Cherubina de Gabriak: French Sources of the Mystification

Abstract

The article shows what role M. Voloshin’s interest in the work of Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam played in the creation of Cherubina de Gabriak. This famous mystification was planned by M. Voloshin and E. Dmitrieva in the summer of 1909 when the poet was translating Villiers’ philosophical drama Axel and writing an essay about the play and its author. Shared motifs and images that were discovered in Cherubina’s poems, Villiers’ drama and Voloshin’s essays, allow to treat the heroine of Axel (Sara de Maupers) as a literary prototype of the fictional poetess and to assert that Cherubina- Dmitrieva’s poetry was influenced by Villiers’ works and Voloshin’s interpretation of the former’s life. Also, it is important that Voloshin’s attention on Villiers’ novel Future Eve could serve as an impulse to creation of the ideal illusory poetess: an article about this work figured in Voloshin’s first projects for Apollon magazine, S. Makovsky wrote about the heroine of this novel in his memoirs of Cherubina.

Keywords

• literary mystification
• cherubina de gabriak
• m.a. voloshin
• e.i. dmitrieva
• auguste villiers de l’isle-adam
• silver age
• artificial man
• ideal
• literary reception.