Valerii Pereleshin

This publication of a selection of poems by Valerii Pereleshin 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 broader efforts, works of many authors repressed inside the Soviet Union and authors publishing in the Russian diasporas — works that until then had only circulated inside Russia in Samizdat or Tamizdat editions — began appearing in conventional print-distribution channels inside the country.

In the Russian LGBTQ subculture of the early 1990s, this process included inscribing artistic or cultural figures into a history and a canon from which they had been unjustly excluded because of their sexual identity. The early twentieth-century poets Mikhail Kuzmin and Nikolai Kluyev were again being published in Russia in the early 1990s. Valerii 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 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. 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 great literary work 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, 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 inscription of the work of this gay poet into the Russian and Western literary canons — restoration of these works to their proper place in those canons, which they would, by implication, already occupy but for the cultural violence of the Soviet experiment.

A three-volume set of collected works of Pereleshin was published in 2018 by the Moscow publisher “Prestizh buk.”