Sonja Franeta - My Pink Road to Russia

Let us remember that our perceptions of gender and sexuality are socially based and Eurocentric in the case of the U.S. Other cultures may have their own prejudices and perceptions that are foreign and useful to learn about to broaden our perspectives. Here is another gender-variant report from an internet website on Siberian shamanism about the little known Chukchi in northern Siberia where a third gender is also embraced.

The Chukchi (and neighboring indigenous peoples including the Koryak and the Kamchadal) are a nomadic, shamanic people who embrace a third gender. Generally shamans are biologically male with some adoption of female roles and appearance, who marry men but also are not subject to the social limitations placed on women. Third gender Chukchi could accompany men on the hunt, as well as take care of family.

Great opportunities exist in classrooms, lectures, and print to address queer theory and the deconstruction of gender and sexuality, to open students’ minds to gender issues in their own cultures and to point out the presence of queers throughout time. This is not a new concept, and we can all benefit from connecting it with the control of women and other sectors while not allowing ourselves to be alienated and divided from others. The educational leadership that promotes real learning Is well expressed by Bonny Norton and Aneta Pavlenko in Gender and English Language Learners : ”Teachers need to be proactive and well-prepared to handle controversial topics, while maintaining a positive dynamic in the classroom. Furthermore they need to pay particular attention to learners who may be silenced by the dominant culture.” I would like to see a natural alliance between gender and queer theory.

Judy Grahn calls her excellent coming of age book about being a radical lesbian feminist poet and activist, A Simple Revolution. This and other similar books recover our past. In the name of compulsory heterosexuality, great artists, intellectuals, young people, and workers have lost their lives. Intolerance and homophobia and misogyny have run rampant. The fifteenth century Spanish Inquisition and Nazism alike selected homosexuals and nontraditionally gendered people as early victims. We cannot allow this to happen again. More communication among all the divided identities, more boldness in elucidating the interrelatedness of gender and queer issues in our writing and teaching, are necessary strategies. Revolution, a kind of permanent revolution, continuous change, continuous critiquing of the status quo, require queer theory.

Some would say Sophia Parnok was Marina Tsvetaeva’s first woman lover, others would say she was Russia’s Sappho, but many do not know her name. She has been identified as a minor lyrical poet with a particular intimate voice, born of the Silver Age of Russian culture. Only during perestroika and after did her poetry become somewhat known in Russia, a country where people are generally more aware of literary history, greater lovers of poetry, bigger readers than Americans.

Sophia Parnok wrote these lines in Soviet Russia in 1932. A Russian-Jewish poet born in 1885 in Taganrog, in the south of Russia, she made no secret of her sexual orientation in her life or her work during both the most tolerant and the most repressive times in Soviet Moscow in the early twentieth century. By the time of this poem she was already thinking of herself as writing for only a small circle of friends. Written for Nina Vedeneyeva, the last great love of her life, the poem above shockingly reveals a moment of intimacy, with a touch of humor and irony.

After having written five volumes of poetry, Sophia Parnok died in obscurity in 1933 at the age of forty eight, surrounded by her women friends. It was not until the 1990s that most of her work was published in Russia. She was a poet hidden away by censors, yet being hidden was also part of her persona. Her last book of published poems was called Vpolgolosa ( In a Low Voice ). It was as if she knew that it would be her new communication style—to be quiet. She wrote in a letter to a friend that her voice and her poems were not ready to be heard and she was aware of that. It was the political and historical moment she lived in, but also she was a poet of lesbian intimacy and lived a Sapphic life.

To begin her life as a poet in the exciting atmosphere of the Silver Age in Russia, a time that invited all sorts of artistic currents, including European trends, must have been inspiring. Along with the atmosphere of political change, there was an anti-bourgeois strain in artistic circles, a challenge to traditional sexuality and relationships. Poets like Esenin and Mayakovsky spoke their rebellious poetry very publicly. Cafe gatherings and smaller circles both in St. Petersburg and Moscow were popular. Mikhail Kuzmin was known for his gay cabaret performances and readings in St. Petersburg. The times blossomed in modernism—symbolism, futurism, acmeism, even a new sexual mysticism (Vasily Rozanov). At this time poet Vyacheslav Ivanov published his translations of Sappho which greatly influenced the age. Parnok saw herself as a rebellious female poet, and in this atmosphere she became known as a lesbian and accepted as such.

Although she was married once briefly (to pacify her parents), she declared, “I never was in love with a man.” Parnok had been involved in a five-year relationship with another woman and was an open lesbian when she met Marina Tsvetaeva and other artists and writers who mentored her in poetry. Her friend and fellow poet Vladislav Khodasevich described her as

Average in height, on the short side, with fair hair, parted on the side and tied back in a bun, a pale face which seemed like it had never been young. Sophia Yakovlevna was not very good-looking. But there was something charming and unexpectedly noble about her gray, protruding, attentive eyes, about her intense Lermontov-like look, about the turn of her head, slightly supercilious, about her soft, quite deep voice. Her opinions were independent, her speech direct.

In addition to identifying with the antitraditionalism of the age, Parnok held to a very traditional Russian background and foundation but coupled it with her own queer view. She believed Russia was feminine while Europe was masculine. She was Jewish yet she leaned toward Orthodox Christianity and other spiritual imagery in her poetry. The legacy of the great nineteenth century romantic poets—Pushkin, the lyric poet Tyutchev, and Karolina Pavlova, a Romantic woman poet—was a strong influence on her artistic sensibility. The newer currents of her time emphasizing the feminine and the soul and even revolutionary politics all impacted her.

But Sappho… She learned about Sappho, the lesbian icon from Ivanov’s popular translations published in 1914. Sappho’s life and poetry validated Parnok and her writing. Besides feeling a connection with Sappho as the mother of lesbians, Parnok herself became a kind of Sappho herself, later in life living in the Crimea near the sea and surrounded by her women friends and ex-lovers. Many lines reminiscent of Sappho resound in Parnok’s poetry, as scholars have pointed out.

One of the biggest influences on Parnok was Marina Tsvetaeva who was on the threshold of becoming one of Russia’s greatest poets when they met. Their two-year passionate relationship began when they attended a literary salon in Moscow, at the home of their mutual friend Adelaida Gertsyk. Tsvetaeva, who was only twenty-two at the time and a married woman with a child, was immediately taken with the unusual Sophia Parnok, whose masculine air and assuredness about her lesbian identity attracted her. Soon after Sophia, also known as Sonya, also fell in love with Marina, an acquaintance wrote: “Sonya and Marina are an item in Moscow. They are inseparable.” Their affair was renowned among friends in artistic circles. It was loving and stormy, and they parted ostensibly because of Sonya’s wandering eye, but perhaps also because of differing views about relationships. Marina wrote “Girlfriend,” a cycle of poems dedicated to this important moment in her sexual life that speaks more of her sexuality than her other writings. We can only guess from their writings that Marina and Sonya’s intimacy had a strong impact on both of them. Parnok’s biographer, Diana Burgin, claims that Sophia suffered no less than Marina over the demise of their relationship—a photograph of Marina was near her bedside at the time of Sophia’s death.