Cherubina de Gabriak
Encyclopedia
Cherubina de Gabriak was a literary pseudonym of Elisaveta Ivanovna Dmitrieva possibly together with Maximilian Voloshin
.
n 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 Baron
ess 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.
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.
. 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 talked in public about his romantic affair with Dmitrieva and he did it in rather rude expressions, and on November 19, 1909, at the studio of artist Ivan Bilibin
, Voloshin slapped Gumilyov 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 seconds were Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi and Count Shervashidze; Gumilyov's seconds were Mikhail Kuzmin
and Eugene Znosko-Borovsky
.
Gumilyov shot first, but missed. Voloshin's pistol misfired. He proposed to end the duel, but Gumilyov insisted that Voloshin has to shoot. Voloshin shot in the air, being afraid to kill Gumilyov. Later, Voloshin confessed that he simply didn't know how to shoot. The seconds offered that they shake hands, but both refused. All contacts between them were broken off until a few months before Gumilyov's death in 1921, when he visited Voloshin and restored their friendship.
of the bones and was left lame and barely able to walk.
She studied old French
and Spanish literature
at Saint Petersburg State University
, and published some verses both before and after her Gabriak period but without much success. In 1911 she married Vasiliev, an engineer, and took his last name.
In the early 1920s, she worked with poet and translator Samuil Marshak
on theatrical plays for children. Later she also published prose and translations.
Starting from 1921, she was searched and interrogated by the State Political Directorate
along with other members of the Anthroposophic
Society. Finally in 1927 she was exiled to Tashkent
where she died in 1928 of liver cancer
. Shortly before her death, she was visited in Tashkent by her friend Sinologist Yulian Shchutsky and wrote, influenced by him, 21 poems attributed to Li Xiang Zi, a fictional Chinese poet exiled for his "belief in immortality of human spirit". The name of Li Xiang, invented by Shchutsky, means "a house under a pear tree", where Dmitrieva indeed lived in Tashkent.
. The last name, Gabriak, was derived from Gabriakh, the name of a toy, a wooden imp, presented by Voloshin to Elisaveta Dmitrieva. Voloshin found the name Gabriakh in the book Demonomanie des Sorciers by Jean Bodin, where it belonged to an imp, protecting people from evil spirits.
Maximilian Voloshin
Maximilian Alexandrovich Kirienko-Voloshin was a Russian poet and famous Freemason. He was one of the significant representatives of the Symbolist movement in Russian culture and literature...
.
Mysterious poet
In August 1909, the famous RussiaRussia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n artistic periodical Apollon received a letter with verses on a perfumed paper with black mourning edges, signed only by a single Russian letter Ch
Che (Cyrillic)
Che or Cha is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate , like the pronunciation of ⟨ch⟩ in "change"....
. 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
Sergei Makovsky
Sergey Konstantinovich Makovsky , a son of the painter Konstantin Makovsky, was a poet, arts critic, and organiser of many art expositions.From 1909 to 1917 he edited and published the Appolon arts magazine in Saint Petersburg.-Further reading:...
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
Russian literature
Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia or its émigrés, and to the Russian-language literature of several independent nations once a part of what was historically Russia or the Soviet Union...
. The identity of the author was slowly revealed: her name was Baron
Baron
Baron is a title of nobility. The word baron comes from Old French baron, itself from Old High German and Latin baro meaning " man, warrior"; it merged with cognate Old English beorn meaning "nobleman"...
ess Cherubina de Gabriak, a Russian-speaking girl of French
French people
The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...
and Polish
Poles
thumb|right|180px|The state flag of [[Poland]] as used by Polish government and diplomatic authoritiesThe Polish people, or Poles , are a nation indigenous to Poland. They are united by the Polish language, which belongs to the historical Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages of Central Europe...
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.
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
Maximilian Voloshin
Maximilian Alexandrovich Kirienko-Voloshin was a Russian poet and famous Freemason. He was one of the significant representatives of the Symbolist movement in Russian culture and literature...
.
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
Text corpus
In linguistics, a corpus or text corpus is a large and structured set of texts...
. 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.
Duel
Nikolai Gumilyov was outraged by the thought that his passionate romantic correspondence might in fact have been with a mocking Maximilian VoloshinMaximilian Voloshin
Maximilian Alexandrovich Kirienko-Voloshin was a Russian poet and famous Freemason. He was one of the significant representatives of the Symbolist movement in Russian culture and literature...
. 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 talked in public about his romantic affair with Dmitrieva and he did it in rather rude expressions, and on November 19, 1909, at the studio of artist Ivan Bilibin
Ivan Bilibin
Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin was a 20th-century illustrator and stage designer who took part in the Mir iskusstva and contributed to the Ballets Russes. Throughout his career, he was inspired by Slavic folklore....
, Voloshin slapped Gumilyov across the face, which by the customs of the time made a duel
Duel
A duel is an arranged engagement in combat between two individuals, with matched weapons in accordance with agreed-upon rules.Duels in this form were chiefly practised in Early Modern Europe, with precedents in the medieval code of chivalry, and continued into the modern period especially among...
inevitable. The duel took place on November 22 on the banks of the Chernaya River
Chernaya River (Saint Petersburg)
The Chernaya River , originally Mustajogi also known as the Tchernaya Rechka or Black River, is a small river in Saint Petersburg....
, which had been the site of the fatal duel between Alexander Pushkin and Georges d'Anthès
Georges d'Anthès
Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d'Anthès, baron was a French military officer and politician. Despite his later career as a senator under the Second French Empire, d'Anthès's name is most famous because he killed Russia's greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin in a duel.Born in Colmar to a French royalist...
. Voloshin's seconds were Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi and Count Shervashidze; Gumilyov's seconds were Mikhail Kuzmin
Mikhail Kuzmin
Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin was a Russian poet, musician and novelist, a prominent contributor to the Silver Age of Russian Poetry.Born into a noble family in Yaroslavl, Kuzmin grew up in St. Petersburg and studied music at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov...
and Eugene Znosko-Borovsky
Eugene Znosko-Borovsky
Eugene Alexandrovich Znosko-Borovsky was a Russian chess master, music and drama critic, teacher and author. Born in Saint Petersburg, he settled in Paris in 1920, and lived there for the rest of his life.-Biography:...
.
Gumilyov shot first, but missed. Voloshin's pistol misfired. He proposed to end the duel, but Gumilyov insisted that Voloshin has to shoot. Voloshin shot in the air, being afraid to kill Gumilyov. Later, Voloshin confessed that he simply didn't know how to shoot. The seconds offered that they shake hands, but both refused. All contacts between them were broken off until a few months before Gumilyov's death in 1921, when he visited Voloshin and restored their friendship.
Elisaveta Dmitrieva
The real author of Gabriak's poetry, Elisaveta Dmitrieva, was born on March 31, 1887. Between 1890 and 1903 she suffered from tuberculosisTuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...
of the bones and was left lame and barely able to walk.
She studied old French
French literature
French literature is, generally speaking, literature written in the French language, particularly by citizens of France; it may also refer to literature written by people living in France who speak traditional languages of France other than French. Literature written in French language, by citizens...
and Spanish literature
Spanish literature
Spanish literature generally refers to literature written in the Spanish language within the territory that presently constitutes the state of Spain...
at Saint Petersburg State University
Saint Petersburg State University
Saint Petersburg State University is a Russian federal state-owned higher education institution based in Saint Petersburg and one of the oldest and largest universities in Russia....
, and published some verses both before and after her Gabriak period but without much success. In 1911 she married Vasiliev, an engineer, and took his last name.
In the early 1920s, she worked with poet and translator Samuil Marshak
Samuil Marshak
Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak was a Russian and Soviet writer, translator and children's poet. Among his Russian translations are William Shakespeare's sonnets, poems by William Blake and Robert Burns, and Rudyard Kipling's stories. Maxim Gorky proclaimed Marshak to be "the founder of [Russia's ]...
on theatrical plays for children. Later she also published prose and translations.
Starting from 1921, she was searched and interrogated by the State Political Directorate
State Political Directorate
The State Political Directorate was the secret police of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Soviet Union from 1922 until 1934...
along with other members of the Anthroposophic
Anthroposophy
Anthroposophy, a philosophy founded by Rudolf Steiner, postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world accessible to direct experience through inner development...
Society. Finally in 1927 she was exiled to Tashkent
Tashkent
Tashkent is the capital of Uzbekistan and of the Tashkent Province. The officially registered population of the city in 2008 was about 2.2 million. Unofficial sources estimate the actual population may be as much as 4.45 million.-Early Islamic History:...
where she died in 1928 of liver cancer
Liver cancer
Liver tumors or hepatic tumors are tumors or growths on or in the liver . Several distinct types of tumors can develop in the liver because the liver is made up of various cell types. These growths can be benign or malignant...
. Shortly before her death, she was visited in Tashkent by her friend Sinologist Yulian Shchutsky and wrote, influenced by him, 21 poems attributed to Li Xiang Zi, a fictional Chinese poet exiled for his "belief in immortality of human spirit". The name of Li Xiang, invented by Shchutsky, means "a house under a pear tree", where Dmitrieva indeed lived in Tashkent.
Origin of the name
The name, Cherubina, was taken from the story A Secret Of Telegraph Hill by Bret HarteBret Harte
Francis Bret Harte was an American author and poet, best remembered for his accounts of pioneering life in California.- Life and career :...
. The last name, Gabriak, was derived from Gabriakh, the name of a toy, a wooden imp, presented by Voloshin to Elisaveta Dmitrieva. Voloshin found the name Gabriakh in the book Demonomanie des Sorciers by Jean Bodin, where it belonged to an imp, protecting people from evil spirits.
External links
- Gabriak's lyrics (in RussianRussian languageRussian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
) - Gabriak's biography (in Russian)
See also
- Ern MalleyErn MalleyErnest Lalor "Ern" Malley was a fictitious poet and the central figure in Australia's most celebrated literary hoax. The poet, and his entire body of work, were created in one day in 1944 by writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart as a hoax on Max Harris, Angry Penguins, the modernist magazine he...
, nonexistent Australian poet