Mikhail Kuzmin
Encyclopedia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n poet, musician and novelist, a prominent contributor to the Silver Age of Russian Poetry
Silver Age of Russian Poetry
Silver Age is a term traditionally applied by Russian philologists to the first two decades of the 20th century. It was an exceptionally creative period in the history of Russian poetry, on par with the Golden Age a century earlier...
.
Born into a noble family in Yaroslavl
Yaroslavl
Yaroslavl is a city and the administrative center of Yaroslavl Oblast, Russia, located northeast of Moscow. The historical part of the city, a World Heritage Site, is located at the confluence of the Volga and the Kotorosl Rivers. It is one of the Golden Ring cities, a group of historic cities...
, Kuzmin grew up in St. Petersburg and studied music at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory
Saint Petersburg Conservatory
The N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov Saint Petersburg State Conservatory is a music school in Saint Petersburg. In 2004, the conservatory had around 275 faculty members and 1,400 students.-History:...
under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was a Russian composer, and a member of the group of composers known as The Five.The Five, also known as The Mighty Handful or The Mighty Coterie, refers to a circle of composers who met in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in the years 1856–1870: Mily Balakirev , César...
. He did not graduate, however, later explaining his move towards poetry thus: "It's easier and simpler. Poetry falls ready-made from the sky, like manna into the mouths of the Israelites in the desert." But he did not give up music; he composed the music for Meyerhold
Vsevolod Meyerhold
Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold was a great Russian and Soviet theatre director, actor and theatrical producer. His provocative experiments dealing with physical being and symbolism in an unconventional theatre setting made him one of the seminal forces in modern international theatre.-Early...
's famous 1906 production of Alexander Blok
Alexander Blok
Alexander Alexandrovich Blok was a Russian lyrical poet.-Life and career:Blok was born in Saint Petersburg, into a sophisticated and intellectual family. Some of his relatives were literary men, his father being a law professor in Warsaw, and his maternal grandfather the rector of Saint Petersburg...
's play Balaganchik (The Fair Show Booth), and his songs were popular among the Petersburg elite: "He sang them, accompanying himself on the piano, first in various salons, including Ivanov's Tower, and then at The Stray Dog
Stray Dog Café
Stray Dog Cafe is located at Ploshchad Isskustv, Square of the Arts up to Summer Gardens, St. Petersburg, Russia....
. Kuzmin liked to say of his work that 'it's only little music, but it has its poison.'"
One of his closest friends and major influences as a young man was the polyglot Germanophile aristocrat Georgy Chicherin
Georgy Chicherin
Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin was a Marxist revolutionary and a Soviet politician. He served as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the Soviet government from March 1918 to 1930.-Childhood and early career:...
(who later entered the diplomatic service and after the October Revolution
October Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
became People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs), a passionate supporter of Wagner
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
and Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
. Another strong influence was his travels, first to Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
and Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
and then to northern Russia, where he was deeply impressed by the Old Believers
Old Believers
In the context of Russian Orthodox church history, the Old Believers separated after 1666 from the official Russian Orthodox Church as a protest against church reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon between 1652–66...
. Settling down in St. Petersburg, he became close to the circle around Mir iskusstva
Mir iskusstva
Mir iskusstva was a Russian magazine and the artistic movement it inspired and embodied, which was a major influence on the Russians who helped revolutionize European art during the first decade of the 20th century. From 1909, many of the miriskusniki also contributed to the Ballets Russes...
(World of Art). His first published writings appeared in 1905 and attracted the attention of Valery Bryusov
Valery Bryusov
Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov was a Russian poet, prose writer, dramatist, translator, critic and historian. He was one of the principal members of the Russian Symbolist movement.-Biography:...
, who invited him to contribute to Bryusov's influential literary magazine Vesy
Vesy
Vesy , was a Russian symbolist magazine published in Moscow from 1904 to 1909, with the financial backing of philanthropist S. A. Polyakov. It was edited by the major symbolist writer Valery Bryusov.-History:...
(The Balance), the center of the Symbolist
Russian Symbolism
Russian symbolism was an intellectual and artistic movement predominant at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It represented the Russian branch of the symbolist movement in European art, and was mostly known for its contributions to Russian poetry.-Russian symbolism in...
movement, where in 1906 he published his verse cycle "Alexandrian Songs" (modeled on Les Chansons de Bilitis
Songs of Bilitis
The Songs of Bilitis is a collection of erotic poetry by Pierre Louÿs and published in Paris in 1894 .The book's sensual poems are in the manner of Sappho; the introduction claims they were found on the walls of a tomb in Cyprus, written by a woman of Ancient Greece called Bilitis, a courtesan and...
, by Pierre Louÿs
Pierre Louÿs
Pierre Louÿs was a French poet and writer, most renowned for lesbian and classical themes in some of his writings. He is known as a writer who "expressed pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection."-Life:...
) and the first Russian novel with a homosexual theme, Wings, which instantly achieved notoriety and made him a widely popular writer. In 1908 appeared his first collection of poetry, Seti (Nets), which was also widely acclaimed. In the words of Roberta Reeder, "His poetry is erudite and the themes range from Ancient Greece and Alexandria to modern-day Petersburg."
In 1908 he was living with Sergei Sudeikin
Serge Sudeikin
Sergey Yurievich Sudeikin, also known as Serge Soudeikine , was a Russian artist and set-designer associated with the Ballets Russes and the Metropolitan Opera...
and his first wife Olga Glebova, whom he had married just the year before; when Olga discovered her husband was having an affair with Kuzmin, she insisted Kuzmin move out. "But in spite of this contretemps, Kuzmin, Sudeikin, and Glebova continued to maintain a productive, professional relationship, collaborating on many ventures—plays, musical evenings, poetry declamations—especially at the St. Petersburg cabarets." Kuzmin was also one of the favorite poets of Sudeikin's second wife, Vera
Vera de Bosset
Vera de Bosset Stravinsky was a Russian born American dancer and artist. She is better known as the mistress and, ultimately, second wife of the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky who married her in 1940.-Life:...
, and her published album contains several of his manuscript poems.
Kuzmin's association with the Symbolists was never definitive, and in 1910 he helped give rise to the Acmeist movement with his essay "O prekrasnoi yasnosti" (On beautiful clarity), in which he attacked "incomprehensible, dark cosmic trappings" and urged writers to be "logical in the conception, the construction of the work, the syntax... love the word, like Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style.-Early life and education:Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen,...
, be economical in means and niggardly in words, precise and genuine -- and you will find the secret of an amazing thing — beautiful clarity — which I would call clarism." He was no more a member of the group than he had been of the Symbolists, but he was personally associated with a number of them; in the years 1910-12 he lived in the famous apartment (called the Tower) of Vyacheslav Ivanov, who was another formative influence on the Acmeists, and he was a friend of Anna Akhmatova
Anna Akhmatova
Anna Andreyevna Gorenko , better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova , was a Russian and Soviet modernist poet, one of the most acclaimed writers in the Russian canon.Harrington p11...
, for whose first book of poetry, Vecher [Evening], he wrote a flattering preface. (In later years he incurred Akhmatova's enmity, probably because of a 1923 review she took as condescending, and she made him one of the villains of her "Poem Without a Hero" under the name Cagliostro
Alessandro Cagliostro
Count Alessandro di Cagliostro was the alias of the occultist Giuseppe Balsamo , an Italian adventurer.-Origin:The history of Cagliostro is shrouded in rumour, propaganda and mysticism...
.)
Mandelstam, in his 1916 review "On Contemporary Poetry," wrote:
Kuzmin's classicism is captivating. How sweet it is to read a classical poet living in our midst, to experience a Goethean blend of "form" and "content," to be persuaded that the soul is not a substanceAnd in his essay "A Letter about Russian Poetry" (1922), he said "Kuzmin brought dissident songs from the Volga shores, an Italian comedy from his own native Rome, and the entire history of European culture insofar as it had become music—from Giorgione's "Concert" at the Pitti Palace to the most recent tone poems of Debussy."
made of metaphysical cotton, but rather the carefree, gentle Psyche. Kuzmin's poems not only lend themselves easily to memorization, but also to recall, as it were (the impression of recollection after the very first reading), and they float up to the surface as if out of oblivion (Classicism)...
The last volume of poetry Kuzmin published during his lifetime was The Trout Breaks the Ice (1929), a cycle of narrative poetry
Narrative poetry
Narrative poetry is poetry that has a plot. The poems that make up this genre may be short or long, and the story it relates to may be simple or complex. It is usually nondramatic, with objective regular scheme and meter. Narrative poems include epics, ballads, idylls and lays.Some narrative...
.
Kuzmin spent his declining years translating Shakespeare's plays.
Contemporary poet and critic Alexei Purin
Alexei Purin
Alexei Purin is a Russian poet and critic.Born in Leningrad, Purin graduated from the Leningrad Technological Institute as a chemical engineer but soon turned to literature...
, who thinks the openly "tragic," socially oriented tradition of Russian literature has been exhausted and it needs to reorient itself along the more personal and artistic tradition exemplified by Kuzmin and Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
, quotes Innokenty Annensky
Innokenty Annensky
Innokentiy Fyodorovich Annensky was a poet, critic and translator, representative of the first wave of Russian Symbolism...
as saying it was important to avoid "the persistent embrace of the 'like everyone'" and writes: "It is precisely the poetry of Annensky and Kuzmin that at the beginning of the twentieth century took the first and decisive step away from this 'like everyone' — in the direction of psychologically interpreted details and the everyday word, in the direction of living intonation — a step to be compared, perhaps, only with the Pushkin revolution. All succeeding Russian lyric poetry is unimaginable without it."
Translations in other languages
- Александрийские песни|Canções alexandrinas, Oleg Almeida (Trans.), (n.t.) Revista Literária em Tradução, nº 2 (mar/2011), Fpolis/Brasil, ISSN 2177-5141.
- Canções alexandrinas: Tradução, apresentação e notas explicativas de Oleg Almeida. Arte Brasil: São Paulo, 2011, 50 p. ISBN 978-85-64377-01-1.
- M. Kuzmin, Wings, tr. H. Aplin (2007)
- M. Kuzmin, 'The Venetian Madcaps', tr. M. Green, in Russian Literature Triquarterly; 7 (1973), p. 119-51.
- M. Kuzmin, Wings: prose and poetry, tr. N. Granoien, M. Green (1972)
- M. Kuzmin, Alexandrinische Gesange, tr. A. Eliasberg (1921).