Sinaida Hippius's first entry in her "Blue Book" dated August 1, 1914 reads: "What should one write? Nothing except this - War! ... No one understands what - first of all - a war is. And what it - secondly - means for us, for Russia. I do not understand it yet either. But I feel an unprecedented horror." The onset of World War I transformed the Russian symbolist poetess and captivating salonnière, who managed to gather the Petersburg intelligentsia around her as a feminine Gesamtkunstwerk, into a political chronicler. Until her emigration in December 1919 through Poland to Paris, she wrote her "social diary": as a sharp-tongued critic of the autocratic Tsarist government and the war, which the majority of Petersburg's artistic and intellectual circles enthusiastically supported, as a supporter of the February Revolution.