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Tuesday Book: Mikhail, the Oscar Wilde of St Petersburg Mikhail Kuzmin: a life in art by John E Malmstad and Nikolay Bogomolov (Harvard University Press, pounds 30.95)

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From: The Independent - London
Date: 19991221
Author:Duncan Fallowell

MIKHAIL KUZMIN (1872-1936) is described on the book's jacket as "Russia's first openly gay writer". Indeed he could claim to be the first in any literature of modern times. The great literary precedents in male same-sex eroticism are, of course, Plato's Symposium, Shakespeare's sonnets and the samurai tales of Japan. More recently, Verlaine and Rimbaud in France and the Pater/Wilde/ Beardsley group in England began to confront the post-Renaissance taboo.

With Kuzmin's generation came the great wave of homosexual European writers: Proust, Gide, Lorca, Cavafy, Thomas Mann, Musil, Firbank, ...

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