Tsvetaeva and Parnok

In the early 1990s, RISK was an activist periodical occupied primarily with documenting LGBTQ (to use contemporary Western terminology) history and culture in Russia, including LGBTQ elements of Russia’s literary history. By the mid-1990s, under the editorship of Dmitri Kuzmin, RISK became more focused on contemporary literature and culture. The name, with its implicit reference to the AIDS epidemic and other perils facing LGBTQ people living in Russia, was also sometimes presented as an acronym of the Russian words for equality (ravenstvo), sincerity (iskrennost’), freedom (svoboda), and compromise (komprmiss).

Early issues sought to access a pre-Soviet Russian LGBTQ legacy separated from the early post-Soviet moment by the 1917 Revolution and a decades-long history of Soviet repression, silence, and persecution. The piece featured in this artifact centers on a famous affair between Marina Tsvetaeva, one of the most celebrated poets in the Russian canon, and the poet Sophia Parnok. Published in the Soviet Unions’s last year, it romanticizes an immediately pre-Soviet Russian social reality by presenting the same-sex nature of Tsvetaeva and Parnok’s affair as a casual detail, with contemporaries’ reactions presented as indistinguishable from those that would greet a heterosexual pair. The account also features cursory mention of a gay Russian writer — Mikhail Kuzmin — as another prominent figure in the literary world of early twentieth-century Russia. This text is representative of a tendency to over-correct canonical historical accounts that expunged LGBTQ elements entirely. These were sometimes countered with tendentious alternative accounts that exaggerated the extent to which sexual and gender pluralism were integral parts of pre-Soviet Russian society. Here we have a tight focus on a somewhat rarefied artistic milieu (including Kuzmin) that is not representative of broader social norms, even in the capitals of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Tsvetaeva, a fixture of the repressed classics circulating in samizdat throughout the late Soviet period, was a source of fascination for LGBTQ audiences in early post-Soviet Russia. In this item, Tsvetaeva is shown having almost concurrent affairs with male and female poets, demonstrating the fluidity of modernist sexuality . The author of the essay presents her as a tragic figure who left Russia for the West in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, only to return to a hostile Soviet Russia that would ultimately cause her to self-destruct.

Several pieces from RISK’s early years focused on pre-Soviet and Soviet-era émigré LGBTQ culture, profiling figures who, after 1917, lived in the West. Examples included poet Zinaida Gippius, ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, and Russian literature and culture scholar Simon Karlinsky. Unlike these figures, Tsvetaeva would return to Russia in 1939 after seventeen years abroad, only to commit suicide two years later. The piece acquires an unfortunate layering effect for the 2020s reader, who might look with nostalgia at the relative liberality of the Russia of the early 1990s that allowed this piece to be published and circulated. Legislation introduced after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, legislation that effectively criminalized public speech legitimizing LGBTQ identities, would make publication of such an article a very high-risk venture.