GLR May-June 2025

let L’Après-midi d’un faune , performed in Paris in 1912. The production scandalized audiences with its open depiction of sexual desire—during its peak, the faun, portrayed by Vaslav Nijinsky (1889–1950), reached his climax on stage while rubbing against a scarf. But these fantasies of ancient Greece had already been rehearsed years earlier in Saint Petersburg, in the salons of the Mir Iskusstva circle. The flowing, semi transparent costumes of Scheherazade , another of Bakst’s creations, originated from these gatherings, where clothing was reimagined as a vehicle of erotic self-expression. Diaghilev’s theatrical enterprise also became a magnet for other queer artists. His productions featured contributions from figures as diverse as Jean Cocteau, Serge Lifar, Mau rice Ravel, Francis Poulenc, and Ida Rubinstein. Through his work, Diaghilev also introduced Western audiences to an other of Russia’s great gay artists: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), whom he called “my dear uncle.” Diaghilev willingly hired young homosexual artists, dancers, and writers. Among them was Sergey Nabokov (1900–1945), the openly gay younger brother of the writer Vladimir Nabokov, who worked on librettos for Diaghilev’s ballet productions. Another key figure was Pavel Tche litchew (1898–1957), a painter and stage designer who, after studying in Kyiv with the Ukrainian Cubist artist Olexandra Exter (1882–1949), traveled to Germany specifically to meet Diaghilev and to work with him. While their collaboration was cut short by Diaghilev’s death in 1929, it was a formative ex perience for Tchelitchew, whose later work in Paris and New York explored surreal, dreamlike representations of the body. Many artists associated with Diaghilev’s circle continued to shape queer æsthetics long after he was gone. Tchelitchew, for instance, influenced Salvador Dalí in France in the 1920s and ’30s and David Hockney, Pierre Klossowski, and Francis Bacon in the U.S. in the 1940s. As queer artists discovered new opportunities in exile, the situation within Soviet Russia was shifting toward increasing repression. Several years after the Revolution in 1917, there was a brief period of decriminalization, and the first Soviet Crimi nal Code did not include penalties for homosexuality, and in some cases same-sex unions were informally recognized. How ever, by the mid-1930s, Stalinist policies had imposed a con servative model onto Soviet society, and the legal persecution of homosexuality was reinstated in 1934. This criminalization re mained in place until the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the law still active in some post-Soviet states today. The ideologi cal shift also extended to cultural policy: what had once been tolerated or merely ignored now became subject to censorship, erasure, or persecution. Some, however, found ways to navigate the shifting land scape. One of the most enigmatic cases is that of Alexander Niko layev, also known as Usto Mumin (1897–1957). A Russian-born artist who settled in Central Asia in the early 1920s, Nikolayev was captivated by the æsthetics and sexual freedoms of Uzbek istan. Living in Samarkand, the artist adopted a new identity and immersed himself in the region’s artistic traditions, producing works that reflected both Islamic influences and homoerotic themes. His paintings often depicted the bachas—the Uzbek boy dancers. While his work managed to survive, he was arrested in 1938 during Stalin’s purges, exiled to a labor camp for several 28

Daniel Stepanov. Garçon-batcha , 1923. Private collection.

years, and only later allowed to return to artistic activity. Another figure connected to both the Russian avant-garde and the queer underground was Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (1878–1939), best known for his painting Bathing of a Red Horse (1912), which depicts a slender, nude young man riding bareback. The image, an iconic symbol of early 20th-century Russian art, has often been read in political terms as a premonition of revolutionary change. However, some scholars have pointed to its homoerotic under tones, as depicting an idealized vision of the male body. Despite state repression, traces of queer Modernism per sisted in Soviet art and literature, often in ways that required careful reading. Diaries and private letters provide glimpses into the lives of artists whose public works had to conform to ideo logical expectations. However, much of the documentation sur rounding queer figures remains lost or inaccessible, whether due to deliberate censorship, destruction of the documents, or hiding them from view in the archives. Nevertheless, recent dis coveries continue to reshape our understanding of queer lives within the Russian avant-garde. For instance, new archival ev idence has revealed that Daniil Stepanov (1881–1937) had a ro mantic relationship with the German artist Sascha Schneider (1870–1927) during their time in Italy in the early 1900s. Stepanov later lived in Samarkand, where he worked alongside Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin and Alexander Nikolayev on the preser vation of medieval architecture. The artists of Mir Iskusstva, the Ballets Russes, and the wider avant-garde from the Russian Empire left a lasting im print on world Modernism. While often obscured by censorship and historical amnesia, their contributions shaped the æsthetic language of the 20th century. As new research continues to bring their stories to light, their legacy remains an essential part of Modernist history, awaiting further rediscovery. Readers interested in the intersection of queerness and Modernism in the Russian imperial and Soviet eras can read Dan Healey’s Homosex ual Desire in Revolutionary Russia (2001) and Alexander Etkind’s Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (1997).

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