GLR May-June 2025

ESSAY

Queer Modernism in Russia P AVEL G OLUBEV

T HE EARLY 20th-century avant-garde was pro foundly shaped by queer artists from the Russian Empire—painters, composers, choreographers, and writers whose work transformed modernism. Many of them, driven into exile by revolution, civil war, and the collapse of the Empire’s colo nial order, carried their new visions—whether overt or subtly encoded and infused with eroticism or reflections on identity and gender—to Europe and America. Modernist tendencies had been forming in Russia for decades, but it was the emergence of Mir Iskusstva (“World of Art”) in the late 1890s that crystallized a distinctive new æs thetic. It was a movement (and a magazine) defined by its fas cination with artifice, historical masquerade, and erotic ambiguity. Central to this project was Sergei Diaghilev (1872– 1929), a man of exceptional ambition and strategic instinct. He understood that Modernism’s establishment necessitated more than scattered experiments. It required a network of exhibitions, publications, and debates. Diaghilev’s closest collaborators came from his intimate circle. Dmitry Filosofov (1872–1940), later an influential critic, and Konstantin Somov (1869–1939), the son of a Her mitage Museum curator, were among the most prominent. Their artistic and intellectual influences were diverse. Somov was drawn to the sentimentalism of the 18th century—the world of Antoine Watteau and Jean Louis Prévost—while Filosofov engaged with contemporary Symbolist literature and the mystical philosophical ideas that were circulating in Russian intellectual circles. Russian Symbolism, in turn, was deeply shaped by the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), whose vision of love as a divine and redemp tive force placed it above conventional social structures, es tablishing a framework in which same-sex relationships could be seen as spiritually legitimate. Diaghilev was not just a promoter of Modernism but someone who shaped its direction through exhibitions, publica tions, and collaborations. In the second half of the 1890s, he made a name for himself as a curator, organizing several exhi bitions in Saint Petersburg and embarking on an extended tour of Europe. During this trip, he met Oscar Wilde, who was living in France after serving his prison sentence in England. Inspired by Wilde and by England’s The Studio magazine, which cham pioned æstheticism, Diaghilev and his collaborators founded Mir Iskusstva , a publication dedicated to contemporary international artistic culture and the newest trends in early Modernism. In addition to publishing, Mir Iskusstva became an active Pavel Golubev, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Slavic Studies, Univ. of Potsdam, specializes in the representation of sexual ity in 19th- and 20th-century Eastern European art.

society with a dual mission: to introduce Russia to the most pro gressive European artists and to promote the best young artists from the Russian Empire abroad. To achieve this, Diaghilev es tablished a special art bureau within the journal. Soon, exhibi tions in major European venues—Berlin and Vienna Secessions, the Salon d’Automne in Paris—featured emerging artists from Russia, many of whom were queer. One of them was Konstantin Somov, whose artistic persona was inseparable from his sexuality. Throughout his life, Somov lived openly as a gay man and channeled his gender discomfort into his art. His most recognizable figure was the lascivious Marquise—a recurring female protagonist in his paintings, sometimes endowed with Somov’s own facial features. The Marquise’s lovers often bore a striking resemblance to Somov’s real-life partners. His erotic masquerades, staged in the world of

Konstantin Somov. Portrait of Boris Snejkovsky.

the 18th century, circulated around gender, power, and desire. Somov’s art was immensely popular in Europe before World War I. His work reached a mass audience through Le Livre de la Marquise , an anthology of erotic literature first published in Munich in 1908. The book was reissued six times before 1923, not counting the numerous illegal editions that circulated into the following decades. However, due to the criminalization of homosexuality—both in Russia and in Europe—Somov’s art could not be openly discussed in these terms. Its gendered sub text was gradually forgotten for decades after World War II, both in the Soviet Union and in the West. Like Somov, many artists from Mir Iskusstva were capti vated by the art of earlier periods. By reinterpreting classical and mythological subjects, they could infuse their works with homoeroticism while avoiding direct confrontation with cen

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