverebog (1908), as well as against the background of the collapse of the entire gender pattern that Russian culture had experienced at the turn of the 19–20th centuries.