“I, your "you"”: identity strategies in Zinaida Gippius’s correspondence with Vladimir Zlobin (1916-1919)

This article discusses the reconstitution of self-identity after the crisis of the First World War and the Revolution in ego-documents, which marks a fracture in the perception of the interlocutor. As the correspondence of Zinaida Gippius and Vladimir Zlobin demonstrates, the construction of one's identity becomes inseparable from the reconstruction of one's interlocutors' identity. An early stage of this recently fully published correspondence suggests how a complex relationship between interlocutors concerned with each other was forged. Gippius constructs her own and her interlocutor's autonomy through the use of certain speech markers. She engages Zlobin in a game where feeling, will, and the decision to change life turn out to be variables in a larger life-building project. This game is compounded by a time of deep political change, when some of Zlobin's hopes and aspirations needed adjustment. Gippius sees herself as a mentor to her interlocutor, but she also forms a special erotic tension that turns the correspondence into a novel with its dramatic and paradoxical character. The article explores the various speech means by which Gippius constructs the complex self-identity instilled in her interlocutor. The paradoxes of the correspondence are explained with the help of models of social masks: the mask implies public speech behavior, but also the topography of inner life, the construction of identity based on the topics of inner experiences. Therefore, the actions of the interlocutors are not a correction of someone else's public behavior, but a work with someone else's topics through their own, with the particularities of inner experiences and inner self-determination in a challenging era. Within the epistolary novel, a new cartography of inner life is developed, which is incorporated into the autobiographical myths of the correspondents.