65 Facts About Sophia Parnok

Sophia Parnok has been referred to as "Russia's Sappho", as she wrote openly about her seven lesbian relationships.

Sophia Parnok's 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 1913, Sophia Parnok exclusively had relationships with women and used those love relationships to fuel her creativity.

Sophia Parnok's poetry was banned after 1928, and her work almost forgotten until 1979 when her collected works were published for the first time.

Sophia Parnok's father was a Jewish pharmacist and the owner of an apothecary.

Sophia Parnok's mother was a physician, one of the first women doctors in the empire.

Sophia Parnok's devotion was not steadfast and though Nadya inspired Parnokh, as with other lovers, she was not monogamous.

Sophia Parnok graduated with the gold medal in May 1903.

Sophia Parnok soon made friends with Liubov Gurevich, the most important woman journalist at the time and the married couple, Sophia Chatskina and Yakov Saker.

Sophia Parnok enrolled in the Bestuzhev Courses to study law and continued publishing poems in various journals.

Sophia Parnok began to do translation work, having been invited in 1908 by Gurevich to co-edit a French-Russian translation of Petits poemes en prose by Charles Baudelaire.

In January 1909, finding her marriage to be stifling, Sophia Parnok left her husband and settled in Moscow.

Between 1910 and 1917, Sophia Parnok worked as a journalist under the pseudonym Andrei Polianin, specifically choosing to separate her literary works from her journalism.

Sophia Parnok 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.

Sophia Parnok 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.

Sophia Parnok valued the classical works of writers such as Dante, Goethe and Pushkin.

Since her divorce, Sophia Parnok had not had a permanent partner.

Sophia Parnok accepted a position at Northern Annals where she wrote reviews.

In 1914, at one of the literary salons hosted by Adelaida Gertsyk, Sophia 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, Sophia Parnok read, and later rewrote some of the works of the Greek poet Sappho.

Each of the two women drove the other to excel, revealing that Sophia Parnok had the upper-hand in love while Tsvetaeva was the more refined poet.

In Tsvetaeva's Podruga cycle, she acted as a seer, peering into Sophia Parnok's future, predicting she was a doomed, tragic figure cursed by her passions.

The lyrics in Sophia Parnok's Poems presented the first, non-decadent, lesbian-desiring subject ever to be included in a book of Russian poetry.

Sophia Parnok did not care for Mandelstam though Tsvetaeva was openly friendly and would later have an affair with him.

Sophia Parnok was outraged that Tsvetaeva wanted her gift returned, considering it an attempt to conceal the origin of the poems in their affair.

Sophia Parnok left Moscow in late summer 1917 and spent the Russian Civil War years in the Crimean town of Sudak with Erarskaya.

Sophia Parnok immediately set to work, sourcing her dramatic verse on the epic poem, The Taking of Tmuk Fortress, by Hovhannes Tumanyan and using Erarskaya as her inspiration.

Sophia Parnok finished the libretto by the winter of 1918, long before Spendiaryan had completed the musical score, and returned to reading Sappho.

Sophia Parnok viewed her relationship with Eugenia as that of an older and wiser guide, who could help her mature spiritually and break her addiction to love.

Sophia Parnok prepared most of the poems for two journals which would be published later.

Sophia Parnok was unsatisfied with the collection and knew before it was published that her next collection was more authentically her own.

Civil employees were paid in rations, rather than wages, and to supplement their meager food supplies, Sophia Parnok tried to work a vegetable garden.

Sophia Parnok had switched seats with another passenger, who was killed when the train derailed.

Sophia Parnok sustained no injury and for the rest of her life, was plagued by the memory.

In early 1922, Sophia Parnok returned to Moscow with Erarskaya and was assisted by Vladimir Mayakovsky, who helped her find lodging and join the Writer's Union.

Sophia Parnok feared that The Vine would have trouble with the censors because of its references to God.

Sophia Parnok had learned from previous experience that religious references were problematic.

Sophia Parnok joined the group known as the "Lyrical Circle", which included members like Lev Gornung, Leonid Grossman, Vladislav Khodasevich, and Vladimir Lidin.

Short of money, Sophia Parnok briefly took an office position, but soon quit and depended upon freelance translations and literary critiques to pay her bills, though critiques were beginning to be censored as well.

Sophia Parnok was distressed, feeling that her life had ended, and was unable to work because of her depression and worry over her lover.

Erarskaya's paranoia and violent outbursts, led to unsettling trauma for Sophia Parnok, causing several fainting spells.

In 1926, Sophia Parnok moved in with Tsuberbiller on Neopalimovsky Lane at Smolensky Boulevard.

Increasingly Sophia Parnok felt isolated from her readers and alienated from her peers, in part because by 1926, GLAVLIT's authority had been extended to cover both public and private publishing.

Sophia Parnok feared that her cycle Music would not be accepted for publication.

Sophia Parnok joined another group of poets, known as "The Knot" which was founded to publish the works of the members to secure that one of the group's first releases was the publishing of Music.

Sophia Parnok was depressed, "The Knot" had been forced to close after publishing Half-Whispered, she was suffering from writer's block with her poetry, and Spendiaryan had died without finishing the score to Almast.

Sophia Parnok made her living solely by translating poems by Charles Baudelaire, novels by Romain Rolland, Marcel Proust, Henri Barbusse and others.

In May 1928, Maximilian Steinberg took it upon himself to complete Almast and Sophia Parnok agreed to try to get it approved for the Bolshoi Theatre to produce it.

In 1929, Tsuberbiller's brother died, and she and Sophia Parnok became responsible for the care of his five-year-old twins.

Sophia Parnok felt trapped between the theater managers and Steinberg.

Sophia Parnok placed it on the schedule so that it would only have a two-day run.

When Maria Maksakova left the title role, Sophia Parnok severed her interest in the project, though it toured successfully in Odessa, Tbilissi, Yerevan and in Paris, among others.

Sophia Parnok began pursuing Maksakova, attending all her performances, and was re-inspired in her work.

Sophia Parnok began work on a libretto for an opera Gyul'nara by Yuliya Veysberg, which was dedicated to Maksakova.

In January 1932, the relationship turned to romance, despite the facts that Sophia Parnok was still living with Tsuberbiller and Yevgeny disapproved of the relationship.

The frantic pace of her writing foretold the exhaustion she would suffer, which hastened her death, but Sophia Parnok was aware of the consequences.

Sophia Parnok was buried in Vvedenskoye Cemetery in Olga Tsuberbiller's family plot.

In 1979, the Soviet scholar, Sofia Polyakova, edited the first Collected Works of Sophia Parnok, which was published in the United States.

Sophia Parnok had believed the obstacle to official acceptance was her lesbianism, though there is no explicit documentation of the reason for continued censorship of her works.

Poems by Sophia Parnok were set to music, recorded on a CD and performed by Elena Frolova in 2002, as part of the "AZIYA +" project.

Sophia Parnok's works are filled with the timbre of tragedy and the melody of coincidence.

Sophia Parnok created five books of poems, more than 30 critical essays, and several translations.

Sofia Polyakova, editor of Sophia Parnok's Collected Works, preserved 261 of her poems.

Much of the scholarly work focused on Sophia Parnok has centered around the period of her relationship with Tsvetaeva; yet, many of her "best poems" were created after 1928.

Sophia Parnok's style employs rhetorical questioning, as if she is having conversations with herself, indicators that even in the presence of others, Parnok felt removed from them.