Valery Pereleshin

This publication of a selection of poems by Valery Pereleshin (1913-1992) represents the broader revisionist trend within Russian culture in the early 1990s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, people sought to reconnect with Russian cultural traditions that the Soviet regime had obscured, distorted, exiled, or repressed. As a part of these efforts, works of many authors suppressed inside the Soviet Union and authors publishing in the Russian diasporas—works that until then had only circulated inside Russia in samizdat (self-publisehd) or tamizdat (published abroad) editions—began appearing in conventional print-distribution channels inside the country.

 

In the Russian LGBTQ subculture of the early 1990s, this process involved inscribing artistic or cultural figures—for instance, early twentieth-century poets Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936) and Nikolai Kluyev (1884-1937)—into a history and canon from which they had been unjustly excluded because of their sexual identity. Valery Pereleshin, who died the year this piece was published, was certainly the best known, and possibly the only, published Russian-diaspora author of openly homoerotic verse in the Russian language as of 1992. 

 

As a child, he had emigrated with his family to the Russian enclave in Harbin, China after 1917, ultimately landing in Brazil by way of the USA. He wrote poetry in Russian and Portuguese, with homoerotic themes becoming increasingly prominent and explicit in his oeuvre as time went on. His poetry was published by Russian émigré presses in Harbin, Germany, France, the USA, and the Netherlands. The cycle Ariel, published by the Frankfurt publisher Posev in 1976, was his most overtly homoerotic work up to that point, and, for some readers and critics, a literary masterpiece deserving of a place in the Western canon. Russian émigré literary scholar Simon Karlinsky, himself born in Harbin, called it “a full-fledged literary coming-out,” “a major event in contemporary Russian poetry,” and “a breakthrough that is significant for the whole of Western culture.” 

 

The selection of poems published here in Shans and the brief commentary that accompanies them emphasize Pereleshin’s “platonic” love for an unseen male correspondent of many years. Also evident are classical motifs and relationships to the Greco-Roman tradition, to Shakespeare, to the Italian Renaissance, and to pre-Revolutionary Russian literature. This presentation of the poet and his works seems to have as its main agenda their inscription into the Russian and Western literary traditions—in other words, a restoration of these works to their proper place, which the commentators suggest they would already occupy but for the cultural violence of the Soviet experiment. A three-volume set of Pereleshin’s collected works was published in 2018 by the Moscow publisher “Prestizh buk.”