Partner Olga Tsuberbiller,
Nina Vedeneyeva
Queer Places:
Saint Petersburg Conservatory, Theatre Square, 3, Sankt-Peterburg, Russia, 190000
Mariinskaya Gymnasium, Ulitsa Chekhova, 104, Taganrog, Rostovskaya oblast', Russia, 347935
Oblast' di Rostov, Russia, 347935
Maison-musée d’Adélaïde Gertsyk, 39 ulitsa Gagarina, Sudak 98000, Crimea, Russia
Vvedenskoe Cemetery, Nalichnaya Ulitsa, 1, Moskva, Russia, 111020
Sophia
Parnok (30 July 1885 O.S./11 August 1885 (N. S.) – 26 August 1933) was a
Russian poet, journalist and translator. From the age of six, she wrote poetry
in a style quite distinct from the predominant poets of her times, revealing
instead her own sense of Russianness, Jewish identity and lesbianism. Besides
her literary work, she worked as a journalist under the pen name of Andrei
Polianin. She has been referred to as "Russia's
Sappho", as she wrote openly about
her seven lesbian relationships.
Sonya Yakovlevna Parnokh was born into a well-to-do family of professional
Jews in a provincial city outside the Pale of Settlement. Her mother died
after giving birth to her twin siblings and she was raised by her father and
her step-mother, leaving her feeling her childhood lacked emotional support.
From a young age, she wrote poetry and acknowledged her uniqueness—her
lesbianism, her Graves’ disease, and her religion—which set her apart from her
peers.
Completing her studies at the Mariinskaya Gymnasium in 1894, Parnokh
attempted to study music in Geneva, but lacked any real drive and quickly
returned to Moscow. To distance herself from her father’s control and her
financial dependence on him, she published her first book of poems in 1906
under the pseudonym Sophia Parnok and married Vladimir Volkenstein in 1907.
Within two years, the marriage failed and she began working as a journalist.
From 1913, Parnok exclusively had relationships with women and used those
love relationships to fuel her creativity. In a succession of relationships
with Marina Tsvetaeva, Lyudmila Erarskaya, Olga Tsuberbiller, Maria Maksakova
and Nina Vedeneyeva, her muses propelled her to publish five collections of
poetry and write several librettos for opera, before her disease claimed her
life in 1933.
Barred from publication of her poetry after 1928, Parnok's works were
mostly forgotten until after the Soviet period. Increased scholarship since
that time, resulted in the publication of her collected works for the first
time in 1979. While scholars have focused on her early influential
relationship with Tsvetaeva, her best works are now recognized as those
written from 1928.
In the beginning of 1923, Parnok embarked on a friendship with
Olga Nikolaevna
Tsuberbiller, a mathematician at Moscow State University.
The exact nature of her relationship with Tsuberbiller is unknown as, while
she occupied a significant place in the poet's life, Parnok did not describe
Tsuberbiller in the same sexual context as her lovers. Instead, Tsuberbiller
was a protector.
Parnock would later describe her as almost a guardian angel in her collection
of poems Half-Whispered.
She joined the group known as the "Lyrical Circle", which included members
like Lev Gornung, Leonid Grossman, Vladislav Khodasevich, and Vladimir Lidin.
The members critiqued each other's work, which she hoped would help her find
clarity and harmony in her works.
Short of money, Parnok briefly took an office position, but soon quit and
depended upon freelance translations and literary critiques to pay her bills,
though critiques were beginning to be censored as well.
By 1925, Parnok and Tsuberbiller had become the closest of friends, and
when Erarskaya was hospitalized for a mental break, Tsuberbiller was the one
to whom she turned to regain her peace of mind.
Parnok was distressed, feeling that her life had ended, and was unable to work
because of her depression and worry over her lover. Erarskaya's paranoia and
violent outbursts, led to unsettling trauma for Parnok, causing several
fainting spells.
In 1926, Parnok moved in with Tsuberbiller on Neopalimovsky Lane at Smolensky
Boulevard.
After a year in the sanatorium Erarskaya was finally pronounced well and
released.
Increasingly Parnok felt isolated from her readers and alienated from her
peers,
in part because by 1926, GLAVLIT's authority had been extended to cover both
public and private publishing. Parnok feared that her cycle Music would
not be accepted for publication.
The censorship of her works, but also the unspoken censorship of herself, made
her feel invisible, inspiring her poems such as Prologue (1928).
She joined another group of poets, known as "The Knot" which was founded to
publish the works of the members
to secure that one of the group's first releases was the publishing of
Music.
The censors allowed "The Knot" to exists because their publication runs were
limited to 700 copies or less.
Music was generally well received and earned praise from both
Eugenia Gertsyk and Voloshin, pleasing Parnok.
She made plans to spend the summer with Erarskaya and Tsuberbiller in
Bratovshchina and was revived by the natural surroundings, writing eight
poems.
Though still inspired and writing poetry when they returned, Parnok
increasingly suffered from ill health and depression. These feelings were
acerbated by the continuing failure of Spendiaryan to complete the scores for
Almast.
The poems she wrote in early 1927 showed her growing loneliness and
resignation to the inevitability of her own death.
By spring, sales of "The Knot"′s publications had been quite good and Parnok
felt revived enough to spend the summer with Erarskaya and Tsuberbiller in the
small town of Khalepye in the Kiev Oblast of Ukraine.
Once again the time in nature revived her spirit but she continued to suffer
from bad health.
Returning to Moscow, she was constantly ill, though she managed to finish her
collection Half-Whispered by the end of the year.
By early 1928, Parnok was bedridden, though still translating.
She was depressed, "The Knot" had been forced to close after publishing
Half-Whispered, she was suffering from writer's block with her poetry, and
Spendiaryan had died without finishing the score to Almast.
As censorship clamped down, Parnok’s poetic voice became "unlawful", leading
to prohibition on publication of her works in 1928. She made her living solely
by translating poems by Charles Baudelaire, novels by Romain Rolland,
Marcel Proust, Henri
Barbusse and others.
In May, 1928, Maximilian Steinberg took it upon himself to complete Almast
and Parnok agreed to try to get it approved for the Bolshoi Theatre to produce
it. In 1929, Tsuberbiller's brother died, and she and Parnok became
responsible for the care of his five-year-old twins.
In August 1929, Parnok had word from the Bolshoi that they would produce
the opera, only if she wrote a Communist-themed prologue and epilogue to the
production. In an effort to see the production completed, she agreed, but that
created a rift with Steinberg, who claimed she was bowing to political
pressure. She felt trapped between the theater managers and Steinberg.
In the spring of 1930, Almast finally went into production, but the
conductor made changes, deleting the management's requested prologue and
epilogue. He also placed it on the schedule so that it would only have a
two-day run. Spendiaryan's widow interceded by having Steinberg called to
Moscow to rein in the wayward conductor and move the project to completion.
When the opera finally debuted at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow on 24 June
1930, it was a resounding success.
The premier was so popular with the public, if not the critics, that it led
off the Bolshoi's following fall season.
When Maria Maksakova left the title role, Parnok severed her interest in the
project,
though it toured successfully in Odessa (1930), Tbilissi (1932), Yerevan
(1933) and in Paris (1951), among others.
By the end of the year, both Parnok and Tsuberbiller were exhausted and
spent several weeks at Uzkoye to regain their health. When they returned to
Moscow, they moved to a new apartment, which gave them more room, as well as
space to entertain many colleagues from Tsuberbiller's work.
Parnok began pursuing Maksakova, attending all her performances,
and was re-inspired in her work. She began work on a libretto for an opera
Gyul'nara by Yuliya Veysberg, which was dedicated to Maksakova.
Though Parnok's infatuation was not reciprocated, it fueled a creative period
and by the end of 1931, she had completed the libretto,
which was first performed in 1935.
Parnok's last great love was the Georgian physicist,
Nina Vedeneyeva. The two may have met as
early as 1927, through Tsuberbiller, a colleague of Vedeneyeva. Vedeneyeva's
son, Yevgeny, was living in exile at that time and Tsuberbiller, who had
written a textbook used for decades in the high schools of Russia, helped her
obtain books for him to maintain his studies.
In January, 1932, the relationship turned to romance, despite the facts that
Parnok was still living with Tsuberbiller and Yevgeny disapproved of the
relationship.
As had happened before, her lover became her muse, inspiring her to write two
cycles of poems, Ursa Major and Useless Goods.
The frantic pace of her writing foretold the exhaustion she would suffer,
which hastened her death, but Parnok was aware of the consequences.
The references between these last two cycles and Parnok's adolescent poetry,
make it clear that she had always known what she wanted to say, but until she
reached her maturity, she did not know how to express her words.
Their emotional bond, which accelerated after a trip to Vedeneyeva's summer
cottage in Kashin in April,
was destined to remain hidden from most of Vedeneyeva's family and friends.
To keep up appearance of a mere friendship, they spent their summers apart.
Cutting herself off from all activities other than her work, her love and
her immediate family, Parnok's poetry became paramount and with help from
Tsuberbiller and Vedeneyeva she stopped translation work.
By winter 1932, her body had become swollen with edema, signalling that her
Graves' disease had affected her heart.
For the next six months, Parnok was mostly bedridden and Vedeneyeva visited
daily.
In an attempt to improve Parnok's health, Tsuberbiller suggested that they
summer in Karinskoye (ru)
and despite the arduous trip, they arrived safely.
Vedeneyeva vacationed separately in the Crimea. While they were apart the
lovers were plagued with poor mail service, which acerbated Parnok's stress.
On 31 July 1933, she penned her last complete poem, as a farewell to
Vedeneyeva.
On 20 August 1933, Vedeneyeva returned to Moscow and that same day, she
took the train to join Parnok and Tsuberbiller in Karinskoye.
The arrival was not due to Parnok's illness, but a scheduled arrival per her
pre-planned itinerary.
On 25 August, Tsuberbiller realized that Parnok was dying and notified
Erarskaya.
Parnok succumbed to a heart attack at 11:30 a.m. on the morning of 26 August
1933 with Tsuberbiller and Vedeneyeva at her bedside. Though she tried to make
the trip from Moscow before Parnok died, Erarskaya did not arrive until around
5 p.m.
A portrait of Tsvetaeva was on her bedside table when she died.
The village druggist assisted Tsuberbiller in obtaining the necessary
paperwork to take the body back to Moscow, after the funeral service in
Karinskoye. Her funeral procession on 28 August with her friends and fans
extended 75 kilometers outside of Moscow. They did not reach the city until
the following day.
She was buried in Vvedenskoye Cemetery in Olga Tsuberbiller's family plot.
After Parnok's death, her works were not available, nor was there any
development of Russian scholarship about her until after the Soviet period.
In 1979, the Soviet scholar, Sofia Polyakova, edited the first Collected
Works of Parnok, which was published in the United States.
In 1983, Polyakova published Незакатные оны дни: Цветаева и Парнок
(Those Unfading Days: Tsvetaeva and Parnok, Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis Press),
which unravelled the relationship between Tsvetaeva and Parnok, identifying
Tsvetaeva's "woman friend" in her Girlfriend (Russian:
Подруга) cycle for the first time.
Even after the surge of interest in banned Russian poets through Glasnost
policies brought about by Perestroika, Parnok remained obscure to most
Russians and the Russian diaspora.
Her colleagues and contemporary poets were all rehabilitated before she was.
Parnok believed the obstacle was her lesbianism,
though there is no way to document why censorship of her works remained.
A memorial plaque dedicated to the Parnokh family was placed on the wall of
her birth house in Taganrog in 2012.
Poems by Parnok were set to music, recorded on a CD and performed by Elena
Frolova in 2002, as part of the "AZIYA +" project.
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_Parnok
- Woods, Gregory. Homintern . Yale University Press. Edizione del
Kindle.