Two Lives, Two Destinies. Sketch of S.E. Esenin and N. Kliuev

This article, which centers on a love affair between two classic modernist poets, is an example of a revisionist impulse on the part of some 1990s exponents of unconventional sexual identities in Russia — an impulse to restore figures unfairly marginalized for their expression of homosexual desire to their rightful place in history and the literary canon.

In their effort to bridge the gap between an early post-Soviet present and a pre-Soviet moment that preceded poet Nikolai Klyuev’s (1884-1937) tragic clash with the arbiters of official Soviet aesthetics, the author presents readers with a scene of a kind of prelapsarian purity. Klyuev’s homosexual desires, for which, it is implied, the Soviet state apparatus would ultimately destroy him, seem aligned in this article with a kind of elemental Russianness, in turn inextricable from the marginalized religiosity of the Russian Orthodox sect known as the Khlysty (flagellants), whose ascetic theology had inspired some of Klyuev’s work. For some early post-Soviet exponents of LGBTQ identities, a search for an “elementally Russian” version of homosexuality or sexual and gender fluidity led to the expression of Russian-religious and in some cases Russian-nationalist sentiments. Active identification with distinct national and religious traditions was subversive in the Soviet context, and a number of exponents of non-traditional sexual identities on the cusp of the late-Soviet and post-Soviet eras combined this with elements of Russian national (even nationalist) and religious identities. One instantiation of this was the artist Timur Novikov, who lead a sort of neo-conservative turn in the art world. After his AIDS diagnosis Novikov, who never publicly avowed his homosexuality, retreated into an intensifying Russian-religious conservatism.

The article’s counterpoint to Klyuev is the poet Sergei Esenin (1895-1925), a darling of the early-Soviet literary milieu whose suspected romantic entanglement with Klyuev has long been the object of scholarly speculation. Esenin is presented as the lesser talent of the two, who accordingly enjoyed greater popularity in a darker age than 1992. In this historical framing, the start of the Soviet period marked a rupture with the culture and spirituality with which the article’s author wants to reconnect. At odds with this desire to suture the pre-Soviet past to the post-Soviet present is the historical truth that exiled anti-Bolshevik élites often took a dim view of homosexuality. Among the anti-Soviet émigrés of the early twentieth century, many of whom regarded themselves as the true guardians of Russian culture and religion against Bolshevik degeneracy, vehement antipathy for male homosexuality was rampant. Russian cultural historian Simon Karlinsky led an embattled career as a champion of LGBTQ identity in Russian literature and culture and an advocate of restoring effaced LGBTQ elements in the study and teaching of the Russian cultural canons. These efforts encountered strong resistance from members both of the Western academy and Russian émigré communities, who regarded Karlinsky’s scholarship as an artificial attempt by fringe Western interests to impose their own proclivities on the Russian cultural legacy.