The least known of the Russian writers in Harold Bloom's Western Canon, Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936) is the last to emerge from the oblivion imposed by Soviet prudery on the country's non-conformist art. Green and Shvabrin's Mikhail Kuzmin Selected Writings takes the English-speaking reader well beyond the reference-book cliche of Kuzmin as Russia's first openly gay writer, made notorious by his coming-out novel Wings of 1906. One of the supreme Russian poets of the twentieth century - the equal of Akhmatova, Blok, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Tsvetayeva - Kuzmin was also an out-standing prose writer, dramatist, and literary theoretician. Finally he is beginning to receive the attention that is his due.
