Symbolism, Sensuality, and the Space In-Between: Contextualizing the Queer Expression of Mikhail Kuzmin in Russia’s Fin de Siècle

After the Revolution of 1905, the Russian political and cultural landscape became extremely chaotic. Aesthetically, by the fin de siècle, the Realist “Golden Age” of Russian literature had been replaced by the “Silver Age,” known for its embrace of Symbolism. The Russian Symbolist movement, while short lived and often literature-focused, found inspiration in the gray area created between Realist and nascent Symbolist tropes. The chaos of the Revolution of 1905 led to the “Old Order” of Russian music being uprooted and space for queer artistic experimentation began to open within the milieu of modernist fears of degeneration and societal collapse. The aesthetic chaos caused by both the material conditions of St. Petersburg and the philosophical debates that they ignited provide the context to understand the work of the queer poet and musician Mikhail Kuzmin. In the gray areas created by economic, social, political, and artistic upheaval, spaces for Kuzmin’s queer indulgence in works such as Wings (1906), The Chimes of Love (1908), and The Trout Breaks the Ice (1927) are presented. Kuzmin’s artistic aim in these works is to express queer beauty and love within an environment of fear and loathing and to find self-acceptance in the space between traditionalism and sensuality, obfuscation and confession, and mysticism and realism.