December 5 in Russian history. Yet another duel. Cherubina de Gabriak.

1909

(22 November Old Style)

Duel of two famous Russian poets, Nikolay Gumilyov and Maximilian Voloshin, took place in St.Petersburg, on Chernaya Rechka, where Alexander Pushkin was killed by Georges d'Anthès on the duel in 1837. The cause of the duel had a mysterious name: Cherubina de Gabriak.

Elizaveta (Lila) Dmitriyeva was a shy young girl from a poor aristocratic family. Tuberculosis left her lame for her life. Her brother and sister used to tell her: "If you are lame, your toys should be lame, too", and tore away legs from her dolls. In 1909, she lived in Koktebel, in Crimea, where the healthy climate was good for her. She wrote poems and met Maximilian Voloshin. Once he brought a gift for her, a wooden imp, named Gabriakh. He also had one leg, one arm and an amiable doggy muzzle. His name was found in a compendium on daemonology, it belonged to an imp who protected people from evil spirits.

Voloshin tried to publish Lila's verses, but they did not impress editors. Then they invented the new name for Lila: Cherubina de Gabriak. Gabriak was, of course, the name of that wooden imp, and the first name Cherubina was taken from the short story A Secret Of Telegraph Hill by Bret Harte. Then the story described in the Wikipedia article about Cherubina followed:

In August 1909, the famous Russian artistic periodical Apollon received a letter with verses on a perfumed paper with black mourning edges, signed only by a single Russian letter Ch. The verses were filled with half-revelations about its author—supposedly a beautiful maiden with dark secrets. The same day a woman with a beautiful voice phoned the journal's publisher Sergei Makovsky and arranged for publication of the verses. Over the next few months, publications of the newfound poetic star were the major hit of the magazine, and many believed that they had found a major new talent in Russian poetry. The identity of the author was slowly revealed: her name was Baroness Cherubina de Gabriak, a Russian-speaking girl of French and Polish ancestry who lived in a very strict Roman Catholic aristocratic family, who severely limited the girl's contacts with the outside world because of an unspoken secret in her past. Almost all of Apollon’s male writers fell in love with her, most of all the great poet Nikolai Gumilyov. He wrote a series of passionate love letters to her and received quite passionate answers.

Makovsky lost his head about Cherubina. He was proud of his talents in graphology and from the letters written by Voloshin and Lila Dmitriyeva he concluded that the author was a daughter of a father from the South France and a Russian mother, that she was raised in a monastery in Toledo. "If I had the annual income of fourty thousand rubles, I would dare to fall in love with her," wrote Makovsky. Lila was a teacher in a gymnasium and earned 11 rubles per month. She must have been an unusual teacher: when an inspector visited her class in the gymnasium and asked the girls who was their favorite tsar, their answer was unanimous and unexpected: Grigory Otrepyev! She graduated from the Imperial Women's Pedagogical Institute and specialized in medieval history and French medieval literature. At the same time she studied Spanish literature and Old French language in the St.Petersburg University and Sorbonne.

Now that she was a mysterious Frech lady, her poems were accepted in all magazines and became known to everyone in St.Petersburg. Lila and Voloshin went on getting fun from the story. They invented a whole family of Cherubina, including her Portuguese cousin, don Harpia de Mantilla. Makovsky must have been really blinded if he payed no attention to the name. The others suspected a mystification, but the suspect was the innocent Makovsky.

The fame of the newfound genius was short-lived. In November it was discovered that Baroness Cherubina de Gabriak did not exist at all, and the verses were written by a disabled schoolteacher, Elisaveta Ivanovna Dmitrieva, with the participation of a major Apollon contributor and editor, the poet Maximilian Voloshin.

Apparently Sergei Makovsky had rejected several of Dmitrieva's verses; and Voloshin, who knew his publisher quite well, invented the legend about Cherubina. There is still controversy about the correct attribution of Gabriak's corpus. Most contemporaries, including all of Apollon’s critics, were certain that all the verses and most of the letters were written by Voloshin himself; after all, they claimed, Cherubina was a first-rank poet and Dmitrieva was not. Both Elisaveta Dmitrieva and Maximilian Voloshin claimed that the verses were all Dmitrieva's, and that Voloshin only selected them and suggested themes and expressions. Modern researchers tend to support attribution of the verses to Dmitrieva, as they are quite similar to her later works.

Nikolai Gumilyov was outraged by the thought that his passionate romantic correspondence might in fact have been with a mocking Maximilian Voloshin. Even so, Dmitrieva claimed that she had written the letters to Gumilyov herself, had indeed been in love, but had known the romance would end the moment Gumilyov saw her.

Gumilyov was rude. He told stories in public about his affair with Lila and cruelly ridiculed her. His ungentlemanly conduct made Voloshin to throw down the glove.

On November 19, 1909, at the studio of artist Ivan Bilibin, Gumilyov slapped Voloshin across the face, which by the customs of the time made a duel inevitable. The duel took place on November 22 on the banks of the Chernaya River, which had been the site of the fatal duel between Alexander Pushkin and Georges d'Anthès. Voloshin's second was Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi; Gumilyov's second was Johannes von Gunter.

Wikepedia is wrong. It was Voloshin who slapped Gumilyov and asked: "Do you understand?" "Yes", replied Gumilyov. Only half a year earlier, Voloshin almost called out some other man and Gumilyov had to be his second, but that duel did not happen. This time it was serious.

The peace-loving Voloshin did not want to kill Gumilyov, and wanted even less to be killed himself, so he planned a psychological diversion to defuse the situation. While walking to the place of the duel he lost one of his pair of galoshes in the mud, and claimed that he could not shoot until the missing boot was found. Both seconds started to look for it, and within half an hour Gumilyov joined the search. When eventually the boot was found, the duel had become psychologically impossible, and both participants agreed on a truce. Gumilyov was still angry with Voloshin and broke off all contact until a few months before his death in 1921, when he visited Voloshin and restored their friendship.

And here Wikepedia is also not quite right. The duel did happen. Gumilyov shot first, but missed. Voloshin's pistol misfired. He proposed to end the duel, but Gumilyov insisted that Voloshin has to shoot. After the second misfire, Gumilyov demanded that Voloshin attempt for the third time, but it was against the rules and only then the duel was stopped. Later, Voloshin confessed that he simply didn't know how to shoot...

Gumilyov was executed by Cheka in 1921. Voloshin lived till 1932, when he died peacefully.

Yelizaveta Dmitrieva wrote later to Voloshin: "Cherubina has never been a game for me. Cherubina was my birth, but, alas, it was a stillbirth." She became interested in theosophy. After the revolution she was exiled to Yekaterinodar (modern Krasnodar). In 1922 she was allowed to return to St.Petersburg, but in 1926 she was exiled again, this time to Tashkent. In 1927 she wrote her last literary mystification, a cycle of poems "House under the Peach Tree", under the pseudonym Li Xiang Tzu.

1928

19 years after the duel, on the same day, 5 December, Lila Dmitrieva died in Tashkent of cancer.

In 2008, a playwright from New York Paul Cohen wrote a play Cherubina. It was staged in Sanford Meisner Theater. The Village Voice wasn't really impressed with the play, but NYTheater.com wrote:

Cherubina is one of the most entertaining and well-crafted new plays I've seen this season. I highly recommend it!

And, finally, a large quotation from the Dictionary of Russian Women Writers by Marina Ledkovskaia-Astman et al.:

'DE GABRIAK, Cherubina' (Elizaveta Ivanovna Dmitrieva; 'E. Li,' 'D. [also E. and V.| Arkasova1; m. Vasil'eva; b. Mar. 31, 1887. SPb; d. Dec. 5, 1928, Tashkent). Poet, prose writer, dramatist, and translator.

Although the author of a large body of lyric poetry, Dmitrieva is remembered primarily for the two dozen poems that she published as 'Cherubina de Gabriak' in the years 1909-10. In some ways she emerges as a rather tragic illustration of how much Silver Age interest in women's creativity sometimes depended on personal image.

Though belonging to the noble estate, her parents were low-paid professionals: her father a schoolteacher and her mother a midwife. Between the ages of seven and sixteen, Dmitrieva was bedridden with tuberculosis, which left her crippled. Despite illness, she managed to graduate from a gymnasium in 1904 and went on to study at the university level, specializing in Romance languages and history. She then taught for a year at a gymnasium before studying abroad in France and Germany.

Dmitrieva's literary career began in 1908 with the publication of her translations from Spanish religious poetry in the Messenger of Theosophy (Vestnik teosofii). (She had joined the Russian Anthroposophical Society in 1908.) In 1909 her poetry was rejected by S. Makovskii, editor of the new journal Apollo (Apollon). The fiction of 'Cherubina' began in the summer of that year when Dmitrieva paid a visit to Maksimilian Voloshin's villa at Koktebel' on the Black Sea. There the two made plans to submit her poems to Apollo under the pseudonym 'Cherubina de Gabriak.' In October 1909, Apollo printed a cycle of twelve de Gabriak poems. Dmitrieva became a succes de scandale, yet no one suspected her true identity. Her eventual unmasking the following month led to a major row: most angry of all was the young poet Nikolai Gumilev, who was to marry Anna Akhmatova the next year, but who was Voloshin's rival for Dmitrieva's affections at the time. After Gumilev publicly insulted Dmitrieva in the crudest sexual terms, he and Voloshin fought a duel. Fortunately no serious mishap ensued. Yet in September of the next year Apollo published a cycle of fifteen poems by 'de Gabriak'; these were immediately followed by a poem printed under her real name. The affair of 'Cherubina' made Dmitrieva, for a short while, more notorious than any other woman poet of her day. In 1911 Dmitrieva, along with her new husband, Vsevolod Vasil'ev, an engineer, left St. Petersburg for Turkestan. She maintained contact with SPb. and M. mystic circles and now devoted herself to anthroposophy. In a letter of 1910, Dmitrieva announced to Voloshin: "I shall not publish anything more; my ego—as an artist—has died." It was not until 1915 that a new creative streak which she described in her "Autobiography" as "a new Cherubina," was to overtake her. By 1918, Dmitrieva had settled in Krasnodar, where in 1920 she began to work with the playwright Samuil Marshak. Together they created a center for homeless children and a children's theater for which they wrote plays. In 1922 they returned to Petrograd, where Marshak headed up the Theater for Young Spectators, assisted by Dmitrieva. She also published prose for children.

In 1927 Dmitrieva was arrested and exiled to Tashkent, probably because of her link with anthroposophy. Before she died in 1928, Dmitrieva composed a cycle of philosophical poems entitled "House under the Pear Tree" (Domik pod grushevym derevom), which remained unpublished until 1988.

The 'Cherubina' incident was to be used by Liubov' Gurevich (in Estetika i kul'tura) as an illustration of the decadent trend's self-advertising excesses. There was some justice in this. The runaway success of 'Cherubina's' verse was partly due to its pandering to snobbery (see, for example, "Our Coat of Arms"); the Hispanophilia which swept over Europe in the years before World War I also played a role. In stylistic terms, the poetry was not particularly original. The setting is typically Symbolist in its lack of definition; references to cultural objects are given in terms of the most banal generalities. The lexicon runs the conventional Decadent gamut of solitude, stars, darkness, doomed beaty and corruption, reusing such Gippius-like rhyme combinations as "shroud/blood" (pokrov/krov'). 'Cherubina' also used fashionable "imported" poetic forms such as the rondeau and the French chain verse ("The Golden Bough").

What does give 'Cherubina's' poetry a more than ephemeral significance is the complex feminine psychology which it delineates. These verses achieve a clever fusion of the Decadent female persona, as it had earlier been developed by Mariia Bashkirtseva in her diary, Mirra Lokhvitskaia in poetry, and Lidiia Zinov'eva-Annibal in prose, with a Catholic religiosity drawing partly on French Symbolism and partly- on Dmitrieva's reading of the Counter-Reformational mystics St. Teresa and St. Ignatius Loyola. Reflecting its Symbolist background,

this work at the same time transformed it. A variety of doubles appears in the poems; identity is more fluid than in the dualistic representations of femininity preferred by Symbolism, possibly a result of Dmitrieva's anthroposophical ideals. The lexicon might be Gippius', but the chief actor was now a woman, not Gippius' male speaker; Gabriak's use of Catholic mysticism was a feminized equivalent of Viacheslav Ivanov's borrowings from Italian medieval tradition. Gabriak established a precedent for the use of a female persona in mystical poetry, a fact that was to become very important with mystical poetry's growing significance, during the 1920s and 1930s, as a genre practiced by women in external and internal emigration from Soviet official culture (e.g., Kuz'mina-Karavaeva and Akhmatova).

The 'Cherubina' affair appears also to have aided Dmitrieva's own development as a poet. In her early poems, what coherent voice she has is imitative. In those written after 1915, a stronger individuality develops, and most striking of all are the poems which Dmitrieva wrote in her Tashkent exile. At times, as in "The Willows" (Ivy), the simple lexicon and flexibility of metrics anticipate Akhmatova's practice in the 1930s and 1940s. Her poetry, like that of Sofiia Pamok, Vera Merkur'eva, Adelaida Gertsyk, or Akhmatova herself, is indicative of the very high literary quality achieved by Russian women in internal emigration.

Update @2008-12-06: I've added the story of the name Cherubina and fixed the Wikipedia article.

February 28 in Russian history

1825: Russia and Great Britain sign a convention on the borders between their American colonies. The result is still seen on the map as the border between Alaska and Canada.

1835: On this day Elias Lönnrot, a Finnish scholar and a doctor, writes the last letters in the preface (the letters were E.L.)and sends the manuscript of Kalevala to the publisher. This day, February 28, is celebrated now as the Kalevala day, Kalevalan päivä. There is probably no need to explain what is Kalevala, but why do I write about this day in a Russian history blog? First, Finland was a part of Russia when Lönnrot wrote the epic. Second, Kalevala is also the national epic of Karelians. Third, my wife sometimes tells me (with an approval or disapproval, I never understand) that I am a Finn. Then she watches at me and adds: "or an Ugrian". She probably means an ogre, but it doesn't really matter. And, fourth, it is just a great reading. The day is celebrated in Russian Karelia and St.Petersburg. For an unclear reason, the Petersburgians celebrate the day two weeks later (old style calendar? or just natural slowness?).

1921: The Kronstadt rebellion begins. The navy sailors, who had been one of the main forces supporting bolsheviks during and after the November revolution, grew annoyed by the politics of the dictatorship of the proletariat, by the devastation and havoc caused by the Civil War. The same causes resulted in multiple peasants' revolts. On February 28, sailors and workers of Kronstadt, the crucial naval port near St.Petersburg, started a rebellion under the slogan "For the Soviets without bolsheviks". The rebellion began with the adoption of a resolution, which included 15 demands, like new elections to the Soviets, freedom of speech, right of assembly, right to form trade-unions, amnesty for all political prisoners, abolition of the activity of political parties in the army and of the armed detachments of the political parties. The rebellion was headed by Stepan Petrichenko, a scribe from battleship Petropavlovsk. Soon, there were 14,000 supporters in Kronstadt. Navy officers, usually hated by sailors, joined the rebellion. On March 2 a revolutionary committee was formed. On March 4, the bolsheviks officially named the events in Kronstadt a mutiny. The storm was scheduled on March 8, but the attack failed. On March 16, at night, a new storm started with a mass artillery fire. About 50,000 troops attacked Kronstadt and about every fifth of them was killed. The rebels had to leave the fortress and flee to Finland. Stepan Petrichenko, the leader of the sailors, also escaped to Finland and lived their until 1940, when he was expelled to the USSR, arrested and sent to a labor camp, where he died soon. Many historians say that the rebellion became the turning point towards the totalitarian state.

February 13 in Russian history

1921: Duke Kropotkin, scientist and famous theorist of anarchy, buried in Moscow. All anarchists were released from the Moscow jails to participate in the funerals, after they promised to return to the jails after the ceremony. And they did.

1934: Soviet steamship Chelyuskin sunk in the Chukchi Sea. It was an epic story of the heroism of "real Soviet people", which became a significant part of the mythology of the Stalinist Soviet Union. Chelyuskin was built in 1933 in Denmark and named after Semion Chelyuskin, Russian polar explorer, a participant of the "Great Northern Expedition" of 1733-1743. On August 2, 1933, Chelyuskin left from Leningrad with 112 people. The expedition was led by the Soviet geographer Otto Schmidt and the captain was Vladimir Voronin. The task of the crew was to prove the possibility of navigating along the Northern Sea Route in one summer. It was done by Sibiryakov in 1932, but Sibiryakov was an icebreaker, not a cargo ship. They almost reached their goal, but in November, 1933, in the Chukchi Sea, near the Bering strait, they were stopped by heavy icepacks. After three months, the ship sunk, crashed by ice. The crew managed to save food, bricks and wood. One man died during the evacuation. Schmidt and Voronin were the last to leave the sinking ship. A government commission was formed to organize the rescue operation. Some Western newspapers wrote that it is impossible to save the people, because there were no icebreakers able to navigate the Arctic Ocean in winter and that it was cruel to incite hope in these doomed people. The rescue commission hoped to use aviation. The American government offered their assistance, but they could not help with the aviation, because flights in the Arctic were cancelled due to recent crashes. On March 5, the airplane piloted by Anatoly Lyapidevsky found the camp of the Chelyuskinites, landed on ice and rescued ten women and one baby, who was born in September on board of Chelyuskin. During the second attempt, Lyapidevsky's airplane was damaged. The government decided to send three groups of pilots. The first group departed to the USA, where two airplanes were bought from Pan Am. One of them was damaged soon and another, piloted by Mavrikiy Slepnyov, rescued 5 people and later evacuated O.Schmidt, who was seriously ill. Other people were saved by pilots Kamanin, Pivenshtein, Demirov, Bestanzhiev, Molokov, Vodopyanov and Doronin on Soviet R-5 planes. The engine of Galyshev's plane broke and he could not participate. On April 13, the last people were evacuated. The Chelyuskinites later spoke that the leadership of Otto Schmidt, who published a newspaper in the camp and read lectures on philosophy, was the key in their survival.

1940: Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov finished his best known masterpiece "Master and Margarita". Less than one month later, he died. Bulgakov started his work on this novel in 1928 or in 1929. In 1930, he burnt the first draft, when he learnt that his piece "Cabal of Sanctimonious Hypocrites, or Molière" was banned . The second version was being written since 1931 till 1936. The last, final version was in active work since 1936 till 1938, but Bulgakov kept adding and modifying the text till 1940. "Master and Margarita" is called by many critics one of the greatest Russian novels of the XX century. I would say, though, that the book is so heavily influenced and so tightly woven with the references to the general European culture, from Bible to Goethe, to Hoffmann, that it should be perceived as one of the greatest works in the European, not Russian, literature. On the other hand, Bulgakov, in his turn, influenced Salman Rushdie's "Satanic verses" and even Rolling Stones. After all, it's a small world, isn't it?