Ultimately, however, Kuzmin's writing fell into political disfavor, with Lev Trotsky (1879-1940) stating, in his Literature and Revolution (1924), that Kuzmin's books were disreputable and useless.

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Kuzmin's final great work was Forel' razbivaet led (The Trout Breaks the Ice, 1929), a poem sequence in often highly imagistic and symbolic form that focuses predominantly on one man's idealized, and ultimately reciprocated, love for another. The sequence is also characterized by an economy of language, an aesthetic sensitivity, and decadent characters.

When Kuzmin read sections of the sequence in his last public performance in 1928, the gate-crashing crowd of homosexuals and other supporters showered the writer with flowers. Knyazev appears in the sequence as the "stripling with a bullet through his brain," and Yurkun appears as Mister Dorian, an allusion to Oscar Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Kuzmin died in 1936 of pneumonia, two years before Yurkun and many other writers were arrested under the Stalinist regime and shot. Respected by many of his contemporaries, including Blok, Mayakovsky, and Velemir Khlebnikov (1885-1922), Kuzmin's work is currently experiencing renewed attention in Russia and elsewhere.

Nineteenth-century Decadent literature either describes aspects of decadent life and society or reflects the decadent literary aesthetic.

The confusion of queer identities and possibilities presented by Moscow owes much to its rapid growth and village origins of its inhabitants.

Since the eleventh century, Russian literature has included treatments of homosexual themes.

A cultural crossroads between Asia and Europe, Russia has a long, rich, and often violent heritage of varied influences and stark confrontations in regard to its patterns of same-sex love.

The Ballets Russes represents not only a crucial turning point in dance history, but as one of the earliest gay-identified multinational enterprises, it is a milestone in gay history as well.

English decadent and Symbolist artist Aubrey Beardsley made a lasting contribution to the art of illustration; a satirist with a gift for caricature and grotesquerie, Beardsley attacked Victorian sexual values.

The bisexual Lord Byron treated many of his homosexual love affairs in his poetry, encoding them by the use of classical references or by purporting that they were affairs with women.

For Russian nobleman Sergei Diaghilev, who revolutionized music, the visual arts, theater, and dance, homosexuality may have been integral to his creativity.

One of the greatest dancers and most innovative choreographers in the history of ballet, Vaslav Nijinsky embodied the sensuality and sexual ambiguity associated with the distinctive new art of the twentieth century.

As one of the key figures that western civilization has used to define itself, William Shakespeare stands in a complicated, fiercely contested relationship to homosexuality.

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.