Article on the affair between poets Marina Tsvetaeva and Sophia Parnok in LGBTQ magazine Риск
Post-Soviet
1991
In the early 1990s RISK was a periodical concerned with different aspects of the burgeoning LGBTQ (to use contemporary terminology) culture in Russia. The name, which presumably referred implicitly to the AIDS epidemic and other perils of the precarious existences of LGBTQ people in Russia at the time, was also sometimes presented as an acronym of the Russian words for equality (равенство), sincerity (искренность), freedom (свобода), and compromise (компромисс). Edited by the poet, literary scholar, and gay activist Dmitrii Kuz’min, one of RISK’s preoccupations was LGBTQ elements of pre-Soviet Russian artistic and intellectual culture. Early issues documented an impulse to access a pre-Soviet Russian LGBTQ legacy separated from the early post-Soviet moment by the Revolution and a decades-long history of repression, silence, and persecution. This piece about a famous affair between Marina Tsvetaeva, one of the most celebrated poets in the Russian canon, and the poet Sophia Parnok is an interesting document of a nascent (or renascent) Russian LGBTQ culture at the end of the Soviet era. Published in the Soviet Unions’s last year, it depicts an immediately pre-Soviet Russian social reality in a way that, it is easy to imagine, resembled a lost paradise to LGTBQ people at the end of the Soviet era. The fact that the affair is between two women is a casual detail in a narrative set in a social milieu that seems to react to that affair just as it would to one between a man and a woman. Centered around one of the cardinal figures of the Russian twentieth-century literary canon (Tsvetaeva), the account also features a gay writer — Mikhail Kuzmin — as another prominent figure in the literary world of early twentieth-century Russia. Tsvetaeva seems like she would be have been a figure of some fascination for the LGBTQ audience in early post-Soviet Russia as described by sociologist Laurie Essig in her book Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other (Duke University Press, 1999). Essig observed that, as a rule, Russians experiencing and engaging same-sex desire in this period tended to think of those desires and behaviors as incidental to rather than definitive of their identities, as something they did but not necessarily who they were. Tsvetaeva is shown here having almost concurrent affairs with male and female poets. She also has the value here of a tragic figure who left Russia for the West after the Bolshevik Revolution, but eventually returned to Soviet Russia where she would ultimately self-destruct. Several pieces from the early years of RISK focused on pre-Soviet LGBTQ culture and life and concentrated on figures who, after the 1917 Revolution, lived much or all of their lives in the West, such as the poet Zinaida Gippius, ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev (see “Unknown Diaghilev” in this collection), and Russian literature and culture scholar Simon Karlinsky (see “Unknown Diaghilev,” “Homosexuality in Soviet Prisons and Camps,” “Valerii Pereleshin” in this collection). Unlike these figures, Tsvetaeva would return to Russia in 1939 after seventeen years abroad, and would commit suicide two years later.
Moscow
Tvestaeva, Marina, Parnok, Sophia, and Kuzmin, Mikhail
Russia
Risk, January 1991, pp. 8-9