THE EARLY 20th-century avant-garde was profoundly shaped by queer artists from the Russian Empire—painters, composers, choreographers, and writers whose work transformed modernism. Many of them, driven into exile by revolution, civil war, and the collapse of the Empire’s colonial order, carried their new visions—whether overt or subtly encoded and infused with eroticism or reflections on identity and gender—to Europe and America.
Modernist tendencies had been forming in Russia for decades, but it was the emergence of Mir Iskusstva (“World of Art”) in the late 1890s that crystallized a distinctive new æsthetic. It was a movement (and a magazine) defined by its fascination with artifice, historical masquerade, and erotic ambiguity. Central to this project was Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929), a man of exceptional ambition and strategic instinct. He understood that Modernism’s establishment necessitated more than scattered experiments. It required a network of exhibitions, publications, and debates.
Diaghilev’s closest collaborators came from his intimate circle. Dmitry Filosofov (1872–1940), later an influential critic, and Konstantin Somov (1869–1939), the son of a Hermitage Museum curator, were among the most prominent. Their artistic and intellectual influences were diverse. Somov was drawn to the sentimentalism of the 18th century—the world of Antoine Watteau and Jean Louis Prévost—while Filosofov engaged with contemporary Symbolist literature and the mystical philosophical ideas that were circulating in Russian intellectual circles. Russian Symbolism, in turn, was deeply shaped by the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), whose vision of love as a divine and redemptive force placed it above conventional social structures, establishing a framework in which same-sex relationships could be seen as spiritually legitimate.
Diaghilev was not just a promoter of Modernism but someone who shaped its direction through exhibitions, publications, and collaborations. In the second half of the 1890s, he made a name for himself as a curator, organizing several exhibitions in Saint Petersburg and embarking on an extended tour of Europe. During this trip, he met Oscar Wilde, who was living in France after serving his prison sentence in England. Inspired by Wilde and by England’s The Studio magazine, which championed æstheticism, Diaghilev and his collaborators founded Mir Iskusstva, a publication dedicated to contemporary international artistic culture and the newest trends in early Modernism.
In addition to publishing, Mir Iskusstva became an active society with a dual mission: to introduce Russia to the most progressive European artists and to promote the best young artists from the Russian Empire abroad. To achieve this, Diaghilev established a special art bureau within the journal. Soon, exhibitions in major European venues—Berlin and Vienna Secessions, the Salon d’Automne in Paris—featured emerging artists from Russia, many of whom were queer.
One of them was Konstantin Somov, whose artistic persona was inseparable from his sexuality. Throughout his life, Somov lived openly as a gay man and channeled his gender discomfort into his art. His most recognizable figure was the lascivious Marquise—a recurring female protagonist in his paintings, sometimes endowed with Somov’s own facial features. The Marquise’s lovers often bore a striking resemblance to Somov’s real-life partners. His erotic masquerades, staged in the world of the 18th century, circulated around gender, power, and desire.
Somov’s art was immensely popular in Europe before World War I. His work reached a mass audience through Le Livre de la Marquise, an anthology of erotic literature first published in Munich in 1908. The book was reissued six times before 1923, not counting the numerous illegal editions that circulated into the following decades. However, due to the criminalization of homosexuality—both in Russia and in Europe—Somov’s art could not be openly discussed in these terms. Its gendered subtext was gradually forgotten for decades after World War II, both in the Soviet Union and in the West.
Like Somov, many artists from Mir Iskusstva were captivated by the art of earlier periods. By reinterpreting classical and mythological subjects, they could infuse their works with homoeroticism while avoiding direct confrontation with censorship. But these artistic strategies were not only the work of individual artists: Diaghilev and Filosofov actively encouraged them, shaping the editorial and curatorial direction of the movement. Their influence was especially strong in the early 1900s, when Filosofov had become involved with the Symbolist writers Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941) and Zinaida Gippius (1869–1945), whose æsthetic and philosophical ideas strongly shaped the content of Mir Iskusstva.
The most provocative works in this period were the illustrations of Léon Bakst (1866–1924), which featured androgynous figures paired with poetic references to ancient Greece. These draw- ings resonated with the idea of Greece as a utopia of sexual freedom—an idealized past contrasted with the legal persecution of homosexuality in the Russian Empire. Although Russian law imposed prison sentences for sex between men, this legislation was rarely enforced among the privileged elite, allowing artists to explore queerness obliquely through historical allegory.
Bakst’s fascination with Greece was not only æsthetic but also practical. Alongside Somov, he experimented with the expressive potential of costume, developing new ways of using clothing to suggest transformations of gender and sexuality. These ideas were discussed within a small group of intellectuals, poets, writers, and artists known as the “Friends of Hafez,” who named themselves after the 14th-century Persian poet. Hafez’ poetry, renowned for its mystical devotion, sensual imagery, and homoerotic undertones, aligned with the group’s artistic and philosophical ambitions. Meeting in the Saint Petersburg salon of Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949) and Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal (1866–1907), they reimagined themselves in pseudo-Greek and pseudo-Persian costumes, turning their salons into living tableaux that blurred the boundaries between art, fashion, theater, and poetry. Their experiments with costume and movement laid the groundwork for a new approach to dance—one that rejected the rigid corsetry of classical ballet in favor of a fluid, liberated body. Without this radical rethinking of movement and dress, Diaghilev’s ballet enterprise would not have been possible.
Diaghilev himself was deeply invested in this vision of Greece, not only as an æsthetic but also as an erotic ideal. His passion for antiquity found its most famous expression in the ballet L’Après-midi d’un faune, performed in Paris in 1912. The production scandalized audiences with its open depiction of sexual desire—during its peak, the faun, portrayed by Vaslav Nijinsky (1889–1950), reached his climax on stage while rubbing against a scarf. But these fantasies of ancient Greece had already been rehearsed years earlier in Saint Petersburg, in the salons of the Mir Iskusstva circle. The flowing, semi-transparent costumes of Scheherazade, another of Bakst’s creations, originated from these gatherings, where clothing was reimagined as a vehicle of erotic self-expression.
Diaghilev’s theatrical enterprise also became a magnet for other queer artists. His productions featured contributions from figures as diverse as Jean Cocteau, Serge Lifar, Maurice Ravel, Francis Poulenc, and Ida Rubinstein. Through his work, Diaghilev also introduced Western audiences to another of Russia’s great gay artists: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), whom he called “my dear uncle.”
Diaghilev willingly hired young homosexual artists, dancers, and writers. Among them was Sergey Nabokov (1900–1945), the openly gay younger brother of the writer Vladimir Nabokov, who worked on librettos for Diaghilev’s ballet productions. Another key figure was Pavel Tchelitchew (1898–1957), a painter and stage designer who, after studying in Kyiv with the Ukrainian Cubist artist Olexandra Exter (1882–1949), traveled to Germany specifically to meet Diaghilev and to work with him. While their collaboration was cut short by Diaghilev’s death in 1929, it was a formative experience for Tchelitchew, whose later work in Paris and New York explored surreal, dreamlike representations of the body. Many artists associated with Diaghilev’s circle continued to shape queer æsthetics long after he was gone. Tchelitchew, for instance, influenced Salvador Dalí in France in the 1920s and ’30s and David Hockney, Pierre Klossowski, and Francis Bacon in the U.S. in the 1940s.
As queer artists discovered new opportunities in exile, the situation within Soviet Russia was shifting toward increasing repression. Several years after the Revolution in 1917, there was a brief period of decriminalization, and the first Soviet Criminal Code did not include penalties for homosexuality, and in some cases same-sex unions were informally recognized. However, by the mid-1930s, Stalinist policies had imposed a conservative model onto Soviet society, and the legal persecution of homosexuality was reinstated in 1934. This criminalization remained in place until the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the law still active in some post-Soviet states today. The ideological shift also extended to cultural policy: what had once been tolerated or merely ignored now became subject to censorship, erasure, or persecution.
Some, however, found ways to navigate the shifting landscape. One of the most enigmatic cases is that of Alexander Nikolayev, also known as Usto Mumin (1897–1957). A Russian-born artist who settled in Central Asia in the early 1920s, Nikolayev was captivated by the æsthetics and sexual freedoms of Uzbekistan. Living in Samarkand, the artist adopted a new identity and immersed himself in the region’s artistic traditions, producing works that reflected both Islamic influences and homoerotic themes. His paintings often depicted the bachas—the Uzbek boy dancers. While his work managed to survive, he was arrested in 1938 during Stalin’s purges, exiled to a labor camp for several years, and only later allowed to return to artistic activity.
Another figure connected to both the Russian avant-garde and the queer underground was Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (1878–1939), best known for his painting Bathing of a Red Horse (1912), which depicts a slender, nude young man riding bareback. The image, an iconic symbol of early 20th-century Russian art, has often been read in political terms as a premonition of revolutionary change. However, some scholars have pointed to its homoerotic undertones, as depicting an idealized vision of the male body.
Despite state repression, traces of queer Modernism persisted in Soviet art and literature, often in ways that required careful reading. Diaries and private letters provide glimpses into the lives of artists whose public works had to conform to ideological expectations. However, much of the documentation surrounding queer figures remains lost or inaccessible, whether due to deliberate censorship, destruction of the documents, or hiding them from view in the archives. Nevertheless, recent discoveries continue to reshape our understanding of queer lives within the Russian avant-garde. For instance, new archival evidence has revealed that Daniil Stepanov (1881–1937) had a romantic relationship with the German artist Sascha Schneider (1870–1927) during their time in Italy in the early 1900s. Stepanov later lived in Samarkand, where he worked alongside Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin and Alexander Nikolayev on the preservation of medieval architecture.
The artists of Mir Iskusstva, the Ballets Russes, and the wider avant-garde from the Russian Empire left a lasting imprint on world Modernism. While often obscured by censorship and historical amnesia, their contributions shaped the æsthetic language of the 20th century. As new research continues to bring their stories to light, their legacy remains an essential part of Modernist history, awaiting further rediscovery.
Readers interested in the intersection of queerness and Modernism in the Russian imperial and Soviet eras can read Dan Healey’s Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia (2001) and Alexander Etkind’s Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (1997).
Pavel Golubev, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Slavic Studies, Univ. of Potsdam, specializes in the representation of sexuality in 19th- and 20th-century Eastern European art.
