| This study focuses on the definitive role of homosexuality in the early poetry (1904-1914) of the Russian Silver Age poet, prosaist, and dramatist Mixail Kuzmin (1872-1936). By defining the homosexual imperative of the Kuzminian text according to historicist and lyrical criteria, rather than biographical and thematic, I suggest both its divergence from the norms of contemporary European and American Modernist homoerotic literature, and its place in the specifically Russian discourse of sexual difference in the Symbolist period. This dissertation enlists intertextual, post-structuralist, and historical readings to establish the accessibility and difference of the Kuzminian homosexual imperative.Chapter I, "The Atopia of Desire and the Figuration of the Body," elaborates generalized, atopic desire as textual motive, and the problematics of its specification as homosexual in Kuzmin's earliest poetry. An allegorical presentation of the Narcissus myth obliquely prefaces the lyric sexual self-disclosure which informs later autobiographical poems. Chapter II, "Solace in Nostalgia: Stylization and the Homoerotics of Culture," and Chapter III, "The Retreat from Transcendence," clarify how the Kuzminian text negotiates the pressures brought to bear on it by discursive precedents such as Hellenist erotics and Neo-Platonic mystic transcendence by asserting the desiring, suffering sexual body as the sole site of lyric and communal affirmation.Chapter IV, "The Discourse of Pothos," and Chapter V, "The Poems of Himeros," invoke Roland Barthes' distinction between desire for the absent being and desire for the present being to define the two expressive modes informing the poet's progress towards naming the specificity of his love, and overcoming its atopic origin in a new topography. The discourse of pothos engages the doxological decadent and dandified stereotypes, and exploits the iconic Other's absence to its own purpose of discursive reflexivity and verbal self-portraiture. The poems of himeros posit a socially affirmed reciprocity to the erotic relationship between male Lovers, and demystify the site of sexual fulfillment without losing sight of its metaphysical relevance. The concluding chapter, "Cosmography and the Hypostasis of the Homosexual Body," suggests the axiomatic function of the imperative in Kuzmin's metaphysically concerned later poetry. |
