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Sophia Parnok
ParnokhParnokh
BornSonya Yakovlevna Parnokh
(1885-08-11)11 August 1885
Taganrog, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, Russian Empire
Died26 August 1933(1933-08-26) (aged 48)
Moscow, Soviet Union
Pen nameSophia Parnok (also shown as Sofia Parnok, Sofya Parnok, Sofíia Iákovlevna Parnok)
as a jouralist, Andrei Polianin (also shown as Andrey Polyanin)
OccupationPoet
NationalityRussian Jewish
Period20th Century

Sophia Parnok (Template:Lang-ru, 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 unique style that was uninfluenced by the predominant poets of her age, but explored 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", because she wrote openly about her eight lesbian relationships. While the majority of scholarship has focused on her influence by and to Marina Tsvetaeva, her later works written from 1928 on have been recognized as her best works.

Early life and education

Sonya Yakovlevna Parnokh was born on 11 August 1885, in the city of Taganrog to Alexandra Abramovna (née Idelson) (Template:Lang-ru) and Yakov Solomonovich Parnokh [ru] (Template:Lang-ru). Taganrog was outside the Pale of Settlement and had never experienced the Pogroms which happened in other regions of the Russian Empire. Her father was a Jewish pharmacist and the owner of an apothecary. Her mother was a physician, one of the first women doctors in the empire. The oldest of three children, Parnokh was the only one to have been raised by her mother, as Alexandra died after giving birth to the twins, Valentin, known as "Valya", and Yelizaveta, known as Liza, in 1891. The family was intellectual and taught by the father at home until ready to enter gymnasium. 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. Valentin would later introduce jazz to Russia and Yelizaveta became a noted author of children’s literature.

Birthhouse of Parnokhs 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. In 1894, she entered the Mariinskaya Gymnasium and from this period, she began writing profusely, producing around fifty poems which are representative of her juvenilia. Unlike her brother's work from his teenage years, Parnokh's works from this 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. Through her poetry, she defined a sense of herself that was unperturbed by others' disapproval and seemed to accept her lesbianism as an innate trait that made her unique and different. In addition, she suffered from Graves' disease, which effected her looks and added to her sense that she was unusual, as did her intense identification with both Russia and her Jewishness—a position not shared by her father's indifference to his religion nor her brother's loathing of Russia and the antisemitism he faced.

In 1902, Parnokh spent the summer in the Crimea and had her first real romance with Nadezhda "Nadya" Pavlovna Polyakova, who would become her muse for the next five years. From this point, a pattern of muse-lovers was established which would fuel Parnokh’s creativity throughout her career. Her devotion was not steadfast and though Nadya inspired Parnokh, as with other lovers, she was not monogamous. 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. She graduated with the gold medal (equivalent to the western designation summa cum laude) in May, 1903. 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 in Moscow.

Shortly before the 1905 Revolution, Parnokh was baptised into the Russian Orthodox faith and her writings from this period reflect a new interest in religion and an exploration of Christianity. 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 to disavow their faith. In 1905, Parnokh convinced her father that she wanted to study music in Geneva. While studying at the Geneva Conservatory, Parnokh began a correspondence with Vladimir Volkenstein, a young poet, and later playwright, who had expressed an interest in her poetry. The two were compatible in temperament and their disdain for symbolism, and she found in Volkenstein a partner who was unbothered by her sexuality and nurturing of her talent, nudging her works to become more allegorical and abstract. At then end of the year, she made a trip to Florence, Italy and though she returned to Geneva, her enrollment in the Conservatory was brief; by spring 1906, she returned to Moscow to live with Nadya Polyakova. 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. Her father's lack of welcome 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:Lang-ru)". Though she had intended her poem Life to be her publishing debut piece, it never appeared in print. Instead, The Autumn Garden was her first published work, appearing in November 1906 in the Journal for Everyone, which was edited by Viktor Mirolyubov. Soon afterward, the relationship with Polyakova ended.

Career

Pre-World War I period

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

Between 1910 and 1917, Parnok worked as a journalist under the pseudonym Andrei Polianin, specifically choosing to separate her literary works from her newspaper works. She lived a nomadic existence, moving five times in the period to various addresses around Moscow and lived for at least six months of 1911 in Saint Petersburg. Her health problems intensified and she suffered bouts of severe depression, despite the acceptance of some of her poems in prestigious journals like Messenger of Europe (Template:Lang-ru) and Russian Thought (Template:Lang-ru). Her father's death in 1913, both freed and imprisoned her, removing the physical presence and strained relationship but making her need to earn her own way imperative. When Gurevich, who had become both a mother-figure and creative advisor took over as head of the literary section of Russian Talk (Template:Lang-ru), she hired Parnok as a literary critic. A series of literary criticisms appeared 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 article. Parnok's literary taste was conservative and decidedly anti-modernist. She valued classic works of writers like Dante, Goethe and Pushkin.

On a personal front, since her divorce, Parnok had not had a permanent partner. In the spring of 1913, she fell in love with the Moscovite socialite, Iraida Karlovne Albrecht (Template:Lang-ru), who spurred Parnok into a creative period. 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. She also accepted a permanent position on the staff of Northern Annals writing reviews. In the spring of 1914, Parnok and Albrecht began an extended trip abroad, traveling through Ascona in the Italian area of Switzerland, and then visiting Milan, Rome and Venice before heading north to Hamburg. Traveling on to Shanklin on the Isle of Wight and eventually London, Parnok continued to write reviews and poems. Learning that World War I had broken, out the couple made immediate plans to return to Moscow, where Parnok spent some time frantically trying to locate her siblings, who she discovered were also abroad—Valya in Jaffa and Liza in Dresden. Moving in to a new apartment, Parnok's life at the beginning of the war was calm and productive.

Marina Tsvetaeva period

In 1914, at one of the literary salons hosted by the poet, Adelaida Gertsyk, Parnok met the young poet Marina Tsvetaeva, with whom she became involved in a love affair that left important imprints on the poetry of both women. Around the same time, Parnok read, and later rewrote some of the works of the poet, Sappho. The Greek poet's influence is shown in Parnok’s collection Roses of Pieria (1922). By October, Tsvetaeva had committed to the affair, disregarding her obligations to her husband and daughter and had written her first love poem to Parnok. Prior to her affair with Tsvetaeva, Parnok's poetry had not shown the originality or unique voice that her later works would evidence. Each of them drove the other to define themselves both as poets and lovers. It was a creative rivalry in which Parnok had the upper-hand in love and Tsvetaeva was the more refined poet. On a personal level, Tsvetaeva was both attracted and repelled by the passion that Parnok had awoken in her and which magnified her insecurities. On a professional level, both were surprised at the depth of their own jealousy, channeling their frustration into a creative duel of words.

In Tsvetaeva's Podruga (Girlfriend) cycle, she acts as a seer, peering into Parnok's future to predict that she is doomed, tragic figure who is cursed by her passions. Parnok's replies, in the later works (poems numbered 54 and 58) in her first book of verse, Poems, respond with calm to the dire predictions that they will break up. To Tsvetaeva's constant worries about who the conqueror and winner of their battles, Parnok replies that they are equals. There is 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 attraction, and grew to maturity during it. On the other hand, Parnok entered their union as the less experienced poet and seeds planted from their collaboration by Tsvetaeva matured in her later writing. Rather than the typical stereotypical older-woman-seducer, Tsvetaeva assumes the male lover's role as pursuer in her poems describing the relationship with Parnok and taunted Parnok with her desire to be the betrayer and not the betrayed. Poems appeared shortly before she and Tsvetaeva broke up in 1916 and displayed her mastery of her craft. The lyrics in Parnok's Poems presented the first, non-decadent, lesbian-desiring subject ever to be included in a book of Russian poetry. Parnok's poems about their affair were more restrained than Tsvetaeva's, but Parnok planned to publish hers and Tsvataeva did not, giving Podruga as a gift to Parnok.

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 at all, though Tsvetaeva was friendly and would later have an affair with him. By July, the lovers left Koktebel, just prior to Tsvetaeva's husband's arrival, and continued their holiday in Sviatye Gory, spending a month there. In January 1916, Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam met at a literary salon in Saint Petersburg, possibly by chance, and recognized in each other their unique talents. The meeting caused a heated quarrel with Parnok. The following month when Mandelstam sought Tsvetaeva out to continue the discussion begun in Saint Petersburg, it was the final straw to breaking the relationship. Tsvetaeva came home from taking Mandelstam to see the sites of Moscow to find Parnok entertaining the actress Lyudmila Vladimirovna Erarskaya. It is unknown exactly when Parnok and Erarskaya met, but theirs would be the longest relationship of the poet's life, lasting for the next sixteen years. In a pique, Tsvetaeva asked Parnok to return her Podruga and manuscripts. Parnok was outraged, not only that she would take her gift back, but that she would deny the poems' life and hide them away.

The long-reaching effects of their affair would last until each of the poets' deaths. Several times Parnok in her later years reminisced in other works over the best and worst aspects of their stormy affair. Tsvetaeva, on the other hand tried to exorcise Parnok completely from her life and her works. By summer, Tsvetaeva, who had returned to her husband, was pregnant and Parnok and Erarskaya were living together in an apartment at 2 Sukharevskaya Sadovaya Street. 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. 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.

Sudak period

Parnok left Moscow in late summer 1917 and spent the Russian Civil War years in the Crimean town of Sudak with Erarskaya. Soon after their arrival, she was approached by 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 poem on the epic poem, The Taking of Tmuk Fortress by Hovhannes Tumanyan and using Erarskaya as inspiration. She finished the libretto by the winter of 1918, long before Spendiarov finished the musical score. The opera was a big hit in the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow in 1930, as well as in Odessa, Tbilissi, Tashkent, Yerevan and in Paris (1952).

By spring of 1918, Parnok had returned to reading Sappho. Simultaneously, she and Eugenia Gertsyk, sister of Adelaida, became closer friends, reveling in their spiritual quest together. She viewed her relationship with Eugenia as one might an older and wiser guide, who could help her mature spiritually and break her addiction to love.

She also survived a train crash. In early 1921, Parnok was arrested and sent to a prison in Sudak, where she contracted a severe case of tuberculosis. 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. Upon her release in December, Parnok and Erarskaya left the Crimea because of the famine.

Return to Moscow

In early 1922, Parnok returned to Moscow with Erarskaya. Almost as soon as she arrived, she began experiencing trouble with the censors. In trying to help Maximilian Voloshin publish a collection of poems, she was repeatedly refused. When she tried a few months later to publish a collection of her own works, Centuries-Old Mead, 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. In the beginning of 1923, she met and became friends with Olga Nikolaevna Tsuberbiller, a mathematician at Moscow State University. Joining the group known as the "Lyrical Circle", which included members like Leonid Grossman [fr], Vladislav Khodasevich, and Vladimir Lidin, she strove for clarity and harmony in her works. Parnok was the author of the collections of poems Roses of Pieria (1922), The Vine (1923), Music (1926) and Half-Whispered (1928). By 1926, GLAVLIT's authority had been extended to cover both public and private publishing and Parnok feared that Music would not be allowed publication. As censorship clamped down, Parnok’s poetic voice became "unlawful," and she was unable to publish after 1928. She made her living translating poems by Charles Baudelaire, novels by Romain Rolland, Marcel Proust, Henri Barbusse and others.

By 1925, Parnok and Tsuberbiller had moved in together. Increasingly she felt isolated from her readers and alienated from her peers. The censorship of her works, but also the unspoken censorship of herself, made her feel invisible and she addressed it in verse, such as the poems, Prologue (1928). 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 in use for decades in the high schools of Russia, helped her obtain books for him.

Death and legacy

Parnok finally succumbed to her illness in 1933 with three of her lovers at her bedside. Her funeral procession of her friends and fans extended 75 kilometers outside of Moscow. She died of a heart attack in a village near Moscow on 26 August 1933. A portrait of Tsvetaeva was on her bedside table when she died. By the end of the 1930s, the Soviet Writer Publishing House issued a collection of her poems, but after her death, her works were not available, nor was scholarship prepared concerning her in Russia until after the Soviet period ended.

In 1979, the Soviet scholar, Sofia Polyakova, edited the first Collected Works of Parnok, which was published in the United States. 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:Lang-ru) cycle for the first time.

A memorial plaque dedicated to the Parnok family was placed on the wall of her birth house in Taganrog in 2012.

Poems by Parnok were set to music, recorded on a CD and performed by Elena Frolova in 2002, as part of the "AZIYA +" project.

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 thirty critical essays, and several translations. Sofia Polyakova, editor of Parnok's Collected Works, preserved 261 of her poems. Because she chose to live openly and write about her relationships with eight 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 writing during the period of her relationship with Tsvetaeva; however, many of her "best poems" were created after 1928. Poems from her Vedeneyeva period reflect both material and spiritual intake and musical and creative output. The incorporate the themes that run through all of her works: "anguish, poetry, the elements (wind, water, earth, fire), heat and cold, illness, madness, remembering, and death". Her mature poetry showed a simpler use of language, shorter lines and rhythmic variation, which while rejecting the Romantic poetry of previous eras, Parnok conveyed passion through the use of commonplace straightforward language.

Стихотворения (Poems, 1916) contained sixty 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.

  • Розы Пиерии (Roses of Pieria, 1922)
  • Лоза (The Vine, 1923)
  • Музыка (Music, 1926)
  • Вполголоса (Half-Whispered or In a low voice, 1928)

References

Citations

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  81. Burgin 2002, p. 36.
  82. Burgin 2003, p. 570.
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  84. Burgin 1994, p. 194.
  85. Shrayer 2015, pp. 199–200.
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  90. Пахомова 2004, p. 2.
  91. Burgin, Diana Lewis Burgin (1 July 1994). Sophia Parnok: The Life and Work of Russia's Sappho. NYU Press. ISBN 0814712215
  92. Franeta 1994, p. 9.
  93. McCorkle 2015, p. 1.
  94. Taganrog Local Government 2012.
  95. ^ Полит 2015.
  96. Полякова et al. 1994, p. 3.
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Bibliography

External links

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