SOPHIA PARNOK
1885 – 1933
For EK Gertsik
When you fall out of love
With the flesh
You begin to chill
To the work of incarnation:
To the work of incarnation:
The hand that reaches for the clay
Almost doesn’t stir.
Already, you won’t mould
Lion or dove.
What floats into your life as a mere shadow
Won’t be fixed in marble.
You give up on a song
In the middle of a word,
Withdraw the brush in the middle
Of a stroke, because
Simply they are not needed.
And farewell also to you,
Delightful appetite: penultimate
Pleasure of the soul!
Translated by
ALEX CHERNOVA,
ANNA IVASKEVICA
& ALEX WONG
Like that of her former lover Marina Tsvetaeva, the work of poet and librettist Sophia Parnok only began to be widely read and appreciated long after her death. Unlike Tsvetaeva, Parnok had to contend with the dual handicaps of having been born Jewish in one of the most anti-Semitic countries on earth and of being openly gay in an era when any kind of mainstream LGBTQI+ visibility wasn't remotely imaginable. She also suffered from the debilitating thyroid condition known as Graves' Disease, a crippling illness which further alienated her from contemporary Russian society and led directly to her early death from a heart attack at the age of forty-eight.
Even in 1979, when the first Collected Edition of Parnok's poetry was published in the United States, homosexuality was considered a crime in what was still the USSR. Sadly, this unofficially remains the case in post-Soviet Russia where, although homosexuality is now legal (and has been since 1993), it remains an 'activity' generally frowned upon by the government and large segments of the country's heterosexual population. Russian LGBTQI+ people are legally forbidden to marry and routinely subjected to discrimination and, in many cases, violence and death thanks to the passing of oppressive laws by Vladimir Putin in 2013 which outlawed the promotion of a 'gay lifestyle' to minors.
Parnok's sexuality and her passionate relationships with the women — Lyudmila Erarskaya, Olga Tsuberbiller, Maria Maksakova and Nina Vedeneyeva in addition to her fellow poet Marina Tsvetaeva — who served as her muses were as integral to her sense of identity as they were to her work, inspiring all of her best poems and helping to define the sense of 'otherness' she embraced as a lesbian. Raised in difficult emotional circumstances by her pharmacist father and his second wife (who had formerly been the governess of Parnok and her twin siblings Valentin and Yelizaveta), she grew up in the shadow of the anti-Jewish pogroms which had been a feature of Russian society since the Middle Ages. In 1905 she converted to Christianity, less for reasons of faith than to allow her to explore her burgeoning interest in religion. Two years later she married her fellow poet Vladimir Volkenstein, a sympathetic man who accepted her sexual identity and was pleased to help escape her overbearing father who considered the composition of poetry a waste of her literary gifts.
Moving with her husband from her childhood home of Taganrog (a town on the Black Sea close to Rostov) to St Petersburg enabled Parnok to mingle with many of Russia's leading writers, poets and intellectuals and publish her work in various literary journals while pursuing a parallel career, under the male pseudonym Andrei Polianin, as a journalist for the review Northern Annals. Her marriage, which was based on friendship rather than love, ended in 1909 when she moved to Moscow where she would stay, living a largely nomadic existence, until 1914, establishing herself as a journalist and poet and as a librettist with her work on an operatic adaptation of The Arabian Nights created in collaboration with composer Maximilian Steinberg. During this period Parnok also enjoyed many love affairs despite her worsening health and the serious bouts of depression it triggered.
It was in August 1914, while on holiday in Crimea, that Parnok met Marina Tsvetaeva, another female poet who, unlike herself, was still married to a man and the mother of two young daughters. Their relationship, which ended a year later as World War One raged through Europe, was a stormy one, marked by jealousy on both sides and a strong sense of competitiveness as each sought to outwrite the other and gain the upper hand emotionally.
Parnok returned to Moscow with her new lover, the actress Lyudmila Erarskaya, in the summer of 1917, only to find it necessary to almost immediately return to the Crimea to escape the Russian Revolution and the country's ensuing Civil War. The years she spent in the town of Sudak would prove to be extremely fertile ones artistically, seeing her write another opera libretto titled Almast, based on an Armenian folk tale, and many new poems inspired by both her break-up with Tsvetaeva and the work of the Ancient Greek poet Sappho. Despite this period of intense creativity, she and her friends, including her new collaborator Alexander Spendiaryan who was writing the score of Almast, faced severe food shortages as well as the steadily advancing Red Army. Parnok was arrested by the latter in 1921 for failing to adequately support its efforts to defeat the pro-Tsarist White Army, her brief stay in prison leading to her contracting tuberculosis which, along with her existing thyroid condition and a near death experience in a train accident — she had exchanged seats with another passenger before the train pulled out, only to watch her fellow passenger subsequently die — only deepened her already profound sense of fatalism.
The winding down of the Civil War, which would end for good in 1923, made it possible for Parnok and Erarskaya to finally return to Moscow, where the former promptly joined the new Writer's Union with the help of popular Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Despite Parnok's obedient toeing of the new party line, her work was carefully scrutinized by the Communist censors who objected to its numerous references to religion. This form of political interference would persist for the next five years, with Parnok coming to feel increasingly isolated and alienated from her peers because she found it so difficult to get her work published and then reviewed and read on those increasingly rare occasions when it was actually distributed. Nor were matters helped by Erarskaya's mental breakdown and subsequent hospitalization, events Parnok survived only with the help and support of Olga Tsuberbiller, a mathematician at Moscow State University who may or may not have been her lover.
By 1928 Parnok's own health had deteriorated to the point where she had become bedridden, sustained by Tsuberbiller and the limited amount of work she managed to find translating the works of Marcel Proust and other male French novelists and poets into Russian. She lived in hope that Almast, the opera she had written while living in Sudak, would be completed and performed at Moscow's prestigious Bolshoi Theatre — a dream that came within reach when her old friend Maximilian Steinberg agreed to complete the unfinished score left behind by the deceased Alexander Spendiaryan. Almast premiered on 24 June 1930 and was an immediate success, later touring throughout the USSR, although Parnok herself lost interest in the production when its star, the mezzo-soprano Maria Maksakova, left it. She had been pursuing the singer for quite some time, only to discover that her affections were not in any way reciprocated.
The last great love of Parnok's life was the physicist
Nina Vedeneyeva whom she began a relationship with in January 1932. This new love also inspired a frantic surge of composition that overtaxed her sick frail body. By the end of the following August her physical condition had once again deteriorated, with Tsuberbiller and Vedeneyeva both at the poet's bedside when she died on 26 August 1933, with her last complete poem, written a month earlier, serving as her final farewell to the ever-loyal Vedeneyeva.
Nina Vedeneyeva whom she began a relationship with in January 1932. This new love also inspired a frantic surge of composition that overtaxed her sick frail body. By the end of the following August her physical condition had once again deteriorated, with Tsuberbiller and Vedeneyeva both at the poet's bedside when she died on 26 August 1933, with her last complete poem, written a month earlier, serving as her final farewell to the ever-loyal Vedeneyeva.
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