Михаил Кузмин

The authors, well-known specialists in the work of one of the greatest poets of the Silver Age, took on the difficult task of restoring the true face of Mikhail Kuzmin through the layers of more or less absurd myths surrounding his name to this day. Indeed, if some - like, for example, Akhmatova - were inclined to demonize Kuzmin, then in the eyes of many other contemporaries he was just a St. Petersburg dandy, a frivolous and selfish darling of fate, a writer of sweet songs. In the book of Bogomolov and Malmsted we see a completely different person. Lightness and beautiful clarity, which so captivated contemporaries, are the result of a complex internal struggle, a tragic search for harmony with the world and God, acquired far from immediately. The authors do not idealize Kuzmin. They do not ignore his sometimes insufficient exactingness to his gift, and his penchant for slander and gossip, which cost him more than one unpleasant episode. And yet in the book there is an image of a man whose personal scale was to match his creative gift.