![]() we can appreciate something of the shock a ‘gay novel’ would have had at the time.” was not published until more than forty years later. If we consider that an analogous American work. In the introductory words of Michael Green, his editor and translator here, “Kuzmin’s sexual inclinations became well known, even notorious, early in his career when Wings, in essence a frank defence of the homosexual way of life. Kuzmin, born in the 1870s into a family of Russian Old Believers, became a passionate exponent of gay literature in the early twentieth century. He was luckier than Wilde, though, living as he did during a brief generation of acceptance-the generation (in our own cultural terms) of E. The position of Kuzmin (1872–1936) in the culture of sexual politics and literature in Russia may perhaps be compared to that of Oscar Wilde in English culture. Normally, this wouldn’t be a useful or relevant beginning to a review of literary work, but Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin’s homosexuality at the beginning of the twentieth century formed an integral part of his literary identity. In Russia, sexual activity between consenting adults of the same sex still counts as criminal activity. In the United States, the legalization of same-sex marriage looks to be just around the corner. A selection of Vladislav Khodasevich (translated by Peter Daniels) is in the works, and now we have the Selected Prose & Poetry of Mikhail Kuzmin. Others await their day in the Western sun. ![]() ![]() Some of these writers have begun to receive literary attention in translation: Nikolai Gumilev and Daniil Kharms, Velimir Khlebnikov and, if mostly by notoriety, Vladimir Mayakovsky. Riding behind, or alongside, the great poets I once called the Four Horsemen of the Soviet Apocalypse-Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, and Marina Tsvetaeva-is a contemporaneous cavalry that is too little known in the West. Translated from the Russian by Michael Green. Selected Prose & Poetry of Mikhail Kuzmin. Poet Mikhail Kuzmin, born in the 1870s into a family of Russian Old Believers, was a passionate exponent of gay literature in the early twentieth century. ![]()
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