Partner Yury Yurkun
Queer Places:
Stray Dog, Ital'yanskaya Ulitsa, 4, Sankt-Peterburg, Russia, 191186
Saint Petersburg Conservatory, Theatre Square, 3, Sankt-Peterburg, Russia, 190000
Literatorskie Mostki
Saint Petersburg, Saint Petersburg Federal City, Russia
Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (October
18 [O.S.
October 6] 1872 – March 1, 1936) was a Russian poet, musician and novelist, a
prominent contributor to the
Silver Age of Russian Poetry. Mikhail Kuzmin came to be regarded as ‘the
Russian Oscar Wilde’ after the publication of his novel Wings in 1906; and, a
touch more absurdly, ‘the Russian Noël Coward’. Modernism. In a diary entry (6
June 1906), Kuzmin called Wilde ‘that snob, that hypocrite, that bad writer
and faint-hearted man, who besmirched that for which he was put on trial’.
Born into a noble family in
Yaroslavl,
Kuzmin grew up in
St. Petersburg and studied music at the
Saint Petersburg Conservatory under
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. He did not graduate, however, later explaining
his move towards poetry thus: "It's easier and simpler. Poetry falls
ready-made from the sky, like manna into the mouths of the Israelites in the
desert."[1]
But he did not give up music; he composed the music for
Meyerhold's famous 1906 production of
Alexander Blok's play Balaganchik (The Fair Show Booth), and his
songs were popular among the Petersburg elite: "He sang them, accompanying
himself on the piano, first in various salons, including
Ivanov's Tower, and then at
The Stray Dog. Kuzmin liked to say of his work that 'it's only little
music, but it has its poison.'"[2]
One of his closest friends and major influences as a young man was the
polyglot Germanophile aristocrat
Georgy Chicherin (who later entered the diplomatic service and after the
October Revolution became People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs), a
passionate supporter of
Wagner and
Nietzsche. Another strong influence was his travels, first to Egypt and
Italy and then to northern Russia, where he was deeply impressed by the
Old Believers. Settling down in St. Petersburg, he became close to the
circle around
Mir iskusstva (World of Art). His first published writings appeared in
1905 and attracted the attention of
Valery Bryusov, who invited him to contribute to his influential literary
magazine Vesy
(The Balance), the center of the
Symbolist movement, where in 1906 he published his verse cycle
"Alexandrian Songs" (modeled on
Les Chansons de Bilitis, by
Pierre Louÿs[3])
and the first Russian novel with a homosexual theme,
Wings, which instantly achieved notoriety and made him a widely
popular writer. In 1908 appeared his first collection of poetry, Seti
(Nets), which was also widely acclaimed. In the words of Roberta Reeder, "His
poetry is erudite and the themes range from Ancient Greece and Alexandria to
modern-day Petersburg."[4]
Kuzmin himself had travelled with his lover ‘Prince Georges’, a cavalry
officer, to Constantinople, Athens, Smyrna, Alexandria, Cairo and
Memphis. In 1897 he took a trip to Rome and, having fallen in love with
the lift boy, took him to Florence, intending eventually to take him all
the way home to Russia ‘in the capacity of my servant’. In the event,
though, he sent the boy home to Rome instead.
Sergei Diaghilev thought
very highly of Mikhail Kuzmin’s
work. They saw so much of each other for a short time in 1907 that
Kuzmin noted in his diary: ‘Gossip is making the rounds about me and
Diaghilev. Quel farce’ (31 October 1907).
In 1908 he was living with
Sergei Sudeikin and his first wife Olga Glebova, whom he had married just
the year before; when Olga discovered her husband was having an affair with
Kuzmin, she insisted Kuzmin move out. "But in spite of this contretemps,
Kuzmin, Sudeikin, and Glebova continued to maintain a productive, professional
relationship, collaborating on many ventures—plays, musical evenings, poetry
declamations—especially at the St. Petersburg cabarets."[5]
Kuzmin was also one of the favorite poets of Sudeikin's second wife,
Vera, and her published album contains several of his manuscript poems.
Kuzmin's association with the Symbolists was never definitive, and in 1910
he helped give rise to the
Acmeist movement with his essay "O prekrasnoi yasnosti" (On beautiful
clarity), in which he attacked "incomprehensible, dark cosmic trappings" and
urged writers to be "logical in the conception, the construction of the work,
the syntax... love the word, like
Flaubert, be economical in means and niggardly in words, precise and
genuine -- and you will find the secret of an amazing thing — beautiful
clarity — which I would call clarism."[7]
He was no more a member of the group than he had been of the Symbolists, but
he was personally associated with a number of them; in the years 1910-12 he
lived in the famous apartment (called the Tower) of
Vyacheslav Ivanov, who was another formative influence on the Acmeists,
and he was a friend of
Anna Akhmatova, for whose first book of poetry, Vecher [Evening],
he wrote a flattering preface. (In later years Kuzmin incurred Akhmatova's
enmity, probably because of a 1923 review she took as condescending, and she
made him a prototype of one of the villains in her "Poem Without a Hero".[8])
Kuzmin met
Yury Yurkun, a poet in 1913. The two men lived together with
Yurkun's mother, and Yurkun’s wife, Olga Arbenina, joined them, for a short
while. Kuzmin and Yurkun's relationship lasted until Kuzmin's death. Kuzmin
died in 1936 of pneumonia, two years before Yurkun and many other writers were
arrested under the Stalinist regime and shot.[6]
Mikhail Kuzmin was greatly admired by
such younger poets as Sergei Esenin
and Marina Tsvetaeva, both of whom met
him at the same St Petersburg literary soirée in January 1916.
The last volume of poetry Kuzmin published during his lifetime was The
Trout Breaks the Ice (1929), a cycle of
narrative poetry.[9]
In the 1920s and 1930s Kuzmin made his living primarily as a literary
translator, most notably of
Shakespeare's plays.[10]
Sergei Diaghilev told
Mikhail Kuzmin about a student in Moscow
called Vladimir Ruslov, ‘a
proselytizer and casse-tête, who considers himself Dorian Gray, who always has
about thirty comrades at the ready par amour’. Kuzmin corresponded with
Ruslov, in the words of his biographers, ‘fascinated as he was by the aura of
legend that surrounded him and by the idea that a new kind of “gay society” of
unprecedented sexual openness might be formed with Ruslov and his young
friends as the Moscow nucleus’. Years later, on 1 March 1924, Ruslov wrote to
tell Kuzmin about a ‘small, very intimate circle made up in the main of young
poets’ that was meeting in Moscow under the name ‘Antinous’, its aim being
‘the revelation of male beauty in print’. They asked Kuzmin to give them a
reading, and after various difficulties, on 11 May he did so.
He died in
Leningrad.
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