Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (1872–1936)

This collection, compiled and translated by Michael Green, who taught Russian literature at UC Irvine, contains the short novel Wings and the play The Venetian madcaps, as well as a dozen or so short stories and several poems.

Wings(1906) sets the tone for the rest of the book: young men who are mysteriously reluctant to fall in love with eligible girls, oddly close to their male friends/servants, and keep a bust of Antinous in their living-rooms (apparently this was before the fashion for Michelangelo's David). Bright, apparently inconsequential drawing-room chatter, usually at cross-purposes. Trips to the opera to see Tristan. Knowing allusions to Tchaikovsky. Holidays on the Volga. Short, inconclusive scenes, little or no linking narrative or description. All very fin-de-siècle. But much more upbeat and joyful than similar works by English and German-speaking contemporaries. Fun in Venice, rather than Death there.

Kuzmin doesn't actually get to be sexually explicit, but even when his characters are too obtuse to notice what's going on in front of their noses, he makes sure that we understand that this is all about men falling in love with other men and (sooner or later) going to bed together. He doesn't see any need to defend or to condemn that. Apparently the Russian censor (at least before the revolution) was too busy looking for political subversion to waste time on mere sexual hi-jinks.

The short stories mostly develop similar plots to Wings, sometimes shifting to female narrators or moving the scene from modern Petersburg to classical antiquity or 18th century Venice.

Fish-scales in the net is a short collection of aphorisms or epigrams inspired by Kuzmin's reading, designed to look like random jottings from a notebook, but presumably actually prepared for publication by Kuzmin himself.

The Venetian madcaps (1912) is a bizarre musical farce, with a plot that draws on Figaro, Don Giovanni, commedia dell'arte and Shakespearean cross-dressing. The Count is in love with his friend Narcisetto(!), the Marquise is planning a tableau vivant in which her maid Maria will appear nude as Venus, and at least two young women are, separately, plotting to seduce the Count. For some reason, everyone has to dress up as everyone else in the second act, and it's anyone's guess what happens. Green's real interest seems to be the theatre, and this is by far the most natural-sounding translation in the collection. It also comes with a set of black-and-white reproductions of costume designs (presumably by Kuzmin himself?).

Of the poems, the autobiographical cycle The trout breaks the ice (1928) looks as though it should be the most interesting, but I found it very difficult to read in Green's translation. It's hard to know when rhyme-schemes and metres come and go in the middle of a section whether that's a deliberate effect of the poem, or the translator simply failing to keep up. The "Alexandrian Songs", mostly in free verse, seem to work much better.

I read this in a 2013 reprint of the original edition from 1980. It looks as though some of the ludicrously large number of typographical errors might be the result of the reprinting process, but that surely can't account for the way Green's footnotes end a short way into Wings and never resume. Especially in the piece Fish-scales in the net, it would have been useful not to need to Google all the names Kuzmin drops in passing. It's particularly irritating that there's no summary anywhere of when and how the individual pieces were first published: some of the information is there in Green's introduction, but other items are mentioned nowhere at all.

Also, even in 1980, the editor of a collection likely to be bought mostly by readers with an interest in LGBT literature isn't doing himself any favours with his audience by going on about "the word 'gay', so widely used in our day, and often so inappropriately". Astonishing that the publishers didn't think to delete this quite irrelevant reactionary whinge in the new edition.… (altro)

J'ai moyennement aimé ce livre. Tout le côté description des sentiments, de l'attirance du jeune héros pour un homme plus mûr, anglais, charismatique est très très bien écrit et décrit car l'auteur envisage tout une gamme de sentiments, sans être péremptoire ou consensuel. On se sent proche de Vania.

Le roman est soft et plutôt évocateur et dans la suggestion que dans la description crue (Kouzmine avec ses Ailes n'est pas Oscar Wilde dans Teleny). Pourtant le roman est très osé surtout dans sa fin, dans le fait que l'auteur donne à Vania le pouvoir de se rendre compte par lui-même de ses sentiments sans tenir compte de son milieu ou de son environnement social.

Ce qui a gâché ma lecture, c'est la construction du roman en courtes scènes, très détachée les unes des autres, rendant difficiles une lecture continue car il faut sans cesse se réadapter (et cela j'ai du mal dans la vie comme dans les livres). C'est encore plus difficile ici car j'ai eu énormément de mal à mémoriser tous les noms (il y a beaucoup de personnages qui peuvent réapparaître après plusieurs dizaines de pages sans n'avoir rien fait de mémorable pendant leur première apparition).

C'est pour cela que je suis un peu déçue par cette lecture.… (altro)