Looking back over a century later, it is difficult to fathom Kuzmin’s courage; he shocked the system. Nothing like it had ever been published, not in the West and not in Russia. As print runs sold out the book was immediately reissued. Also difficult to fathom is the relative ease with which gay artists were allowed to live their lives and envision their possibilities in prerevolutionary Russia. With the crumbling of the czarist empire, and before Soviet repression took hold, we see a flowering of artistic daring and a measure of sexual freedom. But even so, Kuzmin’s daring humbles this writer, and ought to inspire us all.

That you’ve probably never heard Kuzmin’s name is testament to the soviet regime’s success in erasing gay contributions to the arts in Russia. For decades Kuzmin’s archives were strictly off limits to western scholars due to the “intimacy” of his diaries, which include delightful descriptions of St. Petersburg’s gay and literary society in the Silver Age, from musings on poetic influence to bathhouse experience (here’s just a taste, from a bathhouse encounter dated Dec. 23rd, 1905: “I was in that kind of terribly stupid but not unpleasant situation, when you know that both of you know something, but are keeping silent. He stared straight at me, motionless, with a kind of mermaid look, not quite drunkenly, not quite insanely, almost terrifyingly, but when he began to wash me there was no room for doubt.”) If literary history were more just, the diaries would be fully translated, published, and widely read, and the name Mikhail Kuzmin would be as familiar to Out readers as Oscar Wilde, Andre Gide, or Gore Vidal.