Война полов, гомосексуальное письмо и (пост-)советский литературныйканон: 'Форель разбивает лед' (1927)

The paper considers sex and gender issues underlying Mikhail Kuzmin's longer poem 'The Trout Breaks the Ice'. In the Russian literary canon, Kuzmin has not obtained the high status he deserves because his openly gay writings are not acceptable either under homophobic Soviet law or by today's official anti-LGBT Russian mindset. Interestingly, despite the poet's notorious reputation, the homosexual core of 'The Trout' has been consistently ignored in most critical analyses. Nor has the other side of Kuzmin's homosexuality, his misogynism - also an important part of 'The Trout' - been discussed so far. Dissolved in rich intertextuality, symbols and rhetoric, it is responsible for the ambivalent portrayal of the heroine. She is a Psyche who patronizes the love between the two male protagonists but also a femme fatale who drives one of them, who becomes her lover, to death. Women were avenged later, in Anna Akhmatova's 'Poem without a Hero', a tribute to her 1920s romance with Ol'ga Glebova-Sudeikina, which was inspired literarily by a rivalry with Kuzmin, especially his 'Trout'. The poetess' inherent Lesbian agenda led to a covert reworking of Kuzmin's gay poetics, which was programmatically open about homosexual love being more rewarding and less tragic than heterosexual love. As the 'Poem's hidden real message has been ignored even by scholars for fear of diminishing Akhmatova's reputation, 'The Poem' succeeded in eclipsing Kuzmin's more genuine and artistically daring portrayal of bisexual triangular love that flourished in the Silver Age.