Although she was married once briefly (to pacify her parents), she declared, “I never was in love with a man.” Parnok had been involved in a five-year relationship with another woman and was an open lesbian when she met Marina Tsvetaeva and other artists and writers who mentored her in poetry. Her friend and fellow poet Vladislav Khodasevich described her as
Average in height, on the short side, with fair hair, parted on the side and tied back in a bun, a pale face which seemed like it had never been young. Sophia Yakovlevna was not very good-looking. But there was something charming and unexpectedly noble about her gray, protruding, attentive eyes, about her intense Lermontov-like look, about the turn of her head, slightly supercilious, about her soft, quite deep voice. Her opinions were independent, her speech direct.
In addition to identifying with the antitraditionalism of the age, Parnok held to a very traditional Russian background and foundation but coupled it with her own queer view. She believed Russia was feminine while Europe was masculine. She was Jewish yet she leaned toward Orthodox Christianity and other spiritual imagery in her poetry. The legacy of the great nineteenth century romantic poets—Pushkin, the lyric poet Tyutchev, and Karolina Pavlova, a Romantic woman poet—was a strong influence on her artistic sensibility. The newer currents of her time emphasizing the feminine and the soul and even revolutionary politics all impacted her.
But Sappho… She learned about Sappho, the lesbian icon from Ivanov’s popular translations published in 1914. Sappho’s life and poetry validated Parnok and her writing. Besides feeling a connection with Sappho as the mother of lesbians, Parnok herself became a kind of Sappho herself, later in life living in the Crimea near the sea and surrounded by her women friends and ex-lovers. Many lines reminiscent of Sappho resound in Parnok’s poetry, as scholars have pointed out.
One of the biggest influences on Parnok was Marina Tsvetaeva who was on the threshold of becoming one of Russia’s greatest poets when they met. Their two-year passionate relationship began when they attended a literary salon in Moscow, at the home of their mutual friend Adelaida Gertsyk. Tsvetaeva, who was only twenty-two at the time and a married woman with a child, was immediately taken with the unusual Sophia Parnok, whose masculine air and assuredness about her lesbian identity attracted her. Soon after Sophia, also known as Sonya, also fell in love with Marina, an acquaintance wrote: “Sonya and Marina are an item in Moscow. They are inseparable.” Their affair was renowned among friends in artistic circles. It was loving and stormy, and they parted ostensibly because of Sonya’s wandering eye, but perhaps also because of differing views about relationships. Marina wrote “Girlfriend,” a cycle of poems dedicated to this important moment in her sexual life that speaks more of her sexuality than her other writings. We can only guess from their writings that Marina and Sonya’s intimacy had a strong impact on both of them. Parnok’s biographer, Diana Burgin, claims that Sophia suffered no less than Marina over the demise of their relationship—a photograph of Marina was near her bedside at the time of Sophia’s death.
In the mid-1920s, after the new revolutionary government took hold in Soviet Russia, officials launched a drive against lyric poets. The country was under tremendous pressure during the transition just to feed the population. At the time Sophia was living in Sudak in the Crimea, where she had connected with another alternative artistic circle, Maximilian Voloshin’s, which Marina Tsvetaeva had also frequented and where they had been a couple in 1915. The official party line was that lyric poetry made no contribution to the new revolutionary life in Russia because it focused too much on the personal and the spiritual. Many lyric poets, including the much-revered Anna Akhmatova, were silenced, not always officially but through exclusion. Parnok was one of these and her relationships with women did not help her reputation.
As in much of the country, life in Sudak after the 1917 revolution, was not easy. Food was hard to come by and people were dying of famine and tuberculosis and other illnesses and problems that could not be addressed because of the transition and the blockade by Western nations. In an attempt to get everyone on board, the new local militias arrested innocent people. Parnok and her friend Adelaida Gertsyk were imprisoned for a few months for “not supporting the government.” It was after this and after contracting tuberculosis, that Parnok went back to Moscow, thinking it might be easier to survive there. All the while she wrote, not only poetry but essays and a play, Almast. She believed in the spiritual power of creativity and knew it was necessary to her, like food.
Parnok published several books of poetry, but no more after 1928. The situation for everyone grew worse under Stalin who relegated artists, marginalized people, homosexuals, and anyone who suspected of opposing him, to prison camps. He even had many executed. The number of people sentenced to hard labor in the Soviet gulag over the next twenty five years was in the millions, all shrouded in secrecy and NKVD intrigue. For example, to this day it is not clear whether the thirty-year-old renowned bisexual poet Sergey Esenin was killed by the secret police or hung himself. Gay poet Mikhail Kuzmin’s lover Yurkun was arrested twice and executed the second time after Kuzmin’s death because of his association with the well known and open poet.
Toward the latter part of her life, Parnok said: “Now I look at poetry as just a means of communication with people. I am happy there is an eternal language, beyond time, in which I can explain myself, and in which I can sometimes find words everyone can understand.”
How do we know of Parnok today if she was silenced? In 1979, when it was still impossible to publish Parnok in Soviet Russia, a professor of Byzantine and classical literature at Leningrad University, Sophia Polyakova, took great risks to research, collect, and finally publish—in the U.S.—an annotated edition of Parnok’s poems. In addition, in 1983 an amazing book documenting Tsvetaeva’s and Parnok’s lesbian poems and their lesbian relationship, Sunset Days of Yore [Zakatnye ony dni: Tsvetaeva i Parnok] was published by Ardis Press in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The material was smuggled across the Soviet Union’s border and it traveled by a kind of underground railroad to its own “coming out.” It was only after the publication of the Russian Sunset Days of Yore in Michigan that Parnok’s work became available to Russian speakers through samizdat circles. The book also made clear the fact of Parnok’s and Tsvetaeva’s sexual orientations and their relationship. This queer reading of Tsvetaeva, and of same-sex love, had never before been discussed by a Russian national. It was revolutionary.
During my initial travels to Russia in the early 1990s, I began to read more of Marina Tsvetaeva’s work with a queer eye, not having seen Polyakova’s book. Back home in California, U.C. Berkeley professor Simon Karlinsky, gay scholar and Tsvetaeva expert, became a friend. His inspiration was key in learning about Polyakova’s work, as well as Tsvetaeva and Parnok. Simon told me he had a hand in getting Polyakova’s book published by Ardis. We talked about Parnok and Tsvetaeva as if they were famous neighbors. I read with relish his own book on Tsvetaeva, the first important study of this poet, and we talked about other queer Russian writers.