Kuzmin's fourth book of stories concludes with a sequence of nine fairy tales, dedicated to Iurii Iurkun, and dated 1912-13 in the table of contents. At least some of them had appeared separately in periodicals. ¹ Superficially a heterogeneous collection, they are joined with "Pokoinitsa v dome" [A Corpse in the House”] by a common concern about the role of point of view and modes of perception in interpreting external reality. They represent both a reconsideration of some of Kuzmin's basic themes from and the "Aleksandriiskie pesni" [“Alexandrian Songs], and an exploration of the genre's formal properties. In them Kuzmin conducts a subtle disputation with previous practitioners of the fairy tale, notably Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde.

In his attitude towards children's literature Kuzmin was close to Wilde, who said a propos of one of his own collections of fairy tales "I had about as much intention of pleasing the British child as I had of pleasing the British public."² Kuzmin put his own position succinctly in a 1912 review in Apollon [Apollo]:

“Without fearing to fall into heresy, we affirm that there is no good specialized children’s literature, and that it cannot and ought not to be... There can be children’s magazines, but they ought to be filled either with works for adults which could be read without boredom by children as well, or (strange as it might seem) or condensed versions of the classics.”³

Like Wilde's, Kuzmin's fairy tales are "studies in prose, put for Romance's sake into a fanciful form," ⁴ but they lack what has been called the "higher innocence" of Wilde's stories, and in its stead are imbued with the harsher qualities of Villiers de L'isle Adam. The unifying thread of the sequence might be well characterized by the opening lines of the first conte cruel:

Pascal nous dit qu'au point de vue des faits, le Bien et le Mal sont une question de `latitude'. En effet, tel acte humain s'appelle crime, ici, bon action, la-bas, et reciproquement. ⁵

Kuzmin developed the same theme in his short novel Kryl'ia [Wings], stating again and again that what is important is the attitude towards an action rather than the action itself:

“Am I acting morally or immorally when I sneeze while cleaning dust from a table, or when I pet a kitten? However, these same acts can be crimminal, if, for example, let us say, I by means of sneezing warn a murderer about a convenient time for a murder and so forth.”⁶

The fairy tales form a set of variations on this idea, an examination of the interaction of context, motivation, and point of view in attaching significance to action.

The first tale, "Prince Desire", combines elements of the story of the magic fish which grants a poor fisherman his every desire with the story of the Chinese philosopher Chuang-tzu who after waking could not decide whether he was Chuang-tzu dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming it was Chuang-tzu. In this case the poor fisherman is one Ne p’iu-chai, whose name comes perilously close to bawdy. He despairs when his nets give way and curses the fate which left him alone in the world without even a godfather to look after his interests. No sooner have these words been uttered than his godfather, an unpleasant-looking creature resembling a giant frog, appears and offers to grant Ne-p’iu-chai his every desire. The fisherman is duly transformed into the wealthy silk merchant Sam-chin, who is assured by his servants that the idea that he is a poor fisherman is an unfortunate delusion which strikes him when the moon is full. Sam-chin enjoys all the pleasures the world has to offer for some twenty years, then comes to the conclusion that he has no more desires and therefore cannot be truly happy. Hardly has this thought come to him when he is drawn by the sound of weeping to a porcelain gazebo in his garden, where he finds a naked boy of about sixteen. This is Prince Desire, who accuses Sam-chin of abandoning him twenty years ago. Sam-chin wishes to make amends, and this very wish marks a return to desire: the prince kisses him and he turns back into Ne-p’iu-chai, this time permanently, for his godfather now fails to appear when summoned. The closing lines are a wry commentary on humans and happiness:

Don-drin-ti felt hunger and began to spread out his nets to repair them. He was repairing them and grumbling: “I’d give a lot to meet that little boy again - he’d find out the meaning of the strap and would really wail. After twenty years, this was the first desire of the ungrateful fisherman. ⁷

The tale's condescending opening remarks to a presumed audience of children set it off from the remaining fairy tales and can only be interpreted as parody of Hans Christian Andersen's style, in light of subject matter risque for an audience of children. ⁸ Prince Desire is yet another reincarnation of Kuzmin's vozhatyi, a point subtly emphasized by Sam chin's question to the youth when he first meets him:

Perhaps you are deaf or dumb? ⁹

This query brings to mind the deaf-mute servants in "Kharikl iz Milety" [Harikles from Miletus”] and "Flor i razboinik" [“Florus and the Robber”], early avatars of the Vozhatyi.

Syncretion and role reversal, two devices always prominent in Kuzmin, are amusingly applied in this first fairy tale. It combines motifs from "Sleeping Beauty" and "The Frog Prince", but the frog in this case plays the role of fairy godmother (in male guise, of course), while the kiss has a result opposite to that found in the usual fairy tale. The chinoiserie of the story mocks the popular taste of the 1890s. Kuzmin even includes a dig at official poets:

He [Don-drin-ti] became the right hand of the Bogdykhan and his name was immortalized by many poets who sang praises of his wisdom, good judgment, and wealth. ¹⁰

By poking fun at one of his own favorite artistic devices, the significant use of onomastica, Kuzmin sets the tone for the explorations of form to be found in the subsequent tales. Not only is "Ne-p’iu-chai" transformed into "Sam-chin", but he is married to "Miau-miau", while among his servants are to be found such appellations as "Mur-mur", "Sur-sur" and "Brys'-na-pol". Ne-p’iu-chai's unhappy fate anticipates the pessimistic endings of the entire series.

In "Rytsarskie pravila" [“Rules of Chivalry”] Kuzmin parodies the theme of chivalry in fairy tales while engaging in subtle criticism of a morally suspect portrayal of good in Oscar Wilde.

The sixteen year old hero, Ul'rikh of castle Gogenregel' (from the German for `high principles', and a distant echo of Krylov's and Pushkin's `chestnykh pravil') is a knight errant who spends his days erring by applying his father's advice too literally:

Remember only the main thing: liberate the oppressed, don’t steal, don’t lie, and don’t permit an unjust verdict.. ¹¹

Setting off on his quest, he meets a swarthy man with a black beard who is tied to a tree. True to his principles, he frees him. Upon reaching town he interferes in a public trial in which the lady Edita is about to be stripped of her property, challenges her accuser to single combat, and defeats him handily. Continuing on his way, he accepts a commission from a peasant to deliver a sack to the next town without opening it. On the road he encounters a man dying of starvation, but has no food to give, and the man dies before a messenger sent back from town can arrive.

When Ul’rikh delivers the sack he learns that it contains food which could have saved the dying man's life if only he had bent his rules about lying and stealing. Alas, the man he freed was a robber who had been terrorizing the town and had attacked the man he had found starving in the road. Moreover, Edita was actually a witch whom he unwittingly helped attain her wicked ends. In despair, Ul’rikh goes to the river to ponder the failure of his life's principles and falls asleep. In a dream a shepherd appears to him and explains the error in his rules:

My rules are good, I fulfill them religiously and what results is none of my concern. That’s the way heartless lazy people talk, but you, it would appear, are a conscientious and disquieted man. After all, rules were made man and not man for rules. ¹²

Since according to Kuzmin actions have no inherent moral significance, it follows that no code of behavior which specifies a set group of actions as always moral can succeed.

This is a sharp contrast to Oscar Wilde's fairy tale "The Happy Prince". Kuzmin's German keep of Gogenregel' is a far cry from the prince's walled garden in the French palace of Sans-Souci. The prince's gifts do not have the effects he desires: the little match girl does not recognize the value of his sapphire eye, the playwright freezing in his garret is not lifted out of his bitterness, and the recipients of bits of his gold skin are deceived, for "the living always think that gold can make them happy." ¹³ Self-sacrifice in Wilde's tale is valuable not for its particular results but for the effect it has on the soul of the sacrificer. Kuzmin's story acts as a corrective to this after all quite selfish attitude. Instead of God sending an angel to bring him the two most precious things in the city (the prince's lead heart and the dead bird who helped dismember him for the poor), he sends a shepherd to deliver another precious commodity: common sense.

Perhaps closest in tone to the cool frivolity and pointed satire of Anatole France is the third tale of the series, "The Six Brides of King Gilbert". In it Kuzmin continues his examination of the interrelationships of motivation with action, but the situation portrayed in "Rules of Chivalry" is inverted. King Gilbert's philosophy at the beginning of the story can be summed up in a single sentence: "They should be judged not by their words, but by their action." ¹⁴ He decides to apply this principle in his search for a wife. An announcement is composed requesting applications from any young lady between sixteen and twenty-five who has a desire to be wife to the king. The catch is that the king then plans to interview only those women who do not apply, thus insuring that his future spouse will at least be modest and lacking in untoward ambition. Here Kuzmin parodies his previous treatment of his general theme: it is the motivation behind inaction rather than action which is to be investigated.

As it happens, only six women in the kingdom fail to sign up. Each has a different reason for not applying, the most amusing being that of anna, a wicked caricature of Joan of Arc in a tradition which may ultimately be traced back to Voltaire's La Pucelle; here, however, Joan is portrayed not as a harlot but as an insane country girl:

No, no... the angel forbids it... with a pike... in the swamp... The angel is strict, strict... his shirt is red... I was pasturing the sheep and he says: bear it, bear it... don’t get married... The angel is strict... he struck me in the breast with his pike... Men.... they... they... they... have hairy legs [etc.]. ¹⁵

The wise king concludes:

My whole life I have judged people by their actions, but it turns out that one mustn’t do that, because identical actions are performed for completely different reasons. Take my six brides: all of them refused to get married but how different were their reasons for this act! The acts themselves don’t mean anything, what is important is the reasons that give rise to them, but the main thing is the people. ¹⁶

The relatively large number of prospective brides in this story, each with her separate reason for not wishing to marry, is a detail which in turn is inverted in the following fairy tale, "The Daughter of the Genoese Merchant", a variation on the theme of one of the "Alexandrian Songs": "There were four of us sisters". It gives an affirmative answer to that poem's final rhetorical question:

But maybe there weren’t four of us, but five? ¹⁷

The five daughters of Pavel Martini have all married for different reasons: Katarina for her husband's virtue and honesty, Veronica for her husband's riches, Petronella because her husband is a great artist, Marta because her husband is handsome, and Filomena (like the persona of the poem) simply because she loves him. The five husbands become involved in a plot to kill Aleksandr Gastol'di, as a result of which the first four lose the attributes their wives married them for: Katarina's husband betrayed the rest, as a result of which she enters a monastery; Veronica's has his property confiscated, leading her to become a prostitute; Petronella's has his eyes put out, while Marta's is disfigured by a cut across the face, and so she takes to surrounding herself with handsome young men. Only Filomena remains faithful. She and her husband Beppo move to Paris, where he works for a time, but they are ultimately betrayed by a countryman to whom they had extended hospitality. They are forced to take up a wandering life, telling fortunes on the way. Finally Filomena dies on the road, dashing any hopes for a happy ending. The final sentence of the story epitomizes the arbitrary nature of love and fate by viewing it from a subhuman viewpoint, anticipating a technique which Kuzmin was to employ again in “Primer blizhnim” ["An Example for Close Ones"]:

And he [Beppo] silently toppled onto the body of his wife and the wakened monkey again began to crack insects. ¹⁸

The outward form of Filomena's life, while perhaps less unfortunate than that of her sisters, is grim enough. Love could not transform it, but was able to make its tragedy easier to bear.

The uniformly cold tone of narration in this story contrasts sharply with the playful humor of the poem from which it draws its basic structure. Taken together, the poem and the story form a model of the basic thesis of the fairy tale cycle: a set of actions has no inherent significance, and circumstances acquire their meaning not from motivations but from the attitude deliberately adopted towards them.

"The Gold Dress" comes as close as any of the fairy tales to the patterning of a conventional fairy tale. An angel informs the bishop of a town that in order to relieve the drought which has stricken them a girl must voluntarily renounce singing, dancing, fine clothes and wealth. Mara, a blind, mute and lame hunchback, agrees to the sacrifice. Alas, her self-denial is not pleasing in the eyes of God, for she is not, after all, giving up anything. Dada, a young beauty, is approached to participate in the rites in her stead. She too is willing, although she does not place any hope in the bishop's promise of reward in the hereafter. This time the ceremony of renunciation is performed in secret, so that the church will not be embarrassed by any untoward results. Fortunately, rain begins to fall, and Dada is rewarded for her sacrifice when a golden dress descends to her from a rainbow.

The story is marked by the same cynical attitude towards Christianity found in "The Six Brides of King Gilbert" and "The Obedient Herdsboy", a tone first found in "The Tale of Eleusippus told by himself", but not characteristic of Kuzmin's works on contemporary themes or, in so far as they are known, his private views. Here the most likely explanation for it is that such a stance is characteristic of the French models which Kuzmin is imitating.

Inversion also plays a role in the tale's composition, for in the conventional fairy tale one would expect the unfortunate Mara to receive some consideration. Here even God's angel dismisses her as not measuring up to standard.

"Where Everyone is Equal" returns to the problem of defining point of view. Like "The Upper Window", the tale is told in the first person from a child's perspective. The narrator and his brother are continually arguing with two neighbor girls about who is better, boys or girls. They turn to their father as the ultimate arbiter: "Everyone is equal", he answers, in keeping with his liberal views. This contrasts sharply with the opinion of their nurse Praskov'ja, who holds that God assigns each person the role he is best suited for in life. Their mother plays an intermediary role, for although she loyally supports her husband, she herself is an admirer of Byron and Napoleon, feeling that

The feeling of equality is apparently not inborn in people, but is well obtainable, otherwise it would not meet with such resistance. . ¹⁹

The only two places where the young boys instinctively feel that everyone is equal are at mass and in the cemetery. Kuzmin's conclusion, then, is that people, like motivations, are different everywhere except in the eyes of God. This is a repetition of their linkage in “The Six Brides of King Gilbert", but once again inversion of perspective plays a crucial role. From the divine viewpoint the arguments Kuzmin puts forward in the rest of the fairy tales are irrelevant: behind diversity is oneness rather than the other way around. By framing this idea in fairy tale form, Kuzmin subverts his own subversions. It is thus particularly appropriate that "Where Everyone is Equal", like "The Upper Window" which performs a similar function, is set not in an imaginary kingdom but the contemporary world.

"On the Conscientious Laplander and the Patriotic Mirror" applies the essence of Kuzmin's mirror imagery to the nationality question, while at the same time it parodies Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" through the by now familiar device of inverting motifs. ²⁰ The hero of the story is named Kay, like the protagonist of "The Snow Queen". But whereas a demonic mirror is broken at the very beginning of Andersen's tale, lodging a splinter in Kay's eye and one in his heart that distort all he sees and feels, in Kuzmin the mirror performs the opposite function, revealing the appearance of each nationality as it ought to be, and the distortion originates within Kay himself, who throws down the mirror at the story's very end.

Freely acknowledged authorial caprice lands Kay in Amsterdam, where he has his first encounters with representatives of other countries. He attributes their indifference to his boasts to his lack of an identifiable ethnic physiognomy. With the aid of an old calendar listing the most characteristic traits of each nationality, he sets out to acquire an identity of his own by doing exactly the opposite of what he has read. In addition to becoming a wastrel (so as not to be mistaken for a German) and eating his meat well done (to avoid seeming English), he acquires an unpleasantly aggressive ethnic pride. Feeling sure that he has now attained an ethnic identity, he gazes into the magic mirror a shaman had given him, saying that it would reveal the true face of each nationality. Instead of his own drunken mug he sees the serious, thoughtful face of a Laplander against a field of snow with reindeer. Convinced that the shaman lied, he throws away the mirror and goes home to his wife. He has kept her on a long leash in order to prevent anyone from thinking he is French, and so she is entertaining her eleventh lover.

The face in the mirror, as is so often the case in Kuzmin, is an Other. This is not surprising, as the mirror was a gift of a shaman, paralleling the gift Kuzmin's vozhatyi made to him when accepting his heart's allegiance. But in contrast to the poetry and the rest of Kuzmin's prose, here the mirror fails in its cautionary purpose, further evidence of the pervasive influence of the cynicism of Villiers de L'isle Adam and Anatole France on the fairy tales.

"The Upper Window" is a virtuoso study in perspective and point of view. Told from the first person, it begins with an adult looking back on his childhood in the family of a respected writer, but almost immediately assumes the child's vantage point. From his upper window (the source, in the opinion of his parents' guests, for his father's lofty flights of thought and charms of expression in verse) he spies a group of horseguardsmen in the distance, so far away that they have neither arms or legs, but are all golden gleam, harmony and delicate music. He naively asks his nanny, a practical German woman, if these marvelous creatures are men at all, and is annoyed by her down-to-earth reply. Similar questions to his father are met with anger and the prediction that he will grow up to become cannon-fodder.

A second encounter with the guardsmen takes place in a basement shoemaker's shop, to the accompaniment of the pranks and foul language of a red-headed urchin who smears snot on the narrator's suit and claims that the guardsmen will beat him with their riding crops. All that is visible of them from the shop window is the corner of a grey greatcoat and two dirty boots with spurs.

Finally the narrator's mother takes him to see a guardsman, who explains why both the upper and basement windows deceived him:

It will always be that way if you judge things from the attic or from the cellar. One must approach a thing directly and up close; then you will recognize it. ²¹

The story is beautifully constructed, and may be taken as a counterexample to Ivanov's criticism of how point of view was handled in "The Tale of Eleusippus". The switch in viewpoint from adult to child is accompanied by a subtle shift in level of vocabulary and a gradual change to the speech patterns of a child, culminating in the use of the historical present at the end of the story, as though the narrator were reluctant to return to adulthood. The upper window with its glowing detachment is equivalent to the point of view of the narrator's father. It is a point of view obliquely criticized by the superficial and petit bourgeois remarks of the guests about the relationship between the father's poetry and the view from the window.

But contained within the naive story about the importance of point of view is another, more sophisticated one, visible only peripherally because of the narrator's assumption of a child's point of view. Only bits and pieces can be seen, but enough is visible to reconstruct the unhappy relationship between the author's mother and father which leads his mother to an extramarital affair with the horseguardsman.

The first hint of this comes in the narrator's description of his mother's reaction to her guest's remarks:

Mother smiled, proud perhaps of her husband, perhaps of my window, and quietly summoned us to have tea. ²²

Since the story comes near the end of a sequence exploring the relations between motives and actions, the reader is brought to question the two possible motivations advanced by the narrator. Might not his mother instead be reacting to the inanity of her guests' remarks?

A second hint is the father's disproportionate anger at questions about guardsmen. This might be explained as simple impatience with childish questions or else as indication of the father's pacifist stance, but in view of the final paragraph of the story, it would better be labeled annoyance with the narrator's mother. There the narrator describes the way his mother for the first time seems to him to be a young woman, certainly a sign that she sees herself differently in the company of the guardsman.

Kuzmin treats this theme of adultery viewed through a child's eyes once again in “Petin vecher” ["Pete’s Evening"] from the collection Antrakt v ovrage [Entr’acte in the Ravine]. In this second elaboration of the idea, however, he uses third person omniscient narration which, although it often approaches the child's viewpoint, lacks the innocence and directness of the reminiscences in "The Upper Window". The adultery is made clear to the reader from the beginning of the story, and the mother is portrayed as a cynical manipulator. Despite a successful parallel between Petja's emotions while playing hide-and-go-seek with the cook's daughter and his mother's feelings for her lover, "Pete’s Evening" is basically conventional, without the sense of experimentation which is so attractive in "The Upper Window".

In “The Upper Window” the conventional fairy tale structure so familiar from "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" - "too X, too Y, just right" - is subverted by the reader's realization that the narrator has not yet found an appropriate vantage point from which to consider his mother's behavior. This is why he is so reluctant to return to adulthood at the end of the story. It is this application of a traditional structure to new material in such a way as to rejuvenate that structure which marks Kuzminian stylization. The similarity between this application of the "too X, too Y, just right" formula and that found in the story "Vania’s Birthmark" is obvious. In both the problem reduces to one of self-definition: where is one located with respect to the world? In the fairy tales, as in the short novel Wings, Kuzmin was still groping for an answer.

The last tale in the series, "The Obedient Herdsboy " is also the most obviously metaliterary. The narrator, returning to the supercilious attitude assumed in "Prince Desire" and "The Gold Dress", constantly draws the reader's attention to the conventionalities of his genre, employing a haughty first person plural and donning the garb of an urbane Frenchman:

Of course, such a little place can be made famous by the whim of a poet having placed his heroes there, but the inhabitants of that place will not know that the name of their residence is being read by the elegant ladies of Paris. ²³

The story deals with one Nikolai, whose two cardinal virtues are that he is always obedient and always tells the truth. As can been imagined, these traits bring him incessant beatings and abuse. He is captured by the enemy during a war with a neighboring kingdom and taken away to their country. His unsavory habits bring his downfall: when he tells the truth about the lower ranks in the army he is only beaten, but truth about colonels and generals leads to charges of slander, and he is put in prison. Here he falls in love with the jailer's daughter, love being the only point of similarity with the tale of an unnamed contemporary poet which the narrator uses in a far fetched exercise in literary parallelism. ²⁴ His love for the girl (whose name, in the best eighteenth century tradition, is Eliza) greatly distresses her father and even the king, who, priding himself on Socratic powers of persuasion, undertakes to convince Nikolai that he is not in love. The dialogue which follows reminds one of the hilarious exchanges in France's Isle of the Penguins. War, says the king, will be fought with the neighboring kingdom once again so that children will be spared having so many countries to memorize in school.

The king insists on making Nikolai his general. Nikolai takes advantage of his new high position to desert to his former countrymen, who promptly arrest him as a spy and sentence him to be hanged. The priest sent to hear his confession believes him to be innocent, but does nothing to save him, and so the story ends with his execution.

The ironic point of the tale is revealed only when it is considered as a problem in point of view. The stylized condescension of the narrator serves to disguise the basic question the story leaves unanswered: if the tale of Nikolai is even conventionally supposed to have occurred, then how did it become known to the world? Kuzmin might simply have allowed the tradition of omniscient narration to override this point, but instead he provides a second, more satisfying solution. Before being executed Nikolai makes his final confession to an old and fairly cynical priest, who uses the secrecy of the confessional to excuse himself from defending Nikolai to the authorities even though he knows he is innocent. The priest is the only character in the story who knows all its events. It would be in keeping with the generally negative attitude towards institutional religion in the fairy tales if the priest violated his vow after the hanging. This provides the only logical (rather than literary-conventional) explanation for the omniscient narration.

The fairy tales, then, belong to that tradition of the Kunstmarchen which draws only indirectly on oral tradition. Kuzmin uses its form as a frame for purely literary experimentation. While they are not overtly polemical with the fairy tales of Tolstoi or Korolenko, Kuzmin's tales, by their concentration on the question of morality in its aesthetic aspect and by their sophisticated narrative tone contrasting with naive thematics, are inevitably opposed to them.

Critical reaction to the fairy tales was mixed, concentrating on the question of stylization. Sofiia Parnok, writing under the pseudonym Andrej Poljanin in Severnye zapiski [Nothern Notes], admired their "Penchant for laconic and expressive verbal form" as well as their "childlike naivete", finding them comparable to stories of the quattrocento or the medieval nouvelles. ²⁵ Her reaction is evidence more of her own naivete than that of Kuzmin's stories. For once A. A. Izmajlov was close to the truth when he damned two of them in Novoe slovo [New Word]:

This is the half-mocking language of a fourteenth century Italian who believed in the miracle of prayed for rain or the decent of an angel even less than a contemporary member of the intelligentsia might. There can hardly be two opinions about how fitting this might be for a chaste legend, the meaning of which is completely serious, almost holy and foreign to any shade of irony. ²⁶

If one ignores the self-righteous tone of these remarks, it is clear that Izmajlov at least sensed the presence of the dual-directed in the fairy tales. It is this presence which helps to explain Kuzmin's claim that there is no peculiarly "children's" literature.

1(Return to Text) "Rytsarskie pravila", Novoe slovo No. 10 (1912), pp. 22-24; "Shest' nevest korolia Zhil'berta", Novoe slovo No. 4 (1913), pp. 57-60; "Doch’ Genuezskogo kuptsa", Ogonek No. 39 (1913); "Zolotoe plat'e" and "Gde vse ravny", Russkaia mysl' No. 4 (1913), pp. 165-170, 170-174. The date of publication for "Rytsarskie pravila" casts doubt on Granoien's claim that the tales were intended as a series of object lessons for Iurii Iurkun, since Kuzmin met him only in 1913. See Neil Granoien, Mixail Kuzmin: An Aesthete's Prose (unpublished UCLA dissertation, 1981), p. 344.

2(Return to Text) Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.), The Letters of Oscar Wilde (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, Ltd., 1962), p. 302.

3(Return to Text) Mikhail Kuzmin, "Zametki o russkoi belletristike", Apollon No. 2 (1912), p. 72.

4(Return to Text) Hart-Davis, p. 219.

5(Return to Text) Villiers de L'isle Adam, "Les demoiselles de Bienfilatre", Contes cruels (Paris: Editions Garnier Freres, 1968), p. 3. Kuzmin used Villiers de L'isle Adam as a term of comparison in reviewing a Russian translation of William Beckford's Vathek ("Zametki o russkoi belletristike", Apollon No. 2 (1912), p. 73). Much later there is a possible echo in Kuzmin's "Cheshuia v nevode", Strelets No. 3 (1922), p. 107. Compare:

The act of exertion of Divine love is the Passion of Christ. Is it not sexual? The channel of love is the cross. The phallus. Only in the lifeof the flesh is there unification of creation with the One.

with the following passage from the epilogue to "The Messenger":

La croix est la forme de l'Homme lorsqu'il etend les bras vers son desir ou se resigne a son destin. Elle est le symbole meme de l'Amour, sans qui tout acte demeure sterile." (p. 295)

6(Return to Text) Mikhail Kuzmin, Kryl'ia (Moskva: "Skorpion". 1907), p. 32.

7(Return to Text) Mikhail Kuzmin, "Prints Zhelanie", Pokoinitsa v dome (Peterburg: M. I. Semenov, 1914), p. 122.

8(Return to Text) See Roger Sale, Fairy Tales and After (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 63-4 for futher discussion of this annoying Andersen habit. On Kuzmin's work with Andersen material for the theatre in later years, see John E. Malmstad and Vladimir Markov (eds.), Sobranie stichotvorenij, vol.3, pp. 236-237.

9(Return to Text) Mikhail Kuzmin, "Prints Zhelanie", p. 121.

10(Return to Text) Ibid., p. 119.

11(Return to Text) Mikhail Kuzmin, "Rytsarskie pravila", Pokoinitsa v dome (Peterburg: M. I. Semenov, 1914), p. 124.

12(Return to Text) Ibid., p. 130.

13(Return to Text) Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1888), p. 20.

14(Return to Text) Mikhail Kuzmin, "Shest' nevest korolia Zhil'berta", Pokoinitsa v dome (Peterburg: M. I. Semenov, 1914), p. 131.

15(Return to Text) Ibid., p. 137.

16(Return to Text) Ibid., p. 139.

17(Return to Text) Mikhail Kuzmin, "Nas bylo chetyre sestry", Seti (Peterburg-Berlin: Petropolis, 1912), p. 155.

18(Return to Text) Mikhail Kuzmin, "Doch' Genuezskogo kuptsa", Pokoinitsa v dome (Peterburg: M. I. Semenov, 1914), p. 147.

19(Return to Text) Mikhail Kuzmin, "Gde vse ravny", Pokoinitsa v dome (Peterburg: M. I. Semenov, 1914), p. 158.

20(Return to Text) Kuzmin cites Andersen's tale in his 1916 article on Konstantin Somov: "Some sort of demon constantly prompts the artist, as if a shard of the magic mirror from Andersen’s fairy tale had fallen in his eye." M. Kuzmin, "K. A. Somov", in Iu. N. Podkopaeva, A. N. Svenikova (compilers), Konstantin Andreevich Somov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979), p. 471.

21(Return to Text) Mikhail Kuzmin, “Vysokoe okno”, Pokoinitsa v dome (Peterburg: M. I. Semenov, 1914), p. 172.

22(Return to Text) Ibid., p. 168.

23(Return to Text) Mikhail Kuzmin, "Poslushnyi podpasok", Pokoinitsa v dome (Peterburg: M. I. Semenov, 1914), p. 178.

24(Return to Text) The story of a queen falling in love with a page is drawn from a 1910 poem by Igor Severianin, as Prof. Setchkarev has pointed out:

Eto bylo u moria...

Eto bylo u moria, gde azhurnaia pena, Gde vstrechaetsia redko gorodskoi ekipazh... Koroleva igrala - v bashne zamka - Shopena, I, vnimaia Shopenu, poliubil ee pazh.

Bylo vse ochen' prosto, bylo vse ochen' milo: Koroleva prosila pererezat' granat, I dala polovinu, i pazha istomila, I pazha poliubila, vsia v motivax sonat.

A potom otdavalas', otdavalas' grozovo, Do voskhoda rabynei prospala gospozha... Eto bylo u moria, gde volna biriuzova, Gde azhurnaia pena i sonata pazha.

It Was By the Sea...

It was down by the sea where the blue foam ran, Where the city carriages rarely parked.... The Queen in the tower was playing Chopin And, listening to Chopin, her page lost his heart.

All was quite simple, all was quite nice: The Queen asked her page to cut her some fruit, And gave him a half, and wearied her page, And loved him like rhymes that are set for the lute.

And then she surrendered, as the thunder raged, And right until dawn mistress slept like a slave... It was down by the sea where the turquoise wave And the blue foam ran with the song of the page.

On echoes of Kuzmin in Severianin's Medal'ony see Vladimir Markov, "Poeziia Mikhaila Kuzmina", John E. Malmstad and Vladimir Markov (eds.), Sobranie Stichotvorenij, vol.3, pp. 400; 415, n. 61; 423, n. 181. Kuzmin displays a negative attitude towards Severianin in his obituary of Briusov, Teatr No. 12 (18 December 1923), p. 1.

25(Return to Text)Andrei Polianin [pseudonym of Sofiia Parnok], "Literaturnaia letopis'", Severnye zapiski vol. , no. (1915), p. 238.

26(Return to Text) A. A. Izmailov, "Stilizovannaia legenda M. Kuzmina", Novoe slovo 7 (1913), p. 128.