A Difficult Soul

guide the Symbolist movement which dominated Russian literature for the first third of the twentieth century. A major poet, important playwright, and influential literary critic, she was also a sexual rebel who rejected traditional male/female roles as early as the 1890s. Vladimir Zlobin, her secretary and factotum from the time of her emigration to Paris after the revolution until her death in 1945, exposes the consequential inner workings of the literary circle around Gippius. His account