Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/44

20 It was somewhere about the same time that, under the influence of Dostoyevsky and certain foreign poets such as Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe, that I began to be an enthusiastic admirer of modernism, but less of the decadents than of the symbolists (even then I kept the two separate}. A volume of my poems which appeared at the beginning of the nineties, received the title "Symbols"; I believe that I was the first who introduced this word into Russian literature. "What symbols? What are symbols?" I was asked at every turn.

After leaving the University, I went in the summer to the Caucasus. At Borshom, quite by chance, I made the acquaintance of Zinaida Nikolayevna Hippius, and soon afterwards I made her a proposal of marriage. In the following winter I married her at Tiflis, and returned with her to Petrograd.

I will make the rest of this briefer, for I am not writing memoirs, but only an autobiographical sketch. I have neither the intention nor the ability to depict the course of my inner development, which, I believe, is not yet completed.

In the spring after my marriage, my mother died. The death of my mother, a severe illness of my wife, and several other crises in my private life, were the causes of the religious change through which I passed. I am often reproached with having derived my religious ideas schemati-