14 Facts About Mirra Lokhvitskaya

Mirra Lokhvitskaya was a Russian poet who rose to fame in the late 1890s.

Maria Mirra Lokhvitskaya was born on November 19,1869, in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Mirra Lokhvitskaya's father Alexander Vladimirovich Lokhvitsky was a well-known lawyer of the time, famous for his public speeches, the author of several academic works on jurisprudence.

At age fifteen, Mirra Lokhvitskaya started writing poetry and published two of her poems as a small brochure not long before graduation.

Mirra Lokhvitskaya rose to fame in 1891 after her first long poem, "By the Seaside", appeared in the August issue of the Russkoye Obozrenye magazine.

Mirra Lokhvitskaya became a popular figure in the Petersburg literary circles and became friends with Vsevolod Solovyov, Ieronim Yasinsky, Vasily Nemirovich-Danchenko, Pyotr Gnedich, and Vladimir Solovyov.

In late 1891, Mirra Lokhvitskaya married Eugeny Gibert, a French construction engineer, and the couple moved first to Yaroslavl, then to Moscow.

In 1904 Mirra Lokhvitskaya's illness progressed; she was bedridden for most of the year, tortured by pain and anxiety.

In 1901, Balmont and Mirra Lokhvitskaya met, apparently, for the last time.

Mirra Lokhvitskaya was reticent, attended literary parties on just rare occasions and her appearances there were not necessarily triumphant.

Mirra Lokhvitskaya's shyness was one of the reasons why so little mention has been made of her in the extensive body of Russian Silver Age memoirs.

Mirra Lokhvitskaya excluded all poems addressed to her "spiritual lover," and what was left amounted to a fine collection of elegies full of dark premonitions, quasi-religious fables and thinly veiled farewells to her children.

The popularity of Mirra Lokhvitskaya's poetry waned quickly after his death.

For more than ninety years Mirra Lokhvitskaya remained unpublished in her homeland.