LGBT Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing books that have made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any book that touches on LGBT themes is welcome in this series. LGBT Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a Kosmail to Chrislove.
Thank you to Chrislove for turning over the keys to the series for such a long diary on the LGBT literature of pre-revolutionary Russia. Most of the diaries in this series have covered individual writers or works - I've bitten off a bit more by deciding to profile an era, but there are two reasons for this.
First, the historical context in which these writers worked is so radically different from our own (even the term LGBT is an ill fit, but I use it here in the broader sense) that I might as well just introduce the context itself, and go from there. In the first and longest section of the diary, I outline of few of the assumptions that we have to work with in order to understand, or to try to understand, where these writers were coming from. I'd have to do this even for individual works, so I might as well take advantage of the moment.
Second, nearly all of the works I'm going to discuss have not been translated into English, which makes a focused, analytical diary a bit less useful for casual readers. If you can't read these works for yourself, my summaries can only be so useful; far more useful is a capsule discussion of some of the era's more important figures, so that readers (I hope) can come away with a better appreciation of the era as a whole.
That's what I'm going for, at any rate. Hope you enjoy...
Some Background
From the outset, we're faced with the problem of terminology. In 21st century America, we have a highly developed (even if sometimes contentious) vocabulary for discussing queer issues; pre-revolutionary Russia did not, which isn't to say that the figures we'll discuss didn't have highly-developed senses of their own identities, but that the ideas and terms they used for themselves don't always map onto our contemporary ones. This is more than just a problem of language, but raises fundamental issues about the very notions of identity that we take for granted. Just how much does sexual orientation figure into self-identity, anyway? And what is gender, really?
Like anywhere, Russia has its own long history of queer culture, a self-defined consequence of its own history; outside of the urban capitals, this history went largely unrecorded, and remains difficult territory even for specialists. For this diary, we're going to focus on Russia's late Imperial literary scene, a phenomenon that was unavoidably driven by urban intellectuals in St. Petersburg and Moscow. To understand where they were coming from, let's consider two foreign ideas that were having an enormous impact on their writing:
First, it's hard to overstate the influence of degenerative theory. 19th century scientists and social critics had come to believe that the human race was effectively devolving, either because of unhealthy breeding (this is where eugenics gets its big push) or because of unhealthy cultural habits. Two major Western figures made big waves in Russia: the first and most widely read was Max Nordau, a social critic whose massive text Degeneration blamed the human race's evident decline on everything from criminal pathology to modern art; for Nordau, both sexual and gender deviants were further evidence of this decline. Nordau was particularly disgusted by homosexuality, and predicted Germany would legalize same-sex marriage by the end of the 19th century (!!!). Many of the writers we'll discuss had also read Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, which treated homosexuality and bisexuality as forms of sexual pathology, a degenerative "mistake" that led otherwise healthy human beings away from their natural, procreative tendencies. Sexuality and criminality were both markers of unhealthy biological trends.
The second big idea, which had its own scientific theorists but was especially popular with the so-called Decadents, was the notion that human beings are fundamentally androgynous. The roots of this go way back (even to Biblical notions about the first human being) and reappear through art history, but by the late 19th century, androgyny as a kind of aesthetic "ideal" had become something of a major theme in European art. This mindset also lured in more socially-minded writers who were already engaged with the "Woman Question" (What is the role of women in society? Is there a fundamental difference between the sexes?); for them, androgyny may more than just a superficial trait, but a basic element of human nature that most of us are no longer able to access (possibly because of degeneration?). This is a very different way of thinking about gender than even our current use of words like androgyny, but as we'll see, it has a big effect on how writers talk about gender and cross-gender issues.
Modern research leads us to separate out issues of sexual orientation and gender; that was not always the case for these authors. For some of these writers who discussed issues of sex and gender, sexual attraction could be seen as a byproduct of gender (or vice-versa), and/or both as a product of biological pathology and cultural decline: lesbians as "masculine" men frustrated with gender roles, or "feminine" men congregating in bathhouses instead of churches, etc. In other words, to understand this era, we have to let go of some of our assumptions about the unchangeable nature of these issues - which isn't to say that these early, crude attempts at understanding gender and sexuality are beyond criticism, but that we need to try to view it from the inside, to the extent that that is possible.
But it's easier to discuss this in practice, so let's meet some of the major figures in the literary world. I've chosen a mix of writers that includes both those whose activities and/or self-identifications would align them with contemporary notions of queerness in one form or another, and others who were, from all available evidence, what we'd today call cisgender and heterosexual, but who involved themselves in these issues. I've included poets and prose writers, fiction and non-fiction, popular work and (at the time) obscure. My aim is to show something of the diversity of this conversation as it was happening in the years leading up to the Revolution.
Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945)
If you were a writer in late Imperial Russia, you knew Zinaida Gippius. She was a formidable poet (under her own name), an influential and prolific critic (under various male pseudonyms), and a central figure in a number of art collectives, including the Religious and Philosophical Society she co-founded with her husband and life partner, Dmitri Merezhkovsky. In fact, biographers have long had problems separating out Gippius' poetry, which is often dark and self-consciously twisted, with the details of her life, which defy our usual categorizations. She often took to wearing male clothing à la George Sand; she carried on a number of high-profile love affairs with both women and men; and despite the likelihood that her husband was homosexual, they remained coupled for fifty-two years (until his death in 1941), one of the longest and most successful marriages between artists in Russian history, or anywhere. Little surprise that Gippius attracts so many readers while frustrating easy categorization.
In her earlier writing, Gippius was one of Russia's only capital-D Decadent artists: that is, she foregrounded a fascination with superficial beauty and deep moral rot, but with a kind of malicious pleasure in the latter. Decadence was an import from the West, but unlike the more "art for art's sake" Europeans, Gippius considered the soul the centerpiece of her work, which she tried to elevate through both religion and sex. She wrote one of the first nonfiction accounts of a homosexual community, "On the Shores of the Ionian Sea," and expressed her desire for bisexual (or rather, something closer to pansexual) love, put into practice in multiple love affairs with both women and men, some of which may not have been consummated, but which were passionately pursued nonetheless. (Her secretary later tried to claim that Gippius' love affairs were entirely non-sexual - that she was more focused on elevating the aesthetic ideal of androgyny; this seems unlikely, given the evidence.)
I wish more of Gippius were readily available in English - some of her works were published in the 1970s in translations by Temira Pachmuss, but they are impossible to find now. Instead, here's one of her most famous poems (in an online translation by Dina Belyayeva, with minor edits). You can see the way Gippius draws together mystical formulations - polar opposites annihilating each other and creating something new out of their destruction - as a way of making sense of the modernizing world around her:
Electricity (1901)
Two threads are twined together
Exposed here are their hearts.
These “Yes” and “No” unblended,
Entwined remain apart.
Their dusky intersection
Is lifeless and confined,
There will be resurrection,
And they await that time.
The ends will meet caressing,
These “Yes” and “No” unite,
And “Yes” and “No” are pressing,
While waking and embracing,
In death, they’ll turn to Light.
This annihilation of opposites is an important theme to Gippius, not least of all as a function of her own identity (both innate and self-fashioned). In one of her diaries, she notes that the felt like "more of a man in my thoughts, my desires, and my spirit; but in my body, more of a woman." Embracing the role of the androgyne in her life and art freed her to experience a more transcendent form of life. She was a controversial figure in public, widely hated and just as widely admired.
For all the early ecstatic gloom of her poetry, Gippius was radicalized against the Emperor due to the events of the 1905 revolution, and then against the Bolshevik atrocities after 1917. She and her husband (and cohort) eventually escaped to Europe, where they found it difficult to retain anything of their former prestige (and income) in the dispersed, dislocated emigre community.
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Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936)
For many reasons, Mikhail Kuzmin has become the central figure in discussions of Russian LGBT literature. After attempting suicide as a conservatory student, he disappeared on what we believe was a religious pilgrimage, then returned to the capital dressed as an Old Believer (this is him) and transformed himself into the prototypical urban aesthete, or dandy (this is also him). He was openly and unapologetically homosexual, and wrote about it with none of the closet angst we associate with early gay literature: his works embrace same-sex love without the complications of guilt or self-doubt.
To this we owe Russia's 1905 revolution, which temporarily knocked out the usual organs of state censorship and allowed publication of Kuzmin's landmark novella, Wings. An immediate and far-reaching success (albeit of the scandalous type), Wings is a modernist update of the old Künstlerroman, about a young and unformed artist who grows into his adult identity. Here, orphaned teenager Vanya is gradually introduced to St. Petersburg's homosocial community, where discussions of historical homosexuality mingle with discussions about opera, religion, and (of course) love. Formally audacious and difficult, the novella's one weak attempt at plot - involving a society woman fatally in love with the dashing Stroop - is quickly overrun by its pervasive sunshine: everyone in this world, from the dandiest urbanite to the rural priest, is here to proclaim the gospel of love.
Kuzmin had little tolerance for either the shallow use of homosexuality for prurient interests or for the self-inflicted martyrdom of what we'd today call closet cases. He disliked both Pierre Louÿs, whose Songs of Bilitis used the heroine's bisexuality in ways Kuzmin found distastefully tawdry, and Oscar Wilde, who he found shamefully reliant on euphemism and irony. In direct response to Louÿs he penned his Alexandrian Songs, a set of lyric poems that blur the lines of gender and sexuality to create a hedonism focused more on ideal love than carnality (he also wrote voice-and-piano settings for some of the poems).
He was also a very influential critic, and his most famous critical essay ("On Clarity") reshaped the trajectory of Russian poetry. As a poet, his verse is delicate and balanced (Mirsky described it as "chamber music"), which makes it difficult to convey; here is an early and brave effort by Babette Deustche and Avrahm Yarmolinsky on one of Kuzmin's shorter verses, whose subject couldn't be clearer (note: "domino" here refers to the mask, not the game):
[from the collection Nets (1907)]
Night was done. We rose and after
Washing, dressing,—kissed with laughter,—
After all the sweet night knows.
Lilac breakfast cups were clinking
While we sat like brothers drinking
Tea,—and kept our dominoes.
And our dominoes smiled greeting,
And our eyes avoided meeting
With our dumb lips’ secrecy.
“Faust” we sang, we played, denying
Night’s strange memories, strangely dying,
As though night’s twain were not we.
Kuzmin was bold in foregrounding same-sex love, which cost him dearly as he found himself impossible to publish in Stalinist Russia. Like many other poets, he eked out a living doing translations until his death in 1936. He was a writer of pristine clarity and grace, and thoroughly out of place in Soviet Russia.
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Evdokia Nagrodskaia (1866-1930)
Literary history sometimes runs the risk of privileging the critically- or academically-important over the popular, and any history of LGBT literature in this period needs to take into account that some of the most interesting aspects of that conversation were happening away from belles-lettres and in the world of bestselling fiction. Evdokia Nagrodskaia was one of the best-known "women's writers", sometimes dismissively referred to as the author of "boulevard fiction", that is, fiction for the bored, middle-class housewife who wanted to read about illicit topics in ways designed to test the patience of the censors.
And test she did. Her bestselling novel The Wrath of Dionysus touched on a number of topics guaranteed to shock her readers, but in a way that suggested they were part of an expanding modern life rather than that of a deviant, devolving culture. Her take on gender draws deeply from the concepts of innate androgyny, but in a way that treats it as a living reality for her characters rather than as a merely idealized, aestheticized idea. Thanks to the efforts of Louise McReynolds, it is one of the few works in this diary available in English.
Nagrodskaia's heroine Tatiana (Russian literary code for "ideal woman") finds herself torn between her obedient husband and her fragile male lover, thoroughly disinterested in the idea of motherhood, and abandoning the standard womanly pastimes of music and fainting-on-couches for other hobbies like travel and painting (an admirer praises her painting style as "non-female"). At one point, an older confidant named Latchinov - a gay man she meets on her travels - outlines a theory about her behavior: though physically gendered female, Tania is actually a man on the inside.
This is a far cry from modern understandings of either gender or (especially) transgender identity, but consider that Nagrodskaia is trying to de-pathologize contemporary ideas about gender ambiguity: the idea of gender dysphoria as a pathology, as something "wrong", is foreign to this book. Instead, it is Tania's fate to fall for weak, feminized men and to act as the husband in her relationships (Latchinov encourages her, as a "man", to maintain both the husband and lover, but not to tell either). Nagrodskaia is not merely reversing gender roles, because she also shows Latchinov as a feminized man attracted to other men: in other words, she does not sever the apparent link between "inner" gender and sexuality, but notes that its expression can have either heterosexual or homosexual implications depending on, among other things, upbringing. As Latchinov explains (in McReynolds' translation),
You understand and appreciate feminine beauty and paint women as though spellbound. During our conversations in your studio, I listened closely: you evaluate women strictly from a man's perspective. Remember the French girl your sculptor friend brought over? You watched her walk out and said, 'She's too made-up and no longer young, but I understand why he fell head-over-heels for her. There's something strangely attractive about her.' You should have been a lesbian... You didn't become one simply because of your upbringing, circumstances, and gentility. Before you met Stark [the lover], your inclinations were still latent and didn't set you down that path. Besides, this never entered your head. You didn't know you had a 'secret.'...
Stark is exactly among men what you are among women. Strong, courageous, he has more of a female nature than you do. There's nothing masculine in your appearance, whereas Stark's body, his manners are more refined and delicate than most men's. Most people consider femininity in a man unbecoming, but look at how everyone is attracted to Stark... And his love for the child? Is it really a father's love? No, he's the mother, and a most passionate mother.
The novel's take on gender and sexuality may not win any awards in the 21st century, and the conflation of biological gender with social roles (infidelity is for men, mothering for women) looks especially bad to modern eyes, but for a 1910 novel aimed primarily at more socially conservative readers (in the sense of urban, comfortable bourgeois readers unlikely to have much contact with any of these worlds),
Dionysus was able to shock its readers out their complacency about gender, sexuality, and human nature - heck, contemporary American readers had nothing on this level in 1910, much less a
bestseller. Yes, her modern-day equivalent might be E.L. James and her
50 Shades series, but I promise that Nagrodskaia is a much more interesting and worthwhile read.
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Vasily Rozanov (1856-1919)
If Nagrodskaia was challenging her bourgeois readers, Vasily Rozanov was challenging everyone. One of Russia's most frustrating and controversial writers, Rozanov was an outspoken social critic whose life's work was primarily long-running polemics in the press (sometimes under pseudonyms, sometimes arguing with himself) about everything from art to politics to how much he hated the Jews.
Yes, some level of anti-Semitism is common in this generation of writers, but rarely were they as open and hostile about it as Rozanov, a writer of strange and seemingly incompatible contradictions. Rozanov - an indisputably great writer at his best, as in the quasi-memoirish and experimental Solitaria - was also an outspoken champion of discussing sex directly and frankly, and of the family, which he considered superior to any other social construct. So who else, in 1911, would have published a collection of essays arguing that homosexuality was intrinsic to Christianity - to all of humanity, for that matter - and that sexuality existed along a spectrum, and that the term sodomy needed to be reclaimed from moral critics, etc. The People of Lunar Light is as wide-ranging and confusing as any of Rozanov's more theoretical works, an attempt to unite biology and metaphysics and theology and pathology and whatever else was in his literary kitchen that year.
Nor were these concerns limited to this book. Rozanov, a Christian himself (and not LGBT in any way), hated Christianity as such, which he considered a death cult run by people who wear an instrument of torture on their necks; loved the passion, physicality, and ecstasy of Judaism (see above re: contradictions); was fascinated by androgyny and identified it in his favorite artists, and especially in Eastern cultures, who he considered less burdened by the yoke of Christian guilt; and emerged as one of the most unlikely but consistently sex-positive voices in Russian letters.
The People of Lunar Light even reviews Krafft-Ebing's case studies to draw them out of the world of pure pathology and into philosophy and religious thought: sex is, for Rozanov, the vital life force, and all men and women contain, to some degree, something of the other gender inside of them. All human relationships contain, to some degree, the "essence of sodomy."
I may be overselling this a bit - Rozanov was still a product of his time, disgusted by anal sex and "butch" lesbians, and I won't pretend to analyze this in-depth (the link above, to Diana Burgin's chapter on Rozanov, is well-worth reading if somewhat technical), but there's no doubt that Rozanov's influence in these public discussions was both marked and more explicit than what most writers of the era could get away with. In a 1909 article protesting a sodomy conviction in Berlin, Rozanov wrote (trans. mine):
It is as ancient as the world, and as widespread as the world: but in the strata of ordinary opposite-sex relations, same-sex feeling is interspersed in such rare and such small amounts, just like, e.g., when splashes or shards of ruby, amethyst, topaz, or emerald are "interspersed" in a solid rock of quartz or feldspar. And this rarity is the sole reason that doctors, psychologists, and lawyers listed this phenomenon under labels like "disease," "perversion," and "crime."...
Patroclus and Achilles as the subjects of "psychiatry"! Plato and Socrates as examples of "brain degeneration!" Finally, Harmodius and Aristogiton, founders of Athenian freedom, as "transgressors of human decency!" Is it not obvious that the police, law, and medicine have undertaken here to judge matters that are admittedly very unusual, but that do not at all belong to the order of criminal, insane, or scandalous affairs. What we have here is something interspersed in human nature, in global nature.... No one knows why nature or God needs such exceptions. Maybe to keep everything from being too continuous, smooth, arithmetic and a bit dull, as it generally is. In the great phenomenon of sex (I hope no one will deny that it is that, a great phenomenon) these "gaps" are also interspersed, these "anomalies", "exceptions", "marvels," and "oddities" which are neither "perversions" nor "diseases" nor "crimes" nor even "vices", that is, they may be strange for us, maybe funny, but no more, or hardly more.
Fun and unlikely little historical fact: Rozanov remains almost entirely unpublished in English, except for an early and small run of
Solitaria and the first volume of his similar
Fallen Leaves. Hardly any English speakers in the West ever saw these books, but the translator, a Jewish writer born in a Ukrainian
shtetl no less, happened to be friends with, and pass them on to, the one English writer who would have appreciated them: the equally sex-centric D.H. Lawrence (who said appreciatively that Rozanov "is the first Russian, as far as I'm concerned, who has ever said anything to me.")
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Sophia Parnok (1885-1933)
Few Russian writers could get away with the open bravado of Mikhail Kuzmin; fewer still women. For many of the women we know to have had same-sex relationships, their writing on the topic was necessarily more deeply coded, more personal, and less public. A major exception to this trend was Sophia Parnok, "Russia's Sappho," a powerfully understated poet and one of the central figures in the country's lesbian history. Her life tracks Kuzmin's in a number of important ways: like him, she began as a conservatory student and maintained a lifelong interest in music; she wrote somewhat openly about her sexuality, which cost her dearly in the Soviet era; unable to publish and officially condemned, she supported herself as a translator until her death in 1933.
But she faced circumstances more hostile than Kuzmin. In addition to being a Jewish poet in an environment sometimes hostile to Jewishness in any form, same-sex love between women was highly valued in its abstracted, aesthetic sense, but even more rigidly condemned in real life: no Russian poet before Parnok had expressed her own love directly; as Diana Burgin has notes, she is "the only openly lesbian voice in Russian poetry." Parnok had in fact married a man - as she was expected to - but by the beginning of World War I, she was divorced and entering a relationship with one of the era's most famous poets, Marina Tsvetaeva (it was not her first same-sex relationship, but certainly her most famous). That relationship was passionate but brief, with Tsvetaeva eventually backing off, but it yielded some of their best poetry on both ends.
This diary focuses on pre-revolutionary Russia, but I want to highlight one of her late poems (1932), written with all the wisdom of a difficult life, tinged with irony, but ultimately affirming the deepness of her love. I'm not entirely sure who translated these - the last line is certainly Diana Burgin's, but see the caveats here (also, minor edits on my part) - and I wish this captured the rhyme and music of Parnok's original, but hopefully something of her grace comes through:
Give me your hand; let’s go to our sinful paradise!
Never mind State Pension Plans of heaven:
in mid-winter, May returned for us,
and flowers blossomed in the greening meadow,
where an apple tree in full bloom inclined
its fragrant fans above us two,
and where the earth smelled sweet like you,
and butterflies made love in flight…
We’re one year older now... but so what?
Old wine has aged another year, too;
the fruits of ripe knowledge are far more succulent.
Hello, my love! my grey-haired Eve!
Parnok was constantly in poor health and the difficulties of her living situation eventually took their toll on her. As with so many other writers, she was a second-order victim of a hostile regime that assured her inability to publish and make a secure, settled life for herself. Fortunately her work has been "rediscovered" by later generations, and now Parnok is rightly considered both a major figure in Russia's LGBT history and a significant poet in her own right, though the current climate in Russia has once again troubled her place in the canon. If nothing else, histories like hers cast some doubt on the supposed arc of moral history, which is more of an insecure wobble.
That wobble also affected her brother, Valentin Parnakh, one of early Soviet Russia's most colorful figures. He came back after the revolution to preach the gospel of jazz, urban cosmopolitanism, and modern art. He was not successful. Exiled to Europe, he eventually lived (platonically) with the very same Marina Tsvetaeva that his sister had once been partnered with.
Closing Thoughts
This list of authors doesn't even scratch the surface. If I had more space and time to write, I'd have gone into detail about Gippius' husband Dmitri Merezhkovsky, himself a prolific writer and influential thinker; Lidiia Zinov'eva-Annibal, author of Russia's first lesbian novella, Thirty-Three Monsters; Anastasiia Verbitskaia, the most famous of the "boulevard" writers, who charted the world of female sexuality in her massively successful novels; Marina Tsvetaeva, the sometimes-lover of Parnok and one of the best 20th century lyric poets; Nikolai Klyuev, a self-described "peasant" poet who merged homosexual themes with earthy, religious and rural-centric verses; his most famous lover, Sergei Esenin, the dashing bisexual farm boy and still one of the most popular of all Russian poets; and so many others.
And this is only the writers: we haven't looked at musicians, actors, dancers, even drag performers, much less non-artists like politicians, businessmen, ordinary folk, social circles, bathhouses, etc. etc. As the era's most brilliant satirist Teffi once joked, regarding her one of her characters, "she fell in love often, but only with women, which was very much in style then." Whatever else we can say about early queer culture in Russia, it was neither limited nor homogeneous; it involved a diversity of thought and experience; and it left a lasting cultural heritage (some of these writers remain indisputably canonical.)
This was a rich and complex era, and one of the reasons I wanted to foreground it is because of modern Russia's attempt to dismiss LGBT issues as effectively "foreign" to its own history. It's not: Russia has as rich a queer history as any nation on earth, and that cannot be erased.
Further Reading
There is currently no shortage of material on this topic in English, at least for secondary sources: I've limited the list below to those I used for this diary, but that list is by no means exhaustive. The primary sources, however, remain largely untranslated, including most of the works discussed here. There is an anthology of translated literature that includes shorter works by many of these writers, as well as those of both earlier and later eras (Out of the Blue: Russia's Hidden Gay Literature, ed. Kevin Moss. Gay Sunshine Press, 1997); it covers, unfortunately, only male writers.
The Russian versions are all online, so for those of you who can read Russian, I encourage you to seek out and explore more of these writers and their world. It's a fascinating place to be.
Primary sources, in English:
- Mikhail Kuzmin, Wings (1906), trs. Hugh Alpin. Hesperus Modern Voices, 2007; and Selected Writings, trs. Michael A. Green and Stanislav Shvabrin. Bucknell University Press, 2005.
- Evdokia Nagrodskaia, The Wrath of Dionysus (1910), trs. Louise McReynolds. Indiana University Press, 1997.
in Russian:
- Зинаида Гиппиус, На берегу Ионического моря, 1899 (text) Собрание стихов, 1889-1903 (text)
- Михаил Кузмин, Крылья, 1906 (text), Сети (includes Александрийские песни) (text)
- Евдокия Нагродская, Гнев Диониса, 1910 (text)
- Василий Розанов, Люди лунного света (Метафизика христианства), 1911 (text), "Нечто из тумана 'образов' и 'подобий' Судебное недоразумение в Берлине" (text)
- София Парнок, Стихотворения последних лет, 1933 (text)
Secondary sources, in English:
- Diana Lewis Burgin, Sophia Parnok: The Life and Works of Russia's Sappho. NYU Press, 1994.
- Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-siècle Russia. Cornell University Press, 1992.
- Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent. University of Chicago Press, 2001.
- Philippa Hetherington, Mythos and Eros in Fin de Siecle Russia: Zinaida Gippius' Sexual Revolution, honors thesis, University of Sydney, 2006 (This is exceptionally good for a BA honors thesis. pdf here)
- D.H. Lawrence, "Solitaria, by V.V. Rozanov," [book review], Calendar of Modern Letters, July 1927
- John Malmstad & Nikolai Bogomolov, Mikhail Kuzmin: A Life in Art. Harvard University Press, 1999.
- Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia's Fin de Siècle. University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.
- Vladimir Zlobin, A Difficult Soul: Zinaida Gippius, trs. Simon Karlinsky, University of California Press, 1980.
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