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Lot 77A

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KUZMIN, Mikhail Alekseevich (1872-1936). Krylya. P

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Moscow: "Skorpion," 1908. Second edition. 112 pp., 8vo (200 x 165 mm). Original decorated salmon wrappers designed by Nikolai Petrovich Feofilaktov. Condition: wrappers partially split with occasional soiling, back wrapper with ink mark and small chip to lower corner; backstrip with three small horizontal cracks and slight chipping to head and tail. russia's first openly gay classic by the 'northern wilde.' The liberating influence of the Revolution of 1905 encouraged the first flowering of gay literature in Russia. First published as the entire No. 11 of the leading modernist literary journal Vesy [The Scales] in November 1906, Krylya followed works by Oscar Wilde and André Gide as the first important novel in Russian literature to deal openly with homosexuality. This "coming out" novel describes a student's relationship with his classics professor who frequents a gay bathhouse and the young man's growing awareness and acceptance of his sexuality. The Beardsleyesque wrappers were the work of N. P. Feofilaktov (1878-1941), a Symbolist artist who belonged to Blaue rose [Blue Rose] and Mir Iskusstva [World of Art] groups and was a frequent contributor to Vesy. At the time muzhelozhstvo (anal intercourse between men) was illegal in Russia so the suggestiveness of the novel shocked many readers. Kuzmin was accused of being a "sexual provocateur," and a "psychopath"; his "pornographic" novel suffered from a "vulgar lack of taste" and it dared to "propagandize this unnatural vice openly" and "idealize it." Maxim Gorky complained that Kuzmin was "evidently a semi-literate who cannot write coherently and who is unfamiliar with the Russian language--and he presumably is the creator a new culture!" Not surprisingly, Leon Trotsky too denounced Kuzmin's "anarchism of the flesh"; and Valdimir Nabokov's 1930 novel Soglyadatai [The Eye] is a parody of Krylya. Although relatively chaste by modern standards, some critics have considered Krylya to be a milestone in the history of Western literature. Aleksandr Blok, for one, called the novel "marvelous" and publicly defended Kuzmin against the "guardians of journalistic morality." The first officially registered gay organization in Russia was named Krylya after Kuzmin's novel.

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