Piece on the gay Russian émigré poet Valerii Pereleshin with excerpts from his verse cycle “Ariel” in gay newspaper Shans
Post-Soviet
1992
This item is representative of broader trends of projects to revise Russian history, political and cultural, in early 1990s Russia. This was happening on a grand scale in post-Soviet society at large, where people were seeking reconnection with pre-Soviet Russian cultural traditions from which they had been artificially separated by the Soviet experiment, were seeking to uncover truths about the Soviet era itself concealed from them by a rigidly controlled official Soviet historiography and public sphere, and, to some extent, were constructing hypothetical models of how Russian history and culture might have evolved if the Bolshevik Revolution had not happened. In the much smaller sphere of what in current terminology would be called the LGBTQ subculture in Russia in the early 1990s, this process included inscribing artistic or cultural figures into a history and a cultural canon from which they had been unjustly excluded because of their expression of homosexual desire and/or LGBTQ identities. Another document in this sourcebook “Two Lives, Two Destinies. A sketch of S.E.Esenin and N. Klyuev” represents an effort to restore a great poet to his deserved place in a Russian literary canon in which he has been unfairly marginalized because of his expression of homosexual desire. This piece from Shans on the gay émigré poet Valerii Pereleshin is very much in the same vein. Pereleshin, who died that same year this issue of Shans was published (1992), emigrated with his family to the Russian enclave in the city of Harbin in China after 1917. He would ultimately land in Brazil by way of the USA. He wrote poetry in Russian and Portuguese, and homoerotic themes became increasingly prominent and explicit in his oeuvre as time went on. Curiously, the author of this piece characterizes the love for the male subject in the featured verse cycle (Ariel from 1976) as “purely platonic.” When the cycle was published, Russian literary scholar Simon Karlinsky called it “a full-fledged literary coming out.” Karlinsky (the author of another of the documents in this collection “The Unknown Diaghilev”) was born to Russian émigré parents in Harbin. He eventually settled in the US where he had a long and prolific career as a scholar of Russian literature and culture (he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatuers at University of California Berkeley from the 1970s through the end of the twentieth century). Much of that career was occupied with a revisionist-history-of-Russian-literature project to both restore LGBTQ writers to their rightful places in a canon from which they had been unfairly excluded, and to tease out LGBTQ elements in canonical works, elements overlooked by scholarship thus far. He championed Pereleshin’s Ariel as “a major event in contemporary Russian poetry and a breakthrough that is significant for the whole of Western culture.”
Karlinsky is extensively published and cited in the publications of the early post-Soviet LGBTQ community as an authority on the LGBTQ Russian history and culture they were working to excavate — a Russian émigré authority who had been able to do this work by virtue of the fact that he was operating outside the Soviet Union. The fact is, however, that Karlinsky encountered considerable resistance to these efforts from colleagues in Western academia and from the Russian émigré community. He was, for example, engaged in a heated debate about the attribution of homosexual desire to the early Soviet-era poet Sergei Esenin on the pages of the New York Russian émigré newspaper New Russian Word. Esenin’s relationship with the Russian poet Nikolai Klyuev is the subject of another document included in this collection “Two Lives, Two Destinies. Sketch of S.E. Esenin and N. Klyuev.”
Homosexuality (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85061780)--Russia (Federation) (https://lccn.loc.gov/n92056007)--Periodicals (https://lccn.loc.gov/gf2014026139)
Gay men (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85061798)--Russia (Federation)
LGBT history in Russia (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4204645)
Pereleshin, Valeriĭ (https://lccn.loc.gov/n85145174)
Valery Pereleshin (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4350483)
Pereleshin, Valeriĭ (http://viaf.org/viaf/59110083)
Pereleshin, Valery
Russia
Shans, No. 1, 1992, p. 10