9 - Lidiia Zinov′eva-Annibal's The Singing Ass: a woman's view of men and Eros

Summary

Many of the most interesting women of the early twentieth century were and still are all too often perceived as the ‘wives’ or adjuncts of their famous literary spouses. One could cite several examples: Voloshin's wife, the artist Margarita Sabashnikova, Nadezhda Chulkova, or Liubov′ Blok, the actress, are not so much remembered for their own achievements as for the roles they played in their husbands' lives. Lidiia Zinov′eva-Annibal (1866–1907) falls into a somewhat different category, in that she both was the wife of the well-known writer, Viacheslav Ivanov, and also nurtured literary ambitions of her own. In this sense the closest parallel to her example is the literary marriage of Gippius and Merezhkovskii. However, whereas the work of Gippius has received a fair amount of critical attention, that of Zinov′eva-Annibal is hardly ever considered in its own right outside the context of her husband's work.

Zinov′eva-Annibal originally trained as an opera singer, but gradually joined Ivanov in moving towards literary pursuits some years after their first meeting in Italy in 1893. She wrote a number of strikingly original, if not always entirely successful works. Between 1904 and 1907, the year of her abrupt, pre-mature death, she published two plays, Kol′tsa (Rings, 1904) and Pevuchii osel (The Singing Ass, 1907); a work of prose, Tridtsat′ tri uroda (Thirty-Three Abominations, 1907) which achieved some notoriety for its treatment of lesbian love; and a collection of semi-autobiographical short stories, Tragicheskii zverinets (The Tragic Menagerie, 1907), as well as several essays of literary criticism and a few prose poems.