The Silver Age poet who openly depicted love between men in Wings
A Silver Age poet, novelist and composer. Wings (1906) openly portrayed male same-sex love; Nets and “On Beautiful Clarity” shaped modern Russian poetry. He met Hirschfeld in 1926 and was named in the OGPU’s 1933 investigation of homosexual men, but was not arrested.
Activities and affiliations
- 1898–1936
-
1905–
Union of the Russian People (URP)
Literature and arts
Career Timeline
- 1906Wings and poetic clarity
- 1926Hirschfeld and the investigation of 1933
Related historical events
Wings and poetic clarity
Trained in music, Kuzmin attracted literary attention with Alexandrian Songs and the novel Wings in 1906. Wings made male same-sex love an explicit subject of controversy. His first verse collection, Nets, appeared in 1908; “On Beautiful Clarity” in Apollo (1910) influenced Acmeism through its emphasis on composition and clarity. The Trout Breaks the Ice (1929) was his final lifetime poetry collection.
His sexual openness should not be equated with allegiance to a progressive party. The biographical dictionary records his joining the monarchist Union of the Russian People in 1905. After the revolution, opportunities to publish his own writing diminished, and translation and criticism helped sustain him.
Hirschfeld and the investigation of 1933
According to Roldugina, Kuzmin’s unpublished diary records two meetings with Magnus Hirschfeld during the latter’s Soviet visit in 1926. The diary is evidence of contacts between German sexual reform and Soviet homosexual life.
Interrogation records from the Leningrad homosexual case of 1933 named Kuzmin and Rurik Ivnev, yet neither was arrested. Kuzmin died in 1936. Roldugina uses the case to demonstrate that the police did not arrest every homosexual man they had identified.