Sonja Franeta - My Pink Road to Russia

In the mid-1920s, after the new revolutionary government took hold in Soviet Russia, officials launched a drive against lyric poets. The country was under tremendous pressure during the transition just to feed the population. At the time Sophia was living in Sudak in the Crimea, where she had connected with another alternative artistic circle, Maximilian Voloshin’s, which Marina Tsvetaeva had also frequented and where they had been a couple in 1915. The official party line was that lyric poetry made no contribution to the new revolutionary life in Russia because it focused too much on the personal and the spiritual. Many lyric poets, including the much-revered Anna Akhmatova, were silenced, not always officially but through exclusion. Parnok was one of these and her relationships with women did not help her reputation.

As in much of the country, life in Sudak after the 1917 revolution, was not easy. Food was hard to come by and people were dying of famine and tuberculosis and other illnesses and problems that could not be addressed because of the transition and the blockade by Western nations. In an attempt to get everyone on board, the new local militias arrested innocent people. Parnok and her friend Adelaida Gertsyk were imprisoned for a few months for “not supporting the government.” It was after this and after contracting tuberculosis, that Parnok went back to Moscow, thinking it might be easier to survive there. All the while she wrote, not only poetry but essays and a play, Almast . She believed in the spiritual power of creativity and knew it was necessary to her, like food.

Parnok published several books of poetry, but no more after 1928. The situation for everyone grew worse under Stalin who relegated artists, marginalized people, homosexuals, and anyone who suspected of opposing him, to prison camps. He even had many executed. The number of people sentenced to hard labor in the Soviet gulag over the next twenty five years was in the millions, all shrouded in secrecy and NKVD intrigue. For example, to this day it is not clear whether the thirty-year-old renowned bisexual poet Sergey Esenin was killed by the secret police or hung himself. Gay poet Mikhail Kuzmin’s lover Yurkun was arrested twice and executed the second time after Kuzmin’s death because of his association with the well known and open poet.

Toward the latter part of her life, Parnok said: “Now I look at poetry as just a means of communication with people. I am happy there is an eternal language, beyond time, in which I can explain myself, and in which I can sometimes find words everyone can understand.”

How do we know of Parnok today if she was silenced? In 1979, when it was still impossible to publish Parnok in Soviet Russia, a professor of Byzantine and classical literature at Leningrad University, Sophia Polyakova, took great risks to research, collect, and finally publish—in the U.S.—an annotated edition of Parnok’s poems. In addition, in 1983 an amazing book documenting Tsvetaeva’s and Parnok’s lesbian poems and their lesbian relationship, Sunset Days of Yore [ Zakatnye ony dni: Tsvetaeva i Parnok ] was published by Ardis Press in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The material was smuggled across the Soviet Union’s border and it traveled by a kind of underground railroad to its own “coming out.” It was only after the publication of the Russian Sunset Days of Yore in Michigan that Parnok’s work became available to Russian speakers through samizdat circles. The book also made clear the fact of Parnok’s and Tsvetaeva’s sexual orientations and their relationship. This queer reading of Tsvetaeva, and of same-sex love, had never before been discussed by a Russian national. It was revolutionary.

During my initial travels to Russia in the early 1990s, I began to read more of Marina Tsvetaeva’s work with a queer eye, not having seen Polyakova’s book. Back home in California, U.C. Berkeley professor Simon Karlinsky, gay scholar and Tsvetaeva expert, became a friend. His inspiration was key in learning about Polyakova’s work, as well as Tsvetaeva and Parnok. Simon told me he had a hand in getting Polyakova’s book published by Ardis. We talked about Parnok and Tsvetaeva as if they were famous neighbors. I read with relish his own book on Tsvetaeva, the first important study of this poet, and we talked about other queer Russian writers.

A well-read copy of Polyakova’s important book is still in my library. Unlocking references in Tsvetaeva’s “Girlfriend” poems and in Parnok’s poems to Tsvetaeva, Polyakova includes commentary and details of the poets’ lives. In 1993, I had the good fortune to meet with Sophia Polyakova in her home in St. Petersburg, which she shared with her woman partner. Polyakova told me how she scoured small used bookstores over many years to collect and preserve Sophia Parnok’s poetry and other forgotten writings. When I met with her she was completing a volume of Parnok’s poetry to be published for the first time in Russia.

Polyakova explained that “lyric poets had become outcasts during the early Soviet period because of counter-revolutionary tendencies of the lyric mode which emphasized personal feelings.” Polyakova’s rescue of Parnok’s work, as well as her Sunset Days book, were done in secret because of continued Soviet repression. Stalin’s isolationist beliefs caused lines of communication with the West to be broken in disciplines such as psychology, history, and philosophy, as well as in literature and the arts. The loss of this knowledge was being repaired during perestroika. During the 1990s, Parnok’s poetry could finally be published for the first time, and her sexuality could be spoken of openly. Polyakova was happy to be alive to see this day, she told me.

In our meeting, Polyakova spoke in a relaxed way about her research, even flirting with me at times. Then, reaching into her files, she presented me with copies of photos of Tsvetaeva and Parnok. She used the word saficheski (Sapphic) often our conversation when referring to their relationship. She came from another era. Code words were common in Soviet Russia, but the current code words were goluboy for “gay” and rozovaya for “lesbian.” She said how glad she was to meet me and other saficheski women researchers. When I asked, she admitted she used the word out of habit. She thought it expressed Tsvetaeva and Parnok’s relationship better than the more modern words. “Like lesbian?” I asked. She smiled.

Her humor and lightness came out even more during our tea with her partner, who served some tasty snacks. They bantered in an intimate way, making little in-jokes. I behaved as if I understood. We talked about Russia and some of the people I was meeting and about our mutual interest in the two great poets. We toasted, and then Polyakova asked her partner if she had “noticed Sonechka’s [my] blue eyes.” As a lesbian couple surviving Soviet times into old age and still used to being circumspect, the queer nuances did not escape me. Sophia Polyakova was helping to build and revive Russian lesbian culture: “If there is one thing of worth I have done in my life, it is saving Parnok’s work from obscurity,” were her parting words to me.

Sophia Parnok’s relationship with Marina lasted only two years, but it was very intense. Inspiring one another, the two women wrote each other poetry and shared much in common, as Polyakova depicted in her book. They traveled to the beautiful Crimea, often to Koktebel and Sudak, where Maximilian Voloshin and other artists gathered. When the pair parted in 1916, Tsvetaeva called it “the first great catastrophe of my life.”