Russian translation of an article by American scholar Simon Karlinsky on Sergei Diaghilev, published in the LGBTQ magazine Тема
Post-Soviet
1992
This article is representative of multifaceted attempts in the 1990s at reconstructing a shattered LGBTQ Russian cultural and intellectual legacy, at compiling a history of productive and influential figures belonging to LGBTQ categories (to use contemporary terminology) by reintegrating pieces scattered by the historical traumas of revolutions and wars. The choice of author and subject matter here are also reflective of a fascination with culturally and/or intellectually influential Russian exponents of LGBTQ identities who, at least to some extent, self-actualized in the West.
The author of the article — Simon Karlinsky — was born in the Manchurian city of Harbin to Russian parents who had fled after the Bolshevik Revolution. Harbin housed a large enclave of Russian refugees from the Revolution that was dispersed by the Communist Revolution and civil war in China at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s. After leaving Harbin Karlinsky spent time in Western Europe and ultimately landed in the United States where he became a Slavist and Professor at University of California, Berkeley. Karlinsky was something of a revisionist historian of Russian literature and culture whose research agenda was largely focused on bringing passively overlooked or actively suppressed expressions of homosexuality and gender fluidity to the fore. In 1976 he published a monograph entitled The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol that explored repressed homoerotic desire as a powerfully determinant force in Gogol’s oeuvre. The book was highly controversial in Western Slavic Studies circles in the years immediately following its publication. Karlinsky also published extensively on several of the homosexual, sexually fluid and/or gender-fluid literary and cultural figures mentioned in this article, such as, in addition to Diaghilev himself, the composer Petr Ilych Tchaikovsky and the writer Zinaida Gippius. Karlinsky also wrote about lesser-known, arguably overlooked, figures such as the gay poet Valerii Pereleshin, who grew up in Harbin and eventually landed in Brazil. Pereleshin wrote largely gay-themed poetry in Russian and in Portuguese. The first full-scale monograph on Pereleshin, written by another native of the Russian émigré community in Harbin — Olga Bakich, was published with University of Toronto Press in 2015. Karlinsky himself stands here as an openly gay Russian intellectual who has achieved a place of prominence in the Western academy, and whose own productive scholarly career is centered around the productivity and influence of homosexual, sexually fluid, and/or gender fluid Russian cultural figures, many of whom achieved their prominence to some extent in the West.
The subject of the article — Sergei Diaghilev — is remembered primarily as a highly influential early twentieth-century ballet impresario and the artistic director and main force behind the famous touring company “Ballets Russes,” whose productions exerted an enormous influence on twentieth century dance on both sides of the Atlantic. Diaghilev was openly gay. His romantic relationships with a variety of dancers and other cultural figures — including art and literature critic and publisher Dmitri Filosofov (Diaghilev’s cousin), Vaclav Nizhinsky and Leonide Massine —were public knowledge, and his influence in the dance realm so formidable, that heterosexual artists (such as Massine) are said to have entered into romantic relationships with him in order to become his protegés. In this article Karlinsky goes as far as to assert Diaghilev’s homosexual desire as a force largely responsible for the twentieth-century balletic canon. Diaghilev, who spent much of his life abroad and died in Venice twelve years after the Revolution in 1929, here stands as an index of a prerevolutionary Russian milieu where homosexual relationships were carried on in plain sight, and of a greatly productive Russia-West cultural encounter, one in which an avowedly gay impresario was a sort of cultural ambassador from Russia to the West and a crucial productive agent for a Russian cultural legacy of great import both in Russia and abroad. One imagines the early 1990s Russian LGBTQ reader seeking to reconnect with a Russian cultural LGBTQ legacy might have felt a sense of compounded displacement reading this account of the life and loves of Diaghilev — who spent most of his career in the West — delivered by Karlinsky — a gay Russian literary and cultural scholar born in Manchuria — from his well established seat in American academe.
Diaghilev, Sergei and Karlinsky, Simon
Russia
Tema, No. 2-3, 1992, pp. 3-4