Sophia
Parnok : The Life and Work of Russia's Sappho (Cutting Edge :
Lesbian Life and Literature) by
Diana Lewis Burgin
The weather in Moscow is good, there's no
cholera, there's also no lesbian love...Brrr! Remembering those
persons of whom you write me makes me nauseous as if I'd eaten a
rotten sardine. Moscow doesn't have them--and that's marvellous.
--Anton Chekhov, writing to his publisher in 1895
Chekhov's barbed comment suggests the climate in
which Sophia Parnok was writing, and is an added testament to to
the strength and confidence with which she pursued both her
personal and artistic life. Author of five volumes of poetry, and
lover of Marina Tsvetaeva, Sophia Parnok was the only openly
lesbian voice in Russian poetry during the Silver Age of Russian
letters. Despite her unique contribution to modern Russian
lyricism however, Parnok's life and work have essentially been
forgotten.
Parnok was not a political activist, and she had
no engagement with the feminism vogueish in young Russian
intellectual circles. From a young age, however, she deplored all
forms of male posturing and condescension and felt alienated from
what she called patriarchal virtues. Parnok's approach to her
sexuality was equally forthright. Accepting lesbianism as her
natural disposition, Parnok acknowledged her relationships with
women, both sexual and non-sexual, to be the centre of her
creative existence.
Diana Burgin's extensively researched life of
Parnok is deliberately woven around the poet's own account,
visible in her writings. The book is divided into seven chapters,
which reflect seven natural divisions in Parnok's life. This lends
Burgin's work a particular poetic resonance, owing to its
structural affinity with one of Parnok's last and greatest poetic
achievements, the cycle of love lyrics Ursa Major. Dedicated to
her last lover, Parnok refers to this cycle as a seven-star of
verses, after the seven stars that make up the constellation.
Parnok's poems, translated here for the first time in English,
