Sophia Parnok

Template:Short description Template:Good article Template:Use dmy dates Template:Use British English Template:Family name hatnote Template:Template other Sophia Yakovlevna Parnok (Template:Langx, Template:Langx; 30 July 1885 O.S./11 August 1885 (N.S.) – 26 August 1933) was a Russian poet, journalist and translator. From the age of six, she wrote poetry in a style quite distinct from the predominant poets of her times, revealing instead her own sense of Russianness, Jewish identity and lesbianism. Besides her literary work, she worked as a journalist under the pen name of Andrei Polianin. She has been referred to as "Russia's Sappho", as she wrote openly about her seven lesbian relationships.

Sonya Yakovlevna Parnokh was born into a well-to-do family of professional Jews in a provincial city outside the Pale of Settlement. Her mother died after giving birth to her twin siblings and she was raised by her father and her step-mother, leaving her feeling her childhood lacked emotional support. From a young age, she wrote poetry and acknowledged her uniqueness—her lesbianism, her Graves' disease, and her religion—which set her apart from her peers.

Completing her studies at the Mariinskaya Gymnasium, in 1905 Parnok moved to Geneva and attempted to study music, but lacked any real drive and quickly returned to Moscow. To distance herself from her father's control and her financial dependence on him, she published her first book of poems in 1906 under the pseudonym Sophia Parnok and married Vladimir Volkenstein in 1907. Within two years, the marriage failed and she began working as a journalist.

From 1913, Parnok exclusively had relationships with women and used those love relationships to fuel her creativity. In a succession of relationships with Marina Tsvetaeva, Lyudmila Erarskaya, Olga Tsuberbiller, Maria Maksakova and Nina Vedeneyeva, her muses propelled her to publish five collections of poetry and write several librettos for opera, before her disease claimed her life in 1933.

Her poetry was banned after 1928, and her work almost forgotten until 1979 when her collected works were published for the first time. While scholars have focused on her early influential relationship with Tsvetaeva, her best works are now recognized as those written from 1928.

Early life and education

Sonya Yakovlevna Parnokh was born on 11 August 1885, in the city of Taganrog to Alexandra Abramovna (née Idelson) (Template:Langx) and Template:Ill (Template:Langx).Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn Taganrog was outside the Pale of Settlement and had never experienced the Pogroms which had arisen in other regions of the Russian Empire. Her father was a Jewish pharmacist and the owner of an apothecary.Template:Sfn Her mother was a physician, one of the first women doctors in the empire.Template:Sfn The oldest of three children, Parnokh, was the only one to have been raised by her mother, as Alexandra died shortly after giving birth to her twins Valentin, known as "Valya", and Yelizaveta, known as "Liza".Template:Sfn The family was intellectual and taught by their father at home until ready to enter gymnasium or secondary school. From a young age, they were taught to read and received training in French and German, as well as music. Parnokh and her brother both wrote poetry from childhood; she began writing at age six and he, at the age of nine.Template:Sfn Valentin would later introduce jazz to Russia and Yelizaveta became a noted author of children's literature.Template:Sfn

File:Birthhouse parnokhs.jpg

Birthplace of Parnok in Taganrog

Shortly after Alexandra's death, Yakov remarried with the children's German governess. While they materially were brought up in comfort, the children had little emotional support from their step-mother. As a result, Parnokh felt that she had been forced to grow up too fast and did not have a childhood.Template:Sfn In 1894, she entered the Mariinskaya Gymnasium and from this period, began writing profusely, producing around 50 poems which are representative of her juvenilia.Template:Sfn Unlike her brother's teenage writings, Parnokh's works from the period do not reflect influences of the decadent or symbolist artists who were prolific at this time. Instead, her work explored her feelings, burgeoning lesbianism, and fantasies with a more psychological, than artistic purpose.Template:Sfn Through her poetry, she became unperturbed by disapproval and seemed to accept her lesbianism as an innate trait that made her unique and different.Template:Sfn In addition, she suffered from Graves' disease, which affected her looks and made her feel increasingly unusual,Template:Sfn as did her intense identification with both Russia and her JewishnessTemplate:Sfn—a position not shared by her father's indifference to his religionTemplate:Sfn nor her brother's loathing of Russia and the antisemitism he faced.Template:Sfn

In 1902, Parnokh spent the summer in the Crimea, where she had her first real romance with Nadezhda "Nadya" Pavlovna Polyakova, her muse for the next five years. From this point on, a pattern of muse-lovers was established which would fuel Parnokh's creativity throughout her career.Template:Sfn Her devotion was not steadfast and though Nadya inspired Parnokh, as with other lovers, she was not monogamous.Template:Sfn As she approached her graduation, Parnokh and her father's relationship became increasingly strained. His disapproval of her failure to apply herself seriously to her writing and to her lesbianism brought them into conflict.Template:Sfn She graduated with the gold medal (equivalent to the western designation summa cum laude) in May 1903.Template:Sfn Where she lived for the next two years is unknown, but because of later references to having lived in Moscow as a teenager under the patronage of Yekaterina Geltzer, a prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet, it is probable that at least part of that time was spent there.Template:Sfn

Shortly before the 1905 Revolution, Parnokh was baptised into the Russian Orthodox faith. Her writings from this period reflect a new interest in religion and an exploration of Christianity.Template:Sfn It was not unusual during this time of crisis for the Russian Jewish intelligentsia to convert, in an effort to foster a nationalist aim, rather than as a disavowal of their faith.Template:Sfn In 1905, Parnokh convinced her father that she wanted to study music in Geneva.Template:Sfn While studying at the Geneva Conservatory,Template:Sfn she began a correspondence with Vladimir Volkenstein, a young poet, and later playwright, who had expressed an interest in her poetry.Template:Sfn The two were compatible in temperament and their disdain for symbolism, and she found in Volkenstein a partner who was not bothered by her sexuality,Template:Sfn instead judging her works as allegorical and abstract.Template:Sfn At the end of the year, she made a trip to Florence, ItalyTemplate:Sfn and though she returned to Geneva, her enrollment in the Conservatory was brief; by spring 1906, she had returned to Moscow to live with Nadya Polyakova.Template:Sfn The instability caused by the revolution and her inability to find a publisher forced Parnokh to return to her father's home in Taganrog in June.Template:Sfn Her father's refusal to welcome her and his reduction of her allowance pressed Parnokh to begin searching in earnest for a publisher. Using her contact with Volkenstein as leverage, she asked him to help her find a publisher and instructed him to have the work printed under the name of Sophia Parnok because "I detest the letter kh (Template:Langx)".Template:Sfn Though she had intended her poem Life to be her publishing debut, it never appeared in print. Instead, The Autumn Garden was her first published work, appearing in November 1906 in the Journal for Everyone, edited by Viktor Mirolyubov.Template:Sfn Soon afterward, the relationship with Polyakova ended.Template:Sfn

Career

Pre-World War I period

To escape her father's influence and gain independence, Parnok and Volkenstein married in September 1907 and moved to Saint Petersburg.Template:Sfn As she had suspected, living in the capital widened her circle of literary friends. She soon made friends with Liubov Gurevich, the most important woman journalist at the time and the married couple, Sophia Chatskina (Template:Langx) and Yakov Saker (Template:Langx). The couple owned the journal Northern Annals (Template:Langx), publishing the works of poets such as Alexander Blok, Mikhail Kuzmin, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Fyodor Sologub, and Maximilian Voloshin.Template:Sfn Parnok enrolled in the Bestuzhev Courses to study law and continued publishing poems in various journals.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn She also began to do translation work, having been invited in 1908 by Gurevich to co-edit a French-Russian translation of Petits poèmes en prose by Charles Baudelaire.Template:Sfn The Baudelaire project fell apart, her Graves' disease flared up, and she became increasingly unhappy with her work.Template:Sfn In January 1909, finding her marriage to be stifling, Parnok left her husband and settled in Moscow. Volkenstein finally agreed to a divorce in the spring,Template:Sfn but their break-up embittered the two and their earlier friendship never recovered.Template:Sfn

Between 1910 and 1917, Parnok worked as a journalist under the pseudonym Andrei Polianin,Template:Sfn specifically choosing to separate her literary works from her journalism.Template:Sfn She lived a nomadic existence, moving five times in the period to various addresses around Moscow,Template:Sfn spending at least six months of 1911 in Saint Petersburg.Template:Sfn Her health problems intensified leading to bouts of severe depression,Template:Sfn despite the acceptance of some of her poems in prestigious journals like Messenger of Europe (Template:Langx) and Russian Thought (Template:Langx).Template:Sfn Her father's death in 1913, both freed and imprisoned her, removing the physical, yet strained relationship but forcing her to earn her own living.Template:Sfn When Gurevich, who had become both a mother-figure and creative advisorTemplate:Sfn took over as head of the literary section of Russian Talk (Template:Langx), she hired Parnok as a literary critic.Template:Sfn She wrote a series of articles in Northern Annals in 1913, including Noteworthy Names, a review of works by Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Klyuev and Igor Severyanin and Seeking the Path of Art, an anti-acmeist essay. Parnok's literary taste was conservative and decidedly anti-modernist. She valued the classical works of writers such as Dante, Goethe and Pushkin.Template:Sfn

Since her divorce, Parnok had not had a permanent partner. In the spring of 1913, she fell in love with the Moscovite socialite, Iraida Karlovna Albrecht (Template:Langx), who spurred her into a creative period.Template:Sfn After spending the summer together in Butovo, she returned to working on a novella, Anton Ivanovich, began a collaboration with Maximilian Steinberg on an opera based on the Arabian Nights and rented the first permanent housing she had held in a long time, even acquiring a monkey.Template:Sfn She also accepted a position at Northern Annals where she wrote reviews.Template:Sfn In the spring of 1914, Parnok and Albrecht began an extended trip abroad, traveling through Ascona to the Italian area of Switzerland, and then visiting Milan, Rome and Venice before heading north to Hamburg. Continuing to Shanklin on the Isle of Wight and eventually London, Parnok continued to write reviews and poems.Template:Sfn Learning that World War I had broken out, the couple made immediate plans to return to Moscow, where Parnok frantically tried to locate her siblings. She found they were abroad—Valya in Jaffa and Liza in Dresden.Template:Sfn Moving into a new apartment, Parnok's life at the beginning of the war was calm and productive.Template:Sfn

Marina Tsvetaeva period

File:Tsvetaeva.jpg

Marina Tsvetaeva

In 1914, at one of the literary salons hosted by Adelaida Gertsyk, Parnok met the young poet Marina Tsvetaeva, with whom she became involved in an affair that left important imprints on the poetry of both women.Template:Sfn Around the same time, Parnok read, and later rewrote some of the works of the Greek poet Sappho.Template:Sfn By October, Tsvetaeva had committed to the affair, disregarding her obligations to her husband and daughter by writing her first love poem to Parnok.Template:Sfn Prior to her affair with Tsvetaeva, Parnok's poetry had not shown the originality of expression that her later works would evidence.Template:Sfn Each of the two women drove the other to excel, revealing that Parnok had the upper-hand in love while Tsvetaeva was the more refined poet.Template:Sfn On a personal level, Tsvetaeva was both attracted to and repelled by Parnok's passion, increasing her feelings of insecurity.Template:Sfn On a professional level, both were surprised at the depth of their own jealousy,Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn channeling their envy into a creative duel of words.Template:Sfn

In Tsvetaeva's Podruga (Girlfriend) cycle, she acted as a seer, peering into Parnok's future, predicting she was a doomed, tragic figure cursed by her passions.Template:Sfn In her later works (poems 54 and 58 in her first book of verse, Poems), Parnok responded with calm to the dire predictions that the couple would break up.Template:Sfn To Tsvetaeva's constant worries about who would be the conqueror of their battles, Parnok replied that they were equals.Template:Sfn There was a mother-daughter aspect to the relationship and the poems written during it, in that Tsvetaeva entered the relationship as a novice to lesbian passion, though not to its attraction, later maturing in her relationship.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn On the other hand, Parnok entered their union as the less experienced poet, benefiting in her later writing from the seeds of her collaboration with Tsvetaeva.Template:Sfn Rather than the typical stereotypical older-woman-seducer, Tsvetaeva assumed the male lover's role as pursuer in her poems, taunting ParnokTemplate:Sfn with her desire to be the betrayer rather than the betrayed.Template:Sfn Poems appeared shortly before Parnok and Tsvetaeva broke up in 1916 and displayed the mastery of her craft.Template:Sfn The lyrics in Parnok's Poems presented the first, non-decadent, lesbian-desiring subject ever to be included in a book of Russian poetry.Template:SfnTemplate:Snf Parnok's poems about their affair were more restrained than Tsvetaeva's, but Parnok planned to have hers published in contrast to Tsvataeva whoTemplate:Sfn presented Podruga to Parnok as a gift.Template:Sfn

In the summer of 1915, Parnok and Tsvetaeva, both of their sisters, and Osip Mandelstam were guests at Maximilian Voloshin's dacha in Koktebel. Parnok did not care for Mandelstam though Tsvetaeva was openly friendly and would later have an affair with him.Template:Sfn By July, the lovers left Koktebel, just before Tsvetaeva's husband arrived, after which they spent a month on holiday in Sviatye Gory. In January 1916, Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam met at a literary salon in Saint Petersburg, possibly by chance, and recognized each other's talents. The meeting caused a heated quarrel with Parnok. The following month, Mandelstam's attempt to maintain contact with Tsvetaeva ended her relationship with Parnok.Template:Sfn Tsvetaeva had taken Mandelstam to see the sites of Moscow, and when she came home from the outing, she found Parnok entertaining the actress Lyudmila Vladimirovna Erarskaya.Template:Sfn It is unknown exactly when Parnok and Erarskaya met,Template:Sfn but theirs would be the longest relationship of the poet's life, lasting for the next sixteen years.Template:Sfn In a pique, Tsvetaeva asked Parnok to return her Podruga and her manuscripts. Parnok was outraged that Tsvetaeva wanted her gift returned, considering it an attempt to conceal the origin of the poems in their affair.Template:Sfn

The long-reaching effects of their liaison would last until their deaths.Template:Sfn In her later years, Parnok's works often reminisced on the best and worst aspects of their stormy affair.Template:Sfn Tsvetaeva, on the other hand, tried to eliminate Parnok completely from her life and her works.Template:Sfn By summer, Tsvetaeva, who had returned to her husband, was pregnantTemplate:Sfn and Parnok and Erarskaya were living together in an apartment at 2 Sukharevskaya Sadovaya Street.Template:Sfn As a result of the February Revolution in 1917, Northern Annals closed, ending abruptly Parnok's career as a critic and her most constant source of income.Template:Sfn Illness for each of the couple, famine and the political upheaval of the war, forced them to make plans to move to the Crimea by fall.Template:Sfn

Sudak period

Parnok left Moscow in late summer 1917 and spent the Russian Civil War years in the Crimean town of Sudak with Erarskaya.Template:Sfn Soon after their arrival, she was approached by Alexander Spendiaryan (known in Russia as Alexander Spendiarov) and asked to prepare the libretto for a 4-act opera Almast, based on an Armenian legend. Parnok immediately set to work, sourcing her dramatic verse on the epic poem, The Taking of Tmuk Fortress, by Hovhannes Tumanyan and using Erarskaya as her inspiration. She finished the libretto by the winter of 1918, long before Spendiaryan had completed the musical score,Template:Sfn and returned to reading Sappho.Template:Sfn At that time in Russia, as elsewhere, Sappho was considered a heterosexual poet because she wrote about desire. Both physical love and desire, were perceived as masculine traits, thus women poets who wrote erotic lyrics without shame, regardless of their sexual orientation, were often given the label Sapphic.Template:Sfn Simultaneously, she and Eugenia Gertsyk, Adelaida's sister, became closer friends, reveling in their spiritual quest.Template:Sfn She viewed her relationship with Eugenia as that of an older and wiser guide, who could help her mature spiritually and break her addiction to love.Template:Sfn

Sudak proved to be a productive writing time for Parnok and in 1919, she published in an almanac a substantial number of lyrics, which focused on her new-found spiritual journey.Template:Sfn She prepared most of the poems for two journals which would be published later. These demonstrated her poetic evolution from her past to her future.Template:Sfn Her collection Roses of Pieria (1922) clearly evoked the influence of Sappho,Template:Sfn with her acknowledgement of the first lesbian poet. The poems reflected her attempt to write of her experiences and desire as a sexually active lover of women,Template:Sfn but she stylized her homoerotic verse in a way that was almost alien to her natural poetic voice. She was unsatisfied with the collection and knew before it was published that her next collection was more authentically her own.Template:Sfn The Vine (1923) incorporated the influence of Eugenia Gertsyk,Template:Sfn presenting her own account in lyrical form of her development as a lesbian poet. Using biblical symbolism, she wrote of the physical rapture and suffering of her body which diverted her quest to grow spiritually and produce poetry as her dedicated vocation.Template:Sfn

As a group, the intellectual community in Sudak worked on productions for their own entertainment. Parnok and the two Gertsyk sisters wrote verse; Spendiaryan, who was still struggling with opera, wrote songs; Erarskaya, who had taken a job with the Ministry of Education, staged plays.Template:Sfn Fighting was fierce in the Crimea and food was scarce. Civil employees were paid in rations, rather than wages, and to supplement their meager food supplies, Parnok tried to work a vegetable garden.Template:Sfn In early 1921, she was arrested and sent to a prison in Sudak, where she contracted a severe case of tuberculosis.Template:Sfn Adelaida and Spendiaryan were also arrested for failing to support the Red Army but all were released by the following spring.Template:Sfn The experience of prison, and survival soon thereafter of a train crash, increased Parnok's fatalism. She had switched seats with another passenger, who was killed when the train derailed. She sustained no injury and for the rest of her life, was plagued by the memory.Template:Sfn

In June, the General Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press (GLAVLIT) was created to censor propaganda, state secrets, misinformation, fanaticism and pornography. Fairly quickly, the bureau would begin making lists of banned materials and authors.Template:Sfn In December, Parnok and Erarskaya left the Crimea during the terrible famineTemplate:Sfn in a special hospital train, thanks to Voloshon who had specifically requested their right of passage.Template:Sfn

Return to Moscow

File:Sophia Parnok, 1922.jpg

Parnok in 1922

In early 1922, Parnok returned to Moscow with ErarskayaTemplate:Sfn and was assisted by Vladimir Mayakovsky, who helped her find lodging and join the Writer's Union.Template:Sfn Almost as soon as she arrived, she began experiencing trouble with the censors. Her attempts to help Maximilian Voloshin publish a collection of poems were repeatedly refused. When she tried a few months later to publish a collection of her own works, Centuries-Old Mead, the censors stopped the publication because there were too many religious references. Centuries-Old Mead was placed in stasis by the censorship bureau and never made it to press.Template:Sfn She also feared that The Vine would have trouble with the censors because of its references to God. She had learned from previous experience that religious references were problematic.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn By fall, she was ill, suffering from both bronchitis and stomach problems caused by her Graves' disease. Erarskaya was also sick, having contracted tuberculosis.Template:Sfn

In the beginning of 1923, Parnok embarked on a friendship with Olga Nikolaevna Tsuberbiller, a mathematician at Moscow State University.Template:Sfn The exact nature of her relationship with Tsuberbiller is unknown as, while she occupied a significant place in the poet's life, Parnok did not describe Tsuberbiller in the same sexual context as her lovers. Instead, Tsuberbiller was a protector.Template:Sfn Parnock would later describe her as almost a guardian angel in her collection of poems Half-Whispered.Template:Sfn She joined the group known as the "Lyrical Circle", which included members like Lev Gornung, Template:Ill, Vladislav Khodasevich, and Vladimir Lidin. The members critiqued each other's work, which she hoped would help her find clarity and harmony in her works.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Short of money, Parnok briefly took an office position, but soon quit and depended upon freelance translations and literary critiques to pay her bills, though critiques were beginning to be censored as well.Template:Sfn

By 1925, Parnok and Tsuberbiller had become the closest of friends, and when Erarskaya was hospitalized for a mental break, Tsuberbiller was the one to whom she turned to regain her peace of mind.Template:Sfn Parnok was distressed, feeling that her life had ended, and was unable to work because of her depression and worry over her lover. Erarskaya's paranoia and violent outbursts, led to unsettling trauma for Parnok, causing several fainting spells.Template:Sfn In 1926, Parnok moved in with Tsuberbiller on Neopalimovsky Lane at Smolensky Boulevard.Template:Sfn After a year in the sanatorium Erarskaya was finally pronounced well and released.Template:Sfn Increasingly Parnok felt isolated from her readers and alienated from her peers,Template:Sfn in part because by 1926, GLAVLIT's authority had been extended to cover both public and private publishing. Parnok feared that her cycle Music would not be accepted for publication.Template:Sfn The censorship of her works, but also the unspoken censorship of herself, made her feel invisible, inspiring her poems such as Prologue (1928).Template:Sfn She joined another group of poets, known as "The Knot" which was founded to publish the works of the membersTemplate:Sfn to secure that one of the group's first releases was the publishing of Music.Template:Sfn The censors allowed "The Knot" to exists because their publication runs were limited to 700 copies or less.Template:Sfn

Music was generally well received and earned praise from both Eugenia Gertsyk and Voloshin, pleasing Parnok.Template:Sfn She made plans to spend the summer with Erarskaya and Tsuberbiller in Template:Ill and was revived by the natural surroundings, writing eight poems.Template:Sfn Though still inspired and writing poetry when they returned, Parnok increasingly suffered from ill health and depression. These feelings were acerbated by the continuing failure of Spendiaryan to complete the scores for Almast.Template:Sfn The poems she wrote in early 1927 showed her growing loneliness and resignation to the inevitability of her own death.Template:Sfn By spring, sales of "The Knot"′s publications had been quite good and Parnok felt revived enough to spend the summer with Erarskaya and Tsuberbiller in the small town of Khalepye in the Kiev Oblast of Ukraine.Template:Sfn Once again the time in nature revived her spirit but she continued to suffer from bad health.Template:Sfn Returning to Moscow, she was constantly ill, though she managed to finish her collection Half-Whispered by the end of the year.Template:Sfn

Last loves

By early 1928, Parnok was bedridden, though still translating.Template:Sfn She was depressed, "The Knot" had been forced to close after publishing Half-Whispered, she was suffering from writer's block with her poetry, and Spendiaryan had died without finishing the score to Almast.Template:Sfn As censorship clamped down, Parnok's poetic voice became "unlawful", leading to prohibition on publication of her works in 1928. She made her living solely by translating poems by Charles Baudelaire, novels by Romain Rolland, Marcel Proust, Henri Barbusse and others.Template:Sfn In May 1928, Maximilian Steinberg took it upon himself to complete Almast and Parnok agreed to try to get it approved for the Bolshoi Theatre to produce it. In 1929, Tsuberbiller's brother died, and she and Parnok became responsible for the care of his five-year-old twins.Template:Sfn

In August 1929, Parnok had word from the Bolshoi that they would produce the opera, only if she wrote a Communist-themed prologue and epilogue to the production. In an effort to see the production completed, she agreed, but that created a rift with Steinberg, who claimed she was bowing to political pressure. She felt trapped between the theater managers and Steinberg.Template:Sfn In the spring of 1930, Almast finally went into production, but the conductor made changes, deleting the management's requested prologue and epilogue. He also placed it on the schedule so that it would only have a two-day run. Spendiaryan's widow interceded by having Steinberg called to Moscow to rein in the wayward conductor and move the project to completion.Template:Sfn When the opera finally debuted at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow on 24 June 1930, it was a resounding success.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn The premier was so popular with the public, if not the critics, that it led off the Bolshoi's following fall season.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn When Maria Maksakova left the title role, Parnok severed her interest in the project,Template:Sfn though it toured successfully in Odessa (1930), Tbilissi (1932), Yerevan (1933) and in Paris (1951), among others.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

By the end of the year, both Parnok and Tsuberbiller were exhausted and spent several weeks at Uzkoye to regain their health. When they returned to Moscow, they moved to a new apartment, which gave them more room, as well as space to entertain many colleagues from Tsuberbiller's work.Template:Sfn Parnok began pursuing Maksakova, attending all her performances,Template:Sfn and was re-inspired in her work. She began work on a libretto for an opera Gyul'nara by Yuliya Veysberg, which was dedicated to Maksakova.Template:Sfn Though Parnok's infatuation was not reciprocated, it fueled a creative period and by the end of 1931, she had completed the libretto,Template:Sfn which was first performed in 1935.Template:Sfn

Parnok's last great love was the Georgian physicist, Nina Vedeneyeva. The two may have met as early as 1927, through Tsuberbiller, a colleague of Vedeneyeva. Vedeneyeva's son, Yevgeny, was living in exile at that time and Tsuberbiller, who had written a textbook used for decades in the high schools of Russia, helped her obtain books for him to maintain his studies.Template:Sfn In January 1932, the relationship turned to romance, despite the facts that Parnok was still living with Tsuberbiller and Yevgeny disapproved of the relationship.Template:Sfn As had happened before, her lover became her muse, inspiring her to write two cycles of poems, Ursa Major and Useless Goods.Template:Sfn The frantic pace of her writing foretold the exhaustion she would suffer, which hastened her death, but Parnok was aware of the consequences.Template:Sfn The references between these last two cycles and Parnok's adolescent poetry, make it clear that she had always known what she wanted to say, but until she reached her maturity, she did not know how to express her words.Template:Sfn Their emotional bond, which accelerated after a trip to Vedeneyeva's summer cottage in Kashin in April,Template:Sfn was destined to remain hidden from most of Vedeneyeva's family and friends.Template:Sfn To keep up appearance of a mere friendship, they spent their summers apart.Template:Sfn

Cutting herself off from all activities other than her work, her love and her immediate family, Parnok's poetry became paramount and with help from Tsuberbiller and Vedeneyeva she stopped translation work.Template:Sfn By winter 1932, her body had become swollen with edema, signalling that her Graves' disease had affected her heart.Template:Sfn For the next six months, Parnok was mostly bedridden and Vedeneyeva visited daily.Template:Sfn In an attempt to improve Parnok's health, Tsuberbiller suggested that they summer in Template:Ill and despite the arduous trip, they arrived safely.Template:Sfn Vedeneyeva vacationed separately in the Crimea. While they were apart the lovers were plagued with poor mail service, which exacerbated Parnok's stress.Template:Sfn On 31 July 1933, she penned her last complete poem, as a farewell to Vedeneyeva.Template:Sfn

Death and legacy

File:Памятник Парнок С.Я..jpg

Parnok's grave at Vvedenskoye Cemetery in Moscow

On 20 August 1933, Vedeneyeva returned to Moscow and that same day, she took the train to join Parnok and Tsuberbiller in Karinskoye.Template:Sfn The arrival was not due to Parnok's illness, but a scheduled arrival per her pre-planned itinerary.Template:Sfn On 25 August, Tsuberbiller realized that Parnok was dying and notified Erarskaya.Template:Sfn Parnok succumbed to a heart attack at 11:30 a.m. on the morning of 26 August 1933 with Tsuberbiller and Vedeneyeva at her bedside. Though she tried to make the trip from Moscow before Parnok died, Erarskaya did not arrive until around 5 p.m.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn A portrait of Tsvetaeva was on her bedside table when she died.Template:Sfn The village druggist assisted Tsuberbiller in obtaining the necessary paperwork to take the body back to Moscow, after the funeral service in Karinskoye. Her funeral procession on 28 August with her friends and fans extended 75 kilometers outside of Moscow. They did not reach the city until the following day.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn She was buried in Vvedenskoye Cemetery in Olga Tsuberbiller's family plot.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

After Parnok's death, her works were not available, nor was there any development of Russian scholarship about her until after the Soviet period.Template:Sfn In 1979, the Soviet scholar, Sofia Polyakova, edited the first Collected Works of Parnok, which was published in the United States.Template:Sfn In 1983, Polyakova published Незакатные оны дни: Цветаева и Парнок (Those Unfading Days: Tsvetaeva and Parnok, Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis Press), which unravelled the relationship between Tsvetaeva and Parnok, identifying Tsvetaeva's "woman friend" in her Girlfriend (Template:Langx) cycle for the first time.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Even after the surge of interest in banned Russian poets through Glasnost policies brought about by Perestroika, Parnok remained obscure to most Russians and the Russian diaspora.Template:Sfn Her colleagues and contemporary poets were all rehabilitated before she was.Template:Sfn Parnok had believed the obstacle to official acceptance was her lesbianism,Template:Sfn though there is no explicit documentation of the reason for continued censorship of her works.Template:Sfn

A memorial plaque dedicated to the Parnok family was placed on the wall of her birth house in Taganrog in 2012.Template:Sfn Poems by Parnok were set to music, recorded on a CD and performed by Elena Frolova in 2002, as part of the "AZIYA +" project.Template:Sfn

Works

Parnok's works are filled with the timbre of tragedy and the melody of coincidence. Her first poem was printed in 1906 and her last, the week before her death. Her first collection Стихотворения (Poems) was published in 1916 and her last book of works Вполголоса (Half-Whispered or In a low voice) was published in 1928. She created five books of poems, more than 30 critical essays, and several translations.Template:Sfn Sofia Polyakova, editor of Parnok's Collected Works, preserved 261 of her poems.Template:Sfn Because she chose to live openly and write about her relationships with seven women – to each of whom she dedicated several poems – she came to be called the "Russian Sappho". Much of the scholarly work focused on Parnok has centered around the period of her relationship with Tsvetaeva;Template:Sfn yet, many of her "best poems" were created after 1928.Template:Sfn Nearly 100 poems, written between 1928 and 1933 were never published until long after her death.Template:Sfn Poems from her Vedeneyeva period reflect both material and spiritual intake and musical and creative output. They incorporate the themes running through all her works: "anguish, poetry, the elements (wind, water, earth, fire), heat and cold, illness, madness, remembering, and death".Template:Sfn Parnok's mature poetry showed a simpler use of language, shorter lines and rhythmic variation. While rejecting the Romantic poetry of previous eras, Parnok conveyed passion through the use of commonplace straightforward language.Template:Sfn Her style employs rhetorical questioning, as if she is having conversations with herself, indicators that even in the presence of others, Parnok felt removed from them.Template:Sfn

Стихотворения (Poems, 1916) contained 60 poems, some previously published, written from 1912, the year of her father's death, to 1915. The book was divided into five sections, though the poems were not part of specific cycles. Sections were of different lengths and dealt with death, love and poetry, love and remembrance, Russia and war, and wandering.Template:Snf

Розы Пиерии (Roses of Pieria, 1922) contained 20 poems, written between 1912 and 1921. They were grouped into three sections which evaluated a lesbian poet in a stylized manner, comparing her to the original lesbian poet, Sappho, as a competitor for male lovers, and as alternative rather than competitor for those who were unsatisfied with more traditional roles of lovers of either sex.Template:Snf Much of the imagery used in the poems depicted symbols from ancient Greek mythology and evoke images of her loss of Tsvetaeva.Template:Snf

Лоза (The Vine, 1923) contained 23 poems, which trace Parnok's life from her physical birth to her spiritual rebirth in Sudak.Template:Sfn The poems trace her first awakening to poetry, her frustration at being unable to express herself as she wanted, the new ideas planted by Tsvetaeva, her failure to be able to write seriously without being distracted by love interests and life, and finally her recognition and acknowledgement that poetry was her true vocation. Her poems, were like her children, her legacy, requiring spiritual nurturing, rather than purely words inspired by sexual passion.Template:Snf

Русалочка (The Little Mermaid (libretto), 1923). The libretto for the opera by Yuliya Veysberg was based on the fairy tale of the same name by Hans Christian Andersen.Template:Sfn

Музыка (Music, 1926) contained 33 poems, most of which had been previously published, which had been written between 1916 and 1925. The collection was dedicated to Tsuberbiller, though Erarskaya (known in the lyrics as Mashenka) is the most prevalent of her lover-muses in the collection. The unifying theme of music, with lyrics including instruments, musical phrases, performers, and sounds, charts the relationship of Parnok and Erarskaya from their first meeting to Mashenka's madness.Template:Snf

Вполголоса (Half-Whispered or In a low voice, 1928) contained 38 poems and was dedicated to Tsuberbiller. Eighteen of the poems were written in 1926 and the other twenty were written the following year.Template:Snf The name, literally sotto voce, reflected the dark thoughts which had pervaded her life over the period, worries of isolation, madness, and death, sprinkled with a few rare lyrics of rapture and vigor.Template:Snf

Алмаст (Almast, (libretto), 1930). The libretto for the opera was finished by Parnok in the winter of 1918.Template:Sfn The prologue and epilogue were written in the spring of 1929, to convince the Bolshoi Theater management to produce the opera.Template:Sfn The libretto stands separately on poetic footing as a high-quality, dramatic narrative.Template:Sfn

Гюльнара (Gyul'nara (libretto), 1935). The libretto for the opera by Yuliya Veysberg was completed at the end of 1931 and was dedicated to the opera singer Maria Maksakova.Template:Sfn As Parnok died before production, Veysberg made final edits to the lyric before its debut in 1935.Template:Sfn

See also

• Lesbian Poetry

References

Bibliography

• Template:Cite thesis

External links

• English translations of 5 miniature poems
• Poetic translation of a 1922 poem