Wings E-Book

Mikhail Kuzmin

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 163

Beschreibung

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. Published here in a new translation, Wings was the first Russian novel to focus on homosexuality. Greeted with outrage when it appeared in 1906, this unjustly neglected work is a groundbreaking and sensitive study of a young man's struggle to come to terms with his identity.

Leseprobe

Wings

Mikhail Kuzmin

Translated byHugh Aplin

Foreword byPaul Bailey

Modern Voices

Published by Hesperus Press Limited

167-169 Great Portland Street, W1W 5PF London

First published in 1906

First published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2007

Introduction and English language translation © Hugh Aplin, 2007 Foreword © Paul Bailey, 2007

Designed and typeset by Fraser Muggeridge studio Printed in Jordan by the Jordan National Press

ISBN (paperback): 1-84391-431-x

ISBN13 (paperback): 978-1-84391-431-0

ISBN (e-Book): 978-1-84391-982-7

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Biographical Note

Foreword

This wonderful short novel dispenses with most of the apparatus writers and readers of fiction depend upon – linear narrative, for instance, and psychological insights into the behaviour of the principal characters. Mikhail Kuzmin was widely read in several languages and must have been fully aware of what he was chucking out or, rather, deliberately ignoring. Wings is a work of self-discovery, and it suits Kuzmin’s artistic purpose to write impressionistically. Scenes often follow each other with no discernible thread to link them, much as they do in life. It is the orphaned youth, Vanya Smurov, who is discovering both himself and the world about him, and it’s he who is at the centre of the story. He looks and listens, and we look and listen with him, whether he’s among his unexciting relatives in St Petersburg or in the company of sophisticated adults such as his kindly teacher of Greek, Daniil Ivanovich, or the plump and hedonistic Monsignor Mori, or – especially – the enigmatic half-Russian, half-English Larion Dmitriyevich Stroop, who causes a young woman, Ida Golberg, to kill herself for love of him.

It is salutary to reflect that Wings was first published in Russia in 1906, when Kuzmin was in his thirties. He had at last come to terms with his homosexuality, as Vanya Smurov is beginning to do in the closing paragraph of the book. That he was openly gay in the final years of Tsarist rule and the opening decade of Soviet Communism almost defies credibility, particularly when one thinks of the agonies of mind and body Tchaikovsky was forced to endure. Kuzmin’s attitude to his sexual desires bears comparison with that of another great poet and near-contemporary, Constantine Cavafy, whose poems celebrating the physical beauty of the various Alexandrian boys he went to bed with are entirely free of either sentimentality or guilt. Wings, in its circuitous way, probably represents Kuzmin’s own struggle to reconcile intellectual and aesthetic pleasures with the cruder needs of the flesh.

There aren’t many novels in which erudite people discuss the operas of Wagner, the twenty-eighth Canto from Purgatorio in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the music of Rameau and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and refer casually to Greek mythology, the history of Ancient Rome and the paintings of Botticelli. In Kuzmin’s novella, the reader is invited to learn what Vanya learns from his mentors. The book is unashamedly intelligent, yet there’s no sense that the author is showing off. Some of the names he drops to a purpose are now forgotten or little known, like the once-fashionable poet and dramatist Gabriele D’Annunzio, who is now more interesting for his preposterous political views and his callous treatment of his lover, the actress Eleanora Duse, than for the larger part of his huge literary output. These fin de siècle figures give Wings a certain period flavour, placing it firmly in the burgeoning dawn of modernism. What makes Kuzmin’s first foray into fiction such a rarity is the manner in which it reveals and displays a craving for culture that shows no immediate sign of being assuaged. High-minded though he is, Vanya Smurov is still capable of jealousy, the basest and most understandable of emotions.

Kuzmin’s aestheticism is not confined to an appreciation of great writers, composers and painters. Towards the end of Wings, Vanya and Stroop, the man whose love he will possibly enjoy, have this exchange after they have both witnessed a potentially gifted artist sacrificing his gift for the steely charms of a Florentine whore, Veronica Chibo:

‘It’s as if we’ve been at a funeral,’ remarked Vanya.

‘There are some people who continually seem to be at their own,’ Stroop replied, without looking at Vanya.

‘When an artist perishes, it can be very hard.’

‘There are some people who are artists of life; their ruin is no less hard.’

There follows a superb cameo, when Vanya, Stroop and the bibulous Monsignor Mori visit an old cobbler, Giuseppe, in his dark and cluttered shop in Florence. Giuseppe addresses them thus:

‘What am I? I’m a poor hack, gentlemen, but there are artists, artists! Oh, it’s not so easy to sew a boot in line with the laws of art; you need to know, to study in full the foot you’re sewing for, you need to know where the bone is wider, where it’s narrower, where there are corns, where the instep is higher than it ought to be. There’s not a single foot belonging to a man, you know, that’s just like another’s, and you have to be an ignoramus to think a boot’s a boot, and it fits all feet, when oh dear, what feet there are, Signori! And they all need to walk...’

Kuzmin invests the artisan with the same compulsion to achieve perfection that possessed Mozart, or Beethoven, or any of those geniuses whose names aren’t writ in water. The maker of a well-made shoe is not destined to be honoured by posterity, but his talent is his own, and precious, as Kuzmin has Giuseppe remind Vanya, and via him the reader.

The descriptions of nature, the details of clothes, of food, of faces, of voices, are extraordinarily vivid. Yet they are only brush strokes, as it were, set down with clarity and economy. The cinema was in its very infancy when Mikhail Kuzmin wrote Wings, but he has a cinematic eye. He captures the Florence of the early 1900s in a fraction of a page, but it’s the identical city I lived in in 1968, with its impoverished aristocrats and English exiles. ‘If a story that should be told in fifty pages is written in thirty it will be better,’ said Cavafy. Kuzmin would have agreed with him and, perhaps, with so much else that he had to say.

– Paul Bailey, 2007

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. To the modern eye there is nothing at all explicit in the work – this could be a conventional Bildungsroman, but for the sexual orientation of its hero: yet that was, of course, the very feature that made it unique for its time in Russian literature and that stirred up a critical storm.

Contemporary critics were almost unanimous in their negative response to Wings. It was considered stylistically careless – ‘all over the place, awkward phrases written any old how,’ commented Andrei Bely – and the mosaic-like structure, which may be a positive attraction to the modern reader accustomed to the frequent cutting of cinematic montage, was not deemed a success. Inevitably, however, it was the thematic nature of the work that drew most attention. One critic labelled it ‘idealisation of the sodomitic sin’; another wrote of the ‘sexual excesses’ hidden behind ‘flowery phrases about the beauty of the free man’, and he berated the author for his lack of taste in juxtaposing the beautiful Antinous and the smell of sour cabbage soup. The eminent Symbolist Zinaida Hippius haughtily conceded that Kuzmin’s ‘barbarism’, as she termed it, ‘might pass for culture in Saratov’, while Bely likened Wings to ‘a white-powdered woman with a dirty neck’.

Yet within a year or two, positions had begun to change. Another of Russia’s major Symbolist poets, Konstantin Balmont, wrote in 1909 in the journal The Golden Fleece of his own attitude to what he called ‘the cult of male love’. In a discussion of Walt Whitman’s poetry, while declaring his unwillingness to follow the American into that area, he nonetheless added: ‘But if the cult of male love was comprehensible to such demigods as Leonardo or Michelangelo, and to such elementally fresh living spirits as Whitman, it is evident that with certain conditions of personality and historical circumstances this cult is a logical inner inevitability... And if I am not attracted by something, I cannot for that reason alone have a negative attitude towards it.’ Kuzmin’s writing must certainly be considered to have played its part in literary Russia’s nascent reappraisal of the theme of sexuality.

It may be fitting here to give a final word on the author of Wings to another of Russia’s great poets, Alexander Blok, whose remains lie today along with those of Kuzmin in St Petersburg’s Volkov cemetery: while alluding in his assessment of Wings to Hippius’ accusation of ‘barbarism’, he tempered his reservations with an appreciation not shown at the time by others, seeing in Kuzmin ‘an artist to the marrow, the most refined lyricist, the most witty dialectician in art. The barbarism... is completely drowned in the transparent and crystal-clear moisture of art.’

– Hugh Aplin, 2007

Note on the text

The Russian text of Wings used for this translation is that found in volume one of the excellent three-volume edition of Mikhail Kuzmin, Proza i esseistika [Prose and Essay-writing] (Moscow: Agraf, 1999), prepared by E. Domogatskaya and E. Pevak, whose detailed commentaries and notes are invaluable to both the reader and the translator. They based their text on Mikhail Kuzmin, Pervaya kniga rasskazov [First Book of Stories] (Moscow: Skorpion, 1910), but reinstated a number of fragments of text omitted therein from the first separate edition of the work, also published by Skorpion in Moscow in 1907.