1. S. Poliakova, “Vstupitel'naia stat'ia,” in Sofiia Parnok, Sobranie stikhotvorenii (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979) 310, n. 8. This and all subsequent English translations from Russian originals including Parnok's letters and poems are my own.

2. “Takoi golos, kak moi,” see passage from Parnok's letter to Eugenia Gertsyk of 11 January 1926, quoted by Poliakova, 27.

3. Sofiia Parnok, Sobranie stikhotvorenii No. 225, 237. Parnok's poems quoted in this article come from this edition of her Collected Poems unless otherwise noted and will be referenced by their number in that volume, given in parentheses after the quotation.

4. In the pre-revolutionary period Parnok was probably better known in Moscow literary circles as a lesbian than as a poet. For evidence of this see one contemporary's reminiscence of Parnok and her lover, Marina Tsvetaeva, at a Moscow party in 1915, cited by Veronika Losskaia in Marina Tsvetaeva v zhizni: neizdannye vaspominaniia sovremennikov (Tenafly, NJ: Ermitazh, 1989) 150. In the early to mid-twenties Parnok read her poems regularly in various literary circles (the Moscow Poets’ Artel, Nikitina's Saturdays, the small circle which met at Petr Nikanorovich Zaitsev's). In her own circle which met at her apartment on Tverskaia-Iamskaia Street she was “celebrated” in an unpublished parody by M. Vazlinskii (copy provided me by Poliakova) as a “true daughter of Lesbos” who “embodied the deed of the girlfriend of girlfriends [Sappho]” in the twentieth century (Blazhen, kto v stolet'e 20-m / Podvig podrugi podrug mog na Iamskoi voplotit'.) This suggests that Parnok's lesbian lyrics were politically suspect in the early days of Soviet power. Finally, a homophobic and anti-Semitic comment at the end of a letter from Boris Zaitsev to Ivan Bunin and his wife (8 September 1933) provides more evidence of Parnok's “notoriety” as a lesbian. It also illustrates the lack of a vocabulary in Russian for dealing straightforwardly with lesbianism and the combination of prejudice and sympathy in the letterwriter. Zaitsev is responding to the news of Parnok's death and has referred to her as “one of us” (nash chelovek): “Evidently she had a church funeral although she was a Jew by blood (and by certain psychological ‘deviations’ [uklonchiki]).” My thanks to Professor John Malmstad for drawing Zaitsev's letter to my attention; it was published in Novyi zhurnal, kn. 149 (1982): 129-30.

5. Nineteenth century German and English sexologists provoked this controversy when they advanced the theory that homosexuality was a physical, not moral condition, an inversion rather than a perversion. On one hand these theories liberated homosexuals from the stigma of sin, but on the other hand they encouraged the notion that they were unfortunate freaks of nature. For information on theories of lesbianism in Russia, see Laura Engelstein, “Lesbian Vignettes: A Russian Triptych'from the 1890's,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15, no. 4 (Summer 1990). The Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (St. Petersburg, 1896) defines “Lesbian love” (Lesbiiskaia liubov’) in purely sexual terms and pejoratively as “a form of perversion of sexual feeling, an unnatural attraction of a woman for another woman” (27A: 590).

6. It is difficult to identify Russian lesbian writers because they were heavily closeted. Simon Karlinsky (in “Russia's Gay Literature and History [llth-20th centuries],” Gay Sunshine, no. 29/30) mentions Poliksena Solovyova, Zinaida Gippius, Liudmila Vil'kina-Minskaia, the bisexual Zinovieva-Annibal and, of course, Parnok. Losskaia's unnamed informant (see note 4) refers to Marina Tsvetaeva as “une lesbienne classique” in the period when she and Parnok were lovers (1914-1916). Sophia Poliakova first revealed this love affair and its literary offshoots in Zakatnye ony dni: Tsvetaeva i Parnok (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1983).

7. See Glendinning, Victoria, Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983)Google Scholar. On the literary and romantic relationship between Natalie Clifford Barney and Renee Vivien, see Jay, Karla, The Amazon and the Page (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988 Google Scholar; on expatriot women and lesbian writers of the belle epoque in Paris, Benstock, Shari, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986 Google Scholar.

8. For a comprehensive theoretical discussion of autobiography as a genre see Jane Gary Harris's introduction in Autobiographical Statements in Twentieth Century Russian Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). Jane Taubman deals with what she argues is the “lyric diary” of Tsvetaeva's poetry in her very interesting book, A Life Through Poetry: Marina Tsvetaeva's Lyric Diary (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1988).

9. Parnok's last (incomplete) poem, a fragmentary four-line stanza, was whispered by the poet to her lover, Vedeneeva shortly before the poet died (see Poliakova, 36), so one could say that Parnok wrote her own death into her life, albeit a death without closure.

10. Parnok wrote three poems on the theme of “how to tell”: the first was composed in 1906 and never published; the second, a shorter version of the first, appeared inProtalina, vyp. I, Spring 1907; the third, which links lesbian sexuality with the creative problem of how to write about what is essentially inexpressible, appeared in Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh, ]\xne 1910. The theme of expressing the inexpressible is hardly new with Parnok whose immersion in it was part of her engagement with Tiutchev, probably the Russian poet closest to her as Poliakova demonstrates in her “Introduction.” Like everything Parnok wrote about, however, her concern with finding words to express what she really wanted to say had its source in her own experience and thought, specifically, in my opinion, her lesbian experience.

11. Poliakova has the following note on the identity of the “mastityi master” in No. 203 which, according to the date of composition in the manuscript, was written in March 1926: “The supposition that Briusov is the addressee is hardly possible since the poet is obviously referring to someone living .. . and Briusov died in 1924. One can only think that Parnok, as often happens with her, was mistaken in her dating of the poem since it is hard to imagine who other than Briusov she could have had in mind” (352).

12. The notion of a “lesbian continuum” comes from Adrienne Rich's “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” first published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 4 (1980), reprinted in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, edited by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983).

13. Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing A Woman's Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988).

14. From a handwritten copy of “Zhizn'” in a notebook of Parnok's early unpublished verse generously provided me by Sophia Poliakova.

15. I am indebted for this insight to Professor Katherine T. O'Connor.

16. It is very possible that Parnok's mood shifts and emotional excitability had a physiological and medical source in the Graves's Disease from which she suffered for much of her life. She exhibited other symptoms of hyperthyroidism including slight exophthalmia, a rapid heartbeat (mentioned in several of her poems) and eventually, heart disease.

17. For the lesbian feminist definitions of Lesbian, Archimage, Elements, Wisdom, Wild and Be-musing as I employ them in this article see Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language, conjured by Mary Daly in cahoots with Jane Caputi (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987) 63, 65, 73, 100.

18. Like so many of Parnok's poems No. 157's date of composition is unknown (the poet included it in Music [Muzyka], 1926, which contains poems written from 1916 to 1925). It was, however, written no later than October 1922 and no earlier than 1916. The details of the narrator-poet's situation in the poem seem to replicate Parnok's in late spring 1917: she was in a depressed mood, ill and planning to leave Moscow and spend the summer in the Crimea, that is, the general area of her childhood home.

19. Ample evidence of Parnok's sexual awakening and its providing the impetus for her adolescent creative surge can be found in the extant remnants of her juvenilia (1900-1903), contained in two, unpublished notebooks that the young poet compiled. This material is currently in the possession of the poet's nephew Parnakh. I have studied it in a handwritten copy given to me by Poliakova.

20. I have done a detailed analysis of No. 95, “Contexts and Reverberations of Sophia Parnok's Journey from her ‘Father's Threshold’ (An Analysis of ‘Otchego ot otchego poroga’),” for the Festschrift in honor of Professor Vladimir Markov now in preparation.

21. In a 1906 letter to Wolkenstein Parnok gave the ironic, non-reason reason forher adoption of her pen name as her hatred of the letter “kh” (see Poliakova, 309, n. 3). Svetlana Boym discusses some possible implications of Parnok's pseudonym in her recent article “Dialogue as ‘Lyrical Hermaphroditism': Mandel'shtam's challenge to Bakhtin” (Slavic Review, Spring 1991). She notes that the name “Parnok” lacks a clear nationality, “it is definitely not Russian, but not blatantly Jewish either” (121), thus implying that the poet may have been trying to mask her Jewish origins. (Boym mistakenly assumes that Parnok's original name was Parnakh (her brother's pseudonym), not realizing that it too is a pen name. Strangely, Parnok's brother Valentin changed his father's name by only one letter also.) I agree with Poliakova that whatever reasons Parnok had for her choice of a pen name, they probably did not reveal a desire to hide her Jewishness (see Poliakova's note 3, 309) and would add to Poliakova's arguments the fact that Parnok published for several years, even after her divorce, under the hyphenated name “Parnok-Wolkenstein.” I would also like to note that although the name “Parnok” is generally stressed on the first syllable in Russian, as is the name Parnokh, the poet, according to Poliakova's informants who knew her, stressed the last syllable in pronouncing her chosen name.

22. Parnok broke off relations with her father after she left home in 1907 but there is some evidence to suggest that her inner struggle with her father continued until she died. Her friend Olga Tsuberbiller, with whom she lived from the midtwenties, recounted the following: “On her last day, the 25th of August [1933], Sophia Yakovlevna was fully conscious, and realizing the hopelessness of her situation, she became depressed and kept repeating one and the same thing: ‘Papa, papa, what is this. I really am dying. Papa, papa.’ (Papochka, papochka, chto zhe eto takoe. Ved’ ia umiraiu. Papochka, papochka.) Towards night she lost consciousness and died on 26 August at 11: 30 a.m.” (Included in Lev Gornung, “Recollections,” unpublished typescript, 1974, page 2 of the section entided “Olga Tsuberbiller's Account of Sophia Parnok's Last Days.” A copy of Gornung's reminiscences was made available to me by Poliakova in June 1987.

23. The poet says her “ear took wing” only when her “heavy blood boiled off’ (77). This, one concludes from several other poems, was her father's passionate blood that had kept her in a” hot captivity,” her “Egypt” (94).

24. Eugenia Gertsyk (1881P-1944) was a translator, critic, memoirist and author of a study on Edgar Allen Poe. Parnok lived next door to her in Sudak and remained close friends with her for the rest of her (Parnok's) life. Poliakova notes that Parnok called Gertsyk a sibyl because of the latter's “learnedness and wisdom” (332). It is not coincidental that the homeland of Parnok's soul (Sudak) was not so far from her geographical hometown (Taganrog). The poet draws attention to the similar musics ( “cicadas’ chirrs” ) of her body's and soul's birthplaces. Yet while her biological mother's labor sounded a hellish “music of fire” (85), the ministrations of her “godmother” (77) sang of “cool grapes,” “a sacred eucharist” (77).

25. When preparing At Half Voice (1928) for publication, Parnok was told by thecensor to remove the verb “rebel” (buntovat’) from No. 186 in the lines: “that there's no time to live, / and no time to rebel” (chto zhit'—nekogda, / i buntovat’ nekogda). Parnok changed “to rebel” to “to love” (liubit’) which suggests that she viewed rebellion as a political act in the personal as well as social realm, and virtually a synonym for loving.

26. The relationship between Sappho and Parnok is too complex and important to deal with briefly. I am currently working on an in-depth study of it in my book-inprogress on Parnok, and I treat aspects of it in my essay, “Laid Out In Lavender: Perceptions of Lesbian Love in Russian Literature and Criticism of the Silver Age 1893-1917” in Sexuality and the Body In Russian Culture, edited by Costlow, Sandler and Vowles, forthcoming from Stanford University Press.

27. Parnok seems to have written in her lyrics, before the fact, several chapters ofAmong Women by Louise Bernikow (New York: Harmony Books, 1980). Bernikow's “Mothers and Daughters,” “Sisters,” “Friends” and “Lovers” could serve as “headings” for groups of poems in Parnok's lyrical lesbian life where the poet treats the same relationships.

28. Poliakova provides no notes for No. 71 and gives the impression that it was first published in Roses ofPieria in 1922. In fact, the poem first appeared with the title “Sapphic Stanzas” (Saficheskie strofy) in Severnye zapiski, no. 9 (1916) and then was republished in the later collection of anthological poems.