Breaking the Ice of Russian Repression
Russia’s crackdown on queers is awful. I’m glad that boycotts have attracted attention, but beyond our purchasing power, let’s not forget the power we’ve always had: to read, shape opinion, and drive culture. Lately I’ve been thinking about Russia’s own queer history, and about one of its forgotten heroes. My hope is that you’ll spend the dollars you’ve saved on vodka to pick up a book by Mikhail Kuzmin.
In 1928, at the invitation of students of the Russian Institute of Literature, Kuzmin gave the final public reading of his life. He assumed the event would be poorly attended; the once-great writer had been largely silenced and, he worried, forgotten. The reading was not advertised to the public and only students with tickets were allowed entrance. The director of the Institute feared that any reading by Kuzmin would attract a large contingent of homosexuals and thus the attention of the authorities.
The director was right in his fear. On the night of the reading there came a crush at the doors, the ticket system broke down, and gays crowded in among the students. Kuzmin’s reading electrified the audience — no surprise, as he read his poem The Trout Breaks the Ice, a staggering work swirling with autobiography and cultural allusions that is also an ode to the triumph of desire, a poem that maintains its electricity through translation and time. An ovation followed the reading and the gays pushed to the front, showering Kuzmin with flowers, bouquet upon bouquet landing at his feet. The director and student organizers quaked — they knew they would be called before authorities to account for the scandal (they narrowly escaped punishment, pleading ignorance) — but Kuzmin beamed.
Did he know this would be the last public reading of his life? The times had turned forcefully against him, and in the coming years his friends would be interrogated and the apartment he shared with his lover, Yury Yurkun, would be searched, their artwork and writing seized — but that night he beamed. Did he know it would be, as one student attendee put it, “the last demonstration of Leningrad’s homosexuals” for over half a century? (Kuzmin was lucky to die of natural causes in 1936; just two years later, Yurkun was rounded up with other gay artists and shot.) Certainly he had a sense of the ice of repression spreading and thickening, of the long winter to come, but here were his people — like the beautiful tail of his trout — lashing, thrusting, against that ice. He beamed.
http://www.advocate.com/print-issue/current-issue/2013/08/22/how-break-ice-russian-repression?page=0,0
