Wings

By Mikhail Kuzmin

New to St Petersburg, young, naive Vanya Smurov finds a mentor in the enigmatic and intellectual Larion Stroop, who initiates him into a fascinating sphere of art and beauty. As Vanya is drawn into Stroop' s world of aesthetic sensuality, he also becomes aware that Stroop is a frequenter of bathhouses: a homosexual. Disturbed by this revelation, Vanya abandons Stroop and moves to the Volga countryside in search of a more traditional existence. Yet he soon finds that the alternatives offered there are equally unsettling, leading him to question his initial reaction to Stroop' s hedonistic lifestyle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Nov 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781843919827

Mikhail Kuzmin

Born in Russia in 1872, Mikhail Kuzmin was a prominent novelist, poet, playwright and critic. He was a leading contributor to Russia’s Silver Age of Poetry, publishing the first substantial volume of free verse in Russian literature, and is best known as the first Russian writer to tackle the issue of homosexuality.

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Introduction

It is commonly the fate of Russian poets, whether or not they have also worked in prose, to be relatively little known outside their homeland, no matter how great their fame inside it. When Mikhail Alexeyevich Kuzmin died of pneumonia in Leningrad in the dreadful year of 1936, he was buried in the city’s Volkov Cemetery in the company of such outstanding representatives of Russia’s intellectual and artistic elite as the novelist Turgenev and the scientists Mendeleyev and Pavlov. This eminent final destination served as a just reflection of the circles in which he had moved in life. Yet the inscription marking his resting place is equally suggestive of the ultimate relative obscurity of a man who had once been a leading figure of what was, arguably, Russia’s most brilliant age in the early years of the twentieth century. For the one-word description of him as ‘Poet’, albeit honourable and honest, scarcely does justice to the variety of his talents.

The year of birth shown on his grave – 1875 – notwithstanding, Kuzmin was actually born in the provincial town of Yaroslavl in 1872 (in later life he was himself liable to claim to be two or three years younger). His parents were a naval officer and the daughter of a small landowner, and the family were adherents of the Old Believer tradition which is depicted in some detail in Wings. In the child’s second year they moved to another provincial town much further down the Volga, Saratov, but by 1884 had already moved again, this time to the most European of Russian cities, St Petersburg, where Kuzmin was to spend most of the remainder of his life.

It was during his school years that Kuzmin began taking an active interest in Western European culture and its traditions, and this established a tension within him between the conservatively Russian outlook of his Old Believer upbringing and the contemporary cosmopolitan worldview of the artistic environment to which he was increasingly exposed. This duality of influence would be made visibly explicit after the turn of the century when, having spent some years in defiantly Old Believer guise, including cap, tight-fitting coat, boots and beard, he switched abruptly to the mannered dandyism of the Russian admirers of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde.

After leaving school, Kuzmin began studying in 1891 at the St Petersburg Conservatory, where his tutors included Rimsky Korsakov, but he remained there for only three years. Nonetheless, music was to continue to play a very significant role in his creative life, and his early composition of vocal works in the tradition of the Russian romance was an indication of the way in which the word and music were to be closely intertwined in his oeuvre in the most varied genres: for example, operatic works, cabaret songs, or in his music for Alexander Blok’s satirical play of 1906 The Puppet Show in the production by Vsevolod Meyerhold. Certainly it was as a musician that Kuzmin made his entry into the world of the artistic intelligentsia of St Petersburg from 1901 onwards, performing in the remarkable Evenings of Contemporary Music, which provided a Russian showcase for the likes of Ravel, Debussy, Schönberg, Stravinsky and Prokofiev. This in turn enabled him to form ties, through the Evenings’ main organisers, Walter Nouvel and Alexander Nurok, with such celebrated members of Sergei Diaghilev’s World of Art group as the painters Leon Bakst and Konstantin Somov, who would produce an exquisite portrait of Kuzmin in 1909.

Kuzmin’s earliest surviving literary works are poems dating from 1897, though there can be no doubt that he was already writing before then. His actual debut as a published writer came only in 1904 with the appearance in an almanac of a cycle of sonnets. He was shortly, however, to achieve both literary fame and literary infamy, for 1906 saw the publication of his cycle of ‘Alexandrian Songs’ and his novella Wings. While the latter brought about a genuine furore in Russia’s literary world, the success of the former enabled him to become closely involved with many of the most prominent figures of the then dominant Russian Symbolist movement, and led to his taking part in their regular gatherings as well as contributing to their publications. Wings was published as a separate edition in the following year of 1907, and Kuzmin’s first book of poetry, Nets, came out in 1908. Over the next decade he was a much-published and sought-after writer who, in a time of great artistic as well as political turbulence, contrived to work with, yet remain largely aloof from the various rival literary groupings of the age.

Unlike many of his peers, Kuzmin never saw fit to devote time and pages to propounding his own personal theory of art, and this doubtless helps explain how he could have been loosely associated at different times with various literary movements. Thus the journal The Scales, where Wings first appeared, was the organ of the Symbolists; when the Guild of Poets was formed in 1911 as an association of the young Acmeists such as Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, Kuzmin was an occasional attendee at their meetings; and in 1914 and 1915 he contributed to the sensational first issues of the almanac The Archer along with not only Symbolists, but also cutting-edge representatives of Futurism such as the artist David Burliuk and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. In 1910, in the first issue of the Acmeists’ journal Apollo, where he occupied a significant position as a literary critic, he did publish his most explicit aesthetic credo, the article ‘On Beautiful Clarity’; but if in some ways associated with Acmeism, this was primarily a declaration of artistic independence, and although he did indeed share much of the Acmeists’ belief in elegance and purity of style, he was nonetheless never reticent with his criticism of their school. Rather he produced an -ism of his own, in Russian ‘klarizm’, from the Latin ‘clarus’, signifying clarity or transparency, and the ‘beautiful clarity’ that was its essential feature was one of the abiding elements in all Kuzmin’s writing during his most successful, pre-revolutionary years.

Kuzmin’s response to the revolutions of 1917 was, like that of so many other Russian intellectuals, broadly positive, and he never considered emigration. Despite the great impact that his journeys outside Russia, particularly to Egypt and Italy in the 1890s, had had on his artistic development, he knew that he could not live and work as a writer divorced from his native land. And the years immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution seemed to suggest that he could continue to flourish at home, as four collections of verse and a novel were published one after another. In the mid-1920s, however, only a mere handful of his poems appeared in print, and financial need increasingly obliged him to turn to translation and editing. His final significant publication, a cycle of poems depicting a homosexual love affair, The Trout Breaks the Ice (1929), fittingly continued the major thematic concern of his entire career as a writer. It was remarkable that it was published at all in the ever more aesthetically prescriptive climate of the Soviet Union, and perhaps not surprising that nothing more of his original writing was to appear in his few remaining years.

That silence was very different to the furious noise that had accompanied the opening of Kuzmin’s literary career. Russian literature in 1906 was quite unaccustomed to, and apparently unprepared for having the theme of a young man’s struggle to come to terms with his unorthodox sexuality as the central concern of a work of fiction. Eroticism there had been aplenty in eighteenth and nineteenth-century texts, and gender questions, particularly the role of women in society, had been under discussion for more than half a century; but serious mainstream works with sex, let alone homosexuality, as their primary subject were almost unknown – Leo Tolstoy’s writings in favour of sexual abstinence being the obvious significant exceptions. But topics familiar from fin de siècle Western European culture were not passing Russia by: perhaps encouraged by a new sense of freedom in the aftermath of the revolution of 1905 – and a very real relaxation of censorship – Lidiya Zinovyeva-Annibal was at work on a tale of lesbian love, Thirty-three Monsters, that would regularly be referred to in the same breath as Wings; and also in 1906 Mikhail Artsybashev was beginning to write his infamous ‘pornographic’ novel Sanin. Thus Wings was in the forefront of a new wave of sexually revolutionary literature, and however restrained it might seem a century on, it was explosive material for the readership of its time, and can still be appreciated today for the originality of its construction and the sensitive, yet committed treatment of its theme.

The youthful hero, Vanya Smurov, is shown in three novel, unorthodox and increasingly exotic settings. Newly orphaned, he is vulnerable and susceptible as a series of mentors introduce him to various possible approaches to life, and other characters, through differing experiences or parallel situations, suggest the fates that potentially await him, depending on the decisions he makes. Much of the work’s interest lies in its examination of Smurov’s response to the physicality of the sexual act: his conscious interest in the somewhat enigmatic older man, Stroop, is essentially based on aestheticism – his youth and innocence seem to exclude the possibility of anything carnal, and this explains his aversion, even fear, when he learns something of the reality of Stroop’s life. Only gradually do the arguments of friends, the alternatives he encounters, and encouraging examples from the world of art and, particularly, the Classical world, come to convince him that his objections to the physical nature of homosexual love can be overcome.