Sophia Yakovlevna Parnok (, ; 30 July 1885 O.S./11 August 1885 (N.S.) – 26 August 1933) was a Russian poet, journalist and translator. From the age of six, she wrote poetry in a style quite distinct from the predominant poets of her times, revealing instead her own sense of Russianness, Jewish identity and lesbianism. Besides her literary work, she worked as a journalist under the pen name of Andrei Polianin. She has been referred to as "Russia's Sappho", as she wrote openly about her seven lesbian relationships.
Sonya Yakovlevna Parnokh was born into a well-to-do family of professional Jews in a provincial city outside the Pale of Settlement. Her mother died after giving birth to her twin siblings and she was raised by her father and her step-mother, leaving her feeling her childhood lacked emotional support. From a young age, she wrote poetry and acknowledged her uniqueness—her lesbianism, her Graves' disease, and her religion—which set her apart from her peers.
Completing her studies at the Mariinskaya Gymnasium, in 1905 Parnok moved to Geneva and attempted to study music, but lacked any real drive and quickly returned to Moscow. To distance herself from her father's control and her financial dependence on him, she published her first book of poems in 1906 under the pseudonym Sophia Parnok and married Vladimir Volkenstein in 1907. Within two years, the marriage failed and she began working as a journalist.
From 1913, Parnok exclusively had relationships with women and used those love relationships to fuel her creativity. In a succession of relationships with Marina Tsvetaeva, Lyudmila Erarskaya, Olga Tsuberbiller, Maria Maksakova and Nina Vedeneyeva, her muses propelled her to publish five collections of poetry and write several librettos for opera, before her disease claimed her life in 1933.
Her poetry was banned after 1928, and her work almost forgotten until 1979 when her collected works were published for the first time. While scholars have focused on her early influential relationship with Tsvetaeva, her best works are now recognized as those written from 1928.
Early life and education Sonya Yakovlevna Parnokh was born on 11 August 1885, in the city of Taganrog to Alexandra Abramovna (née Idelson) () and (). Taganrog was outside the Pale of Settlement and had never experienced the Pogroms which had arisen in other regions of the Russian Empire. Her father was a Jewish pharmacist and the owner of an apothecary. Her mother was a physician, one of the first women doctors in the empire. The oldest of three children, Parnokh, was the only one to have been raised by her mother, as Alexandra died shortly after giving birth to her twins Valentin, known as "Valya", and Yelizaveta, known as "Liza". The family was intellectual and taught by their father at home until ready to enter gymnasium or secondary school. From a young age, they were taught to read and received training in French and German, as well as music. Parnokh and her brother both wrote poetry from childhood; she began writing at age six and he, at the age of nine. Valentin would later introduce jazz to Russia and Yelizaveta became a noted author of children's literature.
Shortly after Alexandra's death, Yakov remarried with the children's German governess. While they materially were brought up in comfort, the children had little emotional support from their step-mother. As a result, Parnokh felt that she had been forced to grow up too fast and did not have a childhood. In 1894, she entered the Mariinskaya Gymnasium and from this period, began writing profusely, producing around 50 poems which are representative of her juvenilia. Unlike her brother's teenage writings, Parnokh's works from the period do not reflect influences of the decadent or symbolist artists who were prolific at this time. Instead, her work explored her feelings, burgeoning lesbianism, and fantasies with a more psychological, than artistic purpose. Through her poetry, she became unperturbed by disapproval and seemed to accept her lesbianism as an innate trait that made her unique and different. In addition, she suffered from Graves' disease, which affected her looks and made her feel increasingly unusual, as did her intense identification with both Russia and her Jewishness—a position not shared by her father's indifference to his religion nor her brother's loathing of Russia and the antisemitism he faced.
In 1902, Parnokh spent the summer in Crimea, where she had her first real romance with Nadezhda "Nadya" Pavlovna Polyakova, her muse for the next five years. From this point on, a pattern of muse-lovers was established which would fuel Parnokh's creativity throughout her career. Her devotion was not steadfast and though Nadya inspired Parnokh, as with other lovers, she was not monogamous. As she approached her graduation, Parnokh and her father's relationship became increasingly strained. His disapproval of her failure to apply herself seriously to her writing and to her lesbianism brought them into conflict. She graduated with the gold medal (equivalent to the western designation summa cum laude) in May 1903. Where she lived for the next two years is unknown, but because of later references to having lived in Moscow as a teenager under the patronage of Yekaterina Geltzer, a prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet, it is probable that at least part of that time was spent there.
Shortly before the 1905 Revolution, Parnokh was baptised into the Russian Orthodox faith. Her writings from this period reflect a new interest in religion and an exploration of Christianity. It was not unusual during this time of crisis for the Russian Jewish intelligentsia to convert, in an effort to foster a nationalist aim, rather than as a disavowal of their faith. In 1905, Parnokh convinced her father that she wanted to study music in Geneva. While studying at the Geneva Conservatory, she began a correspondence with Vladimir Volkenstein, a young poet, and later playwright, who had expressed an interest in her poetry. The two were compatible in temperament and their disdain for symbolism, and she found in Volkenstein a partner who was not bothered by her sexuality, instead judging her works as allegorical and abstract. At the end of the year, she made a trip to Florence, Italy and though she returned to Geneva, her enrollment in the Conservatory was brief; by spring 1906, she had returned to Moscow to live with Nadya Polyakova. The instability caused by the revolution and her inability to find a publisher forced Parnokh to return to her father's home in Taganrog in June. Her father's refusal to welcome her and his reduction of her allowance pressed Parnokh to begin searching in earnest for a publisher. Using her contact with Volkenstein as leverage, she asked him to help her find a publisher and instructed him to have the work printed under the name of Sophia Parnok because "I detest the letter kh ()". Though she had intended her poem Life to be her publishing debut, it never appeared in print. Instead, The Autumn Garden was her first published work, appearing in November 1906 in the Journal for Everyone, edited by Viktor Mirolyubov. Soon afterward, the relationship with Polyakova ended.
Career Pre-World War I period To escape her father's influence and gain independence, Parnok and Volkenstein married in September 1907 and moved to Saint Petersburg. As she had suspected, living in the capital widened her circle of literary friends. She soon made friends with Liubov Gurevich, the most important woman journalist at the time and the married couple, Sophia Chatskina () and Yakov Saker (). The couple owned the journal Northern Annals (), publishing the works of poets such as Alexander Blok, Mikhail Kuzmin, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Fyodor Sologub, and Maximilian Voloshin. Parnok enrolled in the Bestuzhev Courses to study law and continued publishing poems in various journals. She also began to do translation work, having been invited in 1908 by Gurevich to co-edit a French-Russian translation of Petits poèmes en prose by Charles Baudelaire. The Baudelaire project fell apart, her Graves' disease flared up, and she became increasingly unhappy with her work. In January 1909, finding her marriage to be stifling, Parnok left her husband and settled in Moscow. Volkenstein finally agreed to a divorce in the spring, but their break-up embittered the two and their earlier friendship never recovered.
Between 1910 and 1917, Parnok worked as a journalist under the pseudonym Andrei Polianin, specifically choosing to separate her literary works from her journalism. She lived a nomadic existence, moving five times in the period to various addresses around Moscow, spending at least six months of 1911 in Saint Petersburg. Her health problems intensified leading to bouts of severe depression, despite the acceptance of some of her poems in prestigious journals like Messenger of Europe () and Russian Thought (). Her father's death in 1913, both freed and imprisoned her, removing the physical, yet strained relationship but forcing her to earn her own living. When Gurevich, who had become both a mother-figure and creative advisor took over as head of the literary section of Russian Talk (), she hired Parnok as a literary critic. She wrote a series of articles in Northern Annals in 1913, including Noteworthy Names, a review of works by Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Klyuev and Igor Severyanin and Seeking the Path of Art, an anti-acmeist essay. Parnok's literary taste was conservative and decidedly anti-modernist. She valued the classical works of writers such as Dante, Goethe and Pushkin.
Since her divorce, Parnok had not had a permanent partner. In the spring of 1913, she fell in love with the Moscovite socialite, Iraida Karlovna Albrecht (), who spurred her into a creative period. After spending the summer together in Butovo, she returned to working on a novella, Anton Ivanovich, began a collaboration with Maximilian Steinberg on an opera based on the Arabian Nights and rented the first permanent housing she had held in a long time, even acquiring a monkey. She also accepted a position at Northern Annals where she wrote reviews. In the spring of 1914, Parnok and Albrecht began an extended trip abroad, traveling through Ascona to the Italian area of Switzerland, and then visiting Milan, Rome and Venice before heading north to Hamburg. Continuing to Shanklin on the Isle of Wight and eventually London, Parnok continued to write reviews and poems. Learning that World War I had broken out, the couple made immediate plans to return to Moscow, where Parnok frantically tried to locate her siblings. She found they were abroad—Valya in Jaffa and Liza in Dresden. Moving into a new apartment, Parnok's life at the beginning of the war was calm and productive.
Marina Tsvetaeva period
In 1914, at one of the literary salons hosted by Adelaida Gertsyk, Parnok met the young poet Marina Tsvetaeva, with whom she became involved in an affair that left important imprints on the poetry of both women. Around the same time, Parnok read, and later rewrote some of the works of the Greek poet Sappho. By October, Tsvetaeva had committed to the affair, disregarding her obligations to her husband and daughter by writing her first love poem to Parnok. Prior to her affair with Tsvetaeva, Parnok's poetry had not shown the originality of expression that her later works would evidence. Each of the two women drove the other to excel, revealing that Parnok had the upper-hand in love while Tsvetaeva was the more refined poet. On a personal level, Tsvetaeva was both attracted to and repelled by Parnok's passion, increasing her feelings of insecurity. On a professional level, both were surprised at the depth of their own jealousy, channeling their envy into a creative duel of words.