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Russian and global LGBT history

Russian Poet Ivan Dmitriev, Boy Favourites, and Same-Sex Desire His the Fables 'The Two Doves' and 'The Two Friends'

A friend of Karamzin and Derzhavin, minister of justice, and a fable writer whose “friendship” turns into male love.

  • 24 min

Ivan Ivanovich Dmitriev entered history as a notable sentimentalist poet of the late 18th–early 19th centuries and as a statesman who rose to the post of minister of justice under Alexander I. In official biographies, he appears as a strict, rational administrator. At the same time, sources and the memoir tradition suggest that young, talented men regularly appeared in his circle. His bachelor life, persistent rumors about the nature of his attachments, and the absence of public scandals create the impression of a figure whose private biography may have been deliberately shielded from publicity, yet remains legible through indirect evidence.

Dmitriev was also known as a man of letters and a translator, widely read in the noble milieu. In his translations and adaptations, he often departed from his sources. The year 1795 is especially revealing: in two of La Fontaine’s fables — “The Two Doves” and “The Two Friends” — Dmitriev, by altering the original, effectively transformed plots about “friendship” into works with a noticeable homoerotic subtext. The full texts of both fables are provided at the end of the page.

Biography and Historical Context

Ivan Ivanovich Dmitriev came from an old noble family, the Dmitrievs, who traced their origins to the princes of Smolensk. His mother belonged to the influential and wealthy Beketov family. The future poet was born on 21 September 1760 on his father’s estate — in the village of Bogorodskoye near Syzran. He received his early education at home and then studied for several years at a private boarding school (a “pansion”, a fee-paying school for noble children) in Simbirsk (today Ulyanovsk), after which he again continued his studies under his father’s guidance.

Among Dmitriev’s reading, Prévost’s “Adventures of the Marquis G.” stood out in particular. However, the fifth and sixth volumes in translation never reached Simbirsk, and Dmitriev turned to the original. At first he read in French with a dictionary, and then gradually achieved fluent command of the language.

Dmitriev’s youth coincided with a difficult historical period. During the Pugachev Rebellion (a major 1773–1775 uprising in the Russian Empire), the family left the estate and moved to Moscow. Financial difficulties forced his father to place his sons into military service. In 1772, Dmitriev was enrolled as a private in the Life Guards Semyonovsky Regiment (elite imperial guard units), a privileged part of the Russian army that served not only military but also court functions. Later, his father brought Dmitriev to Saint Petersburg. There he completed the regiment’s school and received his first officer ranks.

Dmitriev’s service in the Semyonovsky Regiment was described in the memoirs of his contemporaries. Filipp Vigel (memoirist and civil servant) left the following portrait:

“When, on ascending the throne, Paul appointed his heir [Alexander] colonel-in-chief (chef) of the Semyonovsky Regiment, Ivan Ivanovich Dmitriev was a captain in it. His manly beauty struck the young man; his wit amused and captivated his fellow officers, while at the same time a certain natural gravity in his presence restrained any excessive bursts of their merriment: they enjoyed him with respectful delight.”

— F. F. Vigel, Memoirs

Dmitriev displayed literary talent early. As early as 1777, under the influence of the journalist and publisher Nikolai Novikov, he began writing verse, mostly satirical. He later destroyed some of these early attempts. In 1783, Dmitriev met Nikolai Karamzin (sentimentalist writer and historian), a distant relative; Karamzin soon became a close friend.

By the late 1780s, Dmitriev had entered literary circles. In 1790, he grew close to Gavriil Derzhavin (major Russian poet and statesman of the late 18th century), met playwright Denis Fonvizin, and other writers. In 1791, Karamzin published Dmitriev’s mature works in Moskovsky Zhurnal (Moscow Journal). Among them was the song “Golubok” (“The Gray Little Dove Moans”), which quickly became popular and soon received a musical setting.

▶️ “The Little Gray Dove Moans” (YouTube)

Dmitriev’s home became a meeting place for young authors. The aspiring fabulist Ivan Krylov (Russia’s best-known fable writer) visited him. Dmitriev read his early texts carefully and pointed him toward the direction that suited him best, noting that fables were his true calling. After this, Krylov began working steadily in the genre. Later, in 1809, Dmitriev met the young Alexander Pushkin (Russia’s national poet) and helped him gain admission to the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum.

Dmitriev’s official career also progressed successfully. At the invitation of Emperor Alexander I, in 1806 he took up the post of senator. In 1810, Dmitriev was appointed minister of justice. In this position, he sought to bring order to the judicial system: he reduced the number of court instances and worked to accelerate paperwork and case processing. He strictly followed official rules and avoided court intrigue, which inevitably led to conflicts with powerful officials. Ultimately, persistent complaints led to his resignation, which Alexander I accepted with visible regret.

After leaving service, Dmitriev settled in Moscow, not far from Patriarch’s Ponds. There he headed a commission that assisted residents affected by the fire of 1812. For this work, he received the rank of Active Privy Councillor and the Order of Saint Vladimir, 1st class. In practice, this marked the end of his state career.

Contemporaries noted in him a distinctive combination of strictness and the typical lifestyle of a Russian nobleman. The same Vigel wrote:

“As in every extraordinary man, there were many opposites in him: everything about him was measured, proper, neat, even prim, like a German; yet his habits and tastes were entirely those of a Russian barin (a landed nobleman): kvass, pies, and above all raspberries with cream were his pleasures. He also loved jesters — but in their role he usually installed pompous versifiers. Many considered him an egoist because he was a bachelor and seemed cold. He loved few, but he loved them passionately; to the rest he always wished well — what more can one demand of a human heart?”

— F. F. Vigel, Memoirs

In his final years, Dmitriev rarely left Moscow. He revised his early works and worked on a memoir titled A Look at My Life. Ivan Ivanovich Dmitriev died in Moscow on 15 October 1837. He was buried at the Donskoye Cemetery.

“Portrait of I. I. Dmitriev,” Dmitry Levitsky, 1790s. “Portrait of I. I. Dmitriev.” Dmitry Levitsky. 1790s.

Dmitriev’s Possible Homosexuality

During the reign of Alexander I, high society maintained a quiet, unspoken tolerance for same-sex relationships. Such ties were not discussed publicly, but they were known and discussed in private. Contemporaries were aware, in particular, of the homosexual leanings of certain influential dignitaries; among those named was Prince Alexander Golitsyn, the minister of spiritual affairs.

In aristocratic circles, same-sex relationships were often intertwined with practices of patronage. Great nobles promoted favourites (young men receiving protection and career help from a powerful patron), supported their advancement, and society treated this with irony while trying to avoid public scandal. Dmitriev, judging by the surviving testimony, behaved in much the same way. At the same time, no open conflicts or official accusations connected to his private life are recorded.

During Dmitriev’s tenure as head of the Ministry of Justice, memoirs suggest that he was most often surrounded by young and attractive aides. The most vivid testimony comes from Vigel, who described Dmitriev’s first weeks as minister in these words:

“A month had not yet passed since Dmitriev was appointed minister of justice and soon arrived in Petersburg; and he arrived not alone, but brought with him a small yet chosen retinue. Three young men accompanied him — Milonov, Grammatik, and Dashkov; the first two had only just been poets, and the last was whatever he wished to be.”

— F. F. Vigel, Memoirs

No direct testimony from Dmitriev himself, or documents that would unambiguously confirm homosexual relationships, has survived. Nevertheless, numerous indirect remarks by contemporaries make it reasonable to suspect homoerotic inclinations. It is also known that Dmitriev never married.

In another story, Vigel recounts an episode that illustrates how implausible the idea of Dmitriev having a love affair with a woman seemed to people at the time:

“Dmitriev was a friend of Severin’s, and even more so of his wife, who was far smarter and better educated than her husband. From this they concluded that he was her lover, and they even ascribed to him paternal rights over the son she bore, although she was hunchbacked and a genuine monster. This was sheer falsehood, not slander: for no one imagined condemning Dmitriev for such youthful gallantry.”

— F. F. Vigel, Memoirs

Overall, the episode reflects a common assumption of the period: rumors about Dmitriev’s romances with men sounded markedly more plausible than any suggestion of affairs with women.

Same-Sex Desire in Dmitriev’s Poetics

The main source of indirect evidence for Dmitriev’s possible homosexuality remains his own writing. In most poems, he maintained an outwardly impeccable image and followed sentimentalist literary norms. His lyrical hero typically yearned for a conventional lady of the heart, traditionally called Chloe or Phyllis. Yet this manner does not necessarily indicate hypocrisy: in the early 19th century, a double life was widely regarded as a fairly common phenomenon.

In that era, translated literature often became a convenient space for articulating suppressed same-sex desire. Members of the Russian elite who knew French and German could embed personal meanings in a text that was formally considered someone else’s. Translation made it possible to introduce additional shades of meaning and emotion while remaining under the protection of the original work.

The translation scholar Sergey Tyulenev, in his study Translation as Contraband, compared Dmitriev’s fable translations to the secret smuggling of forbidden goods. On the surface, such texts appear familiar and restrained, yet they contain new semantic emphases absent from the foreign original. In such cases, the translator intervened actively in the material: he redistributed intonations, altered imagery, and added his own attitude toward what was unfolding. At the same time, Dmitriev, in the researcher’s phrasing, seemed to remain in the shadows. His involvement was not stated anywhere directly, yet an attentive reader could sense the author’s presence in the style and in the choice of details. As a result, translation became a shell that allowed the poet to bypass censorship and social constraints.

One distinctive feature of Dmitriev’s poetry is that the world of his works is almost entirely populated by male characters. This is especially noticeable in texts where the author is free to choose his heroes. Thus, in the imitation poem “Golubok” (“Little Dove”), written after motifs from the ancient poet Anacreon — who wrote, among other things, about love between men — the choice of source does not appear accidental. In this poem, the hero speaks with a little dove, calling it “beautiful” and “fragrant as a rose.” The bird says that the goddess Venus gave it to Anacreon as a reward for his verses, and now it carries letters from the poet to his beloved boy Bathyllus. The dove also admits that it does not want the freedom its master offers, because it prefers to remain nearby. The only female figure in the text — Venus — appears as an abstract mythological symbol of love.

Another example is often noted in Dmitriev’s adaptation of a fragment from Macpherson’s poem “Love and Friendship.” Dmitriev portrays the friendship of two young men who are in love with the same girl. Over time, one of them asks his friend to kill him, explaining that he can no longer live “like this.” In the end, both heroes die together, underscoring that their “friendship” proves more important than love for a woman.

Finally, despite a publicly maintained heterosexual image, Dmitriev’s work includes two pieces that come close to a comparatively direct expression of feeling. These are his reworkings of two fables by the French writer La Fontaine — “The Two Doves” and “The Two Friends.” In La Fontaine, they are stories about friendship, but in Dmitriev they acquire a more clearly homoerotic tint and become descriptions of romantic attachment between two men.

The Fable “The Two Doves” With a Homoerotic Subtext

Dmitriev’s fable “The Two Doves” is a translation of Jean de La Fontaine’s “Les deux Pigeons”. For Dmitriev, the French fabulist likely evoked the freethinkers’ philosophy (вольнодумцы — Russian “freethinkers”), with its pursuit of freedom and its criticism of social conventions. At the same time, La Fontaine’s name could function as a reliable cover, since the French author had long been accepted as a classic.

This raises a question: why did Dmitriev, selecting only certain works by La Fontaine, turn to these two fables in particular rather than to other texts? To clarify possible reasons for his interest, it is useful to briefly retell the plot of the first fable. At the center are two doves who have lived together for a long time and are deeply attached to one another. One grows tired of a monotonous life and decides to set off traveling. The other begs him not to fly away, fears the separation and possible misfortune — but without success. The traveler soon encounters a chain of dangers: a storm catches him; then he becomes tangled in a net, narrowly avoids a hawk’s strike, injures his wing, and afterward a boy throws a stone at him. Exhausted and nearly crippled, the dove finally returns home. The author ends the fable with a moral: people bound by love should not seek happiness in distant wanderings, because next to the beloved, every moment already gains a new meaning.

Dmitriev’s translation sometimes comes close to imitation: he noticeably expands the plot, which may point to the translator’s personal involvement in the story. La Fontaine has 83 lines, while the Russian version reaches 106 and includes many additional details. The opening is revealing already: instead of a concise phrase that “two doves loved each other with tender love”, Dmitriev offers an extended picture of their shared daily life: “two doves were friends, for a long time they lived together; and they ate and drank”.

The translator also shifts the narrative tone. In the original, the insistent traveler hears a reproach shaped by the polite French “vous” and the neutral word “frère”. In the Russian text, this becomes the more intimate “ты” and the diminutive “bratec moy” (братец мой — literally “my dear little brother”, a tender, familiar form of “brother”): “Oh, dear bratec, how you have struck me! Is it easy to be in separation!.. For you it’s easy, you cruel one! I know; ah! but for me… I, in deep sorrow, will not live even a day…”. The lines are longer and more emotionally saturated.

Overall, the Russian version is more expressive than the original. For instance, La Fontaine’s imprudent voyageur — “a reckless traveler” — Dmitriev renders as “a madman” and “an odd schemer” (затейник — a playful “inventor of schemes”, someone always starting something). Even the farewell scene takes on a different shade: in French, the doves weep and say adieu, “goodbye”. In the translation they do not speak at all. Instead of formal words that sit uneasily with the drama of parting, the birds look at each other, touch beaks, sigh, and separate.

The “female line” deserves special attention in what at first glance seems a strictly male story. In the source fable, there is a third male dove whom the traveling dove meets by spilled grain. In Dmitriev’s version, this character becomes a female dove. Later the traveler falls into a trap, and it is precisely the female dove in the field who serves as bait. In other words, in the Russian text the role of the lure is already assigned to a female figure. This invites questions about the translator’s intentions: did he want to make the episode more familiar for his reader, or did this substitution reflect his own attitude toward female characters?

Another female figure appears as the narrator’s beloved. She is unnamed and belongs to a conventional poetic type, reminiscent of Chloe, Liza, Venus, or Fortune in Dmitriev’s other poems, where an idyllic — though rather bland — love between a man and a woman is portrayed. Against this background, the pair of two male doves, who have lived “together for a long time”, stands out especially: their story, no matter how carefully it is hidden behind the mask of a fable, insistently reads as a tender, intensely “humanized” romance.

The Fable “The Two Friends”: Idealized Male Intimacy

The fable “The Two Friends” is also a translation of La Fontaine. At the center of the plot are two friends whose bond is so close that they almost never part and, as the narrator notes, continually think about the same thing. One day, one of them dreams that his companion is sad. Alarmed, he runs to his friend in the middle of the night to make sure everything is all right. The friend, woken from sleep, assumes that a real disaster has occurred and immediately offers help of any kind — money, weapons, or any action that might save him. Only then does the first man admit that nothing is wrong: he had simply had an anxious dream and, frightened, hurried over to check that all was well.

A comparison of the Russian text with the French original shows that Dmitriev intervenes actively in the narration. He clarifies details and gives the tone greater emotional intensity and sincerity. As a result, the fable acquires the qualities of an almost lyrical poem.

One of the most noticeable changes is the removal of the fairy-tale frame found in La Fontaine. In the French text, the action takes place in the land of Monomotapa — a fictional exotic setting. In Dmitriev’s version, this name disappears. The translator limits himself to a vague opening: “Long ago, where — no one knows, / two friends once lived…”. In this way, the fable stops pointing to a conventionally distant world and instead takes on a more universal character.

Dmitriev develops the theme of the heroes’ closeness more fully than La Fontaine. In the French text, it is stated briefly: “Everything that belonged to one belonged to the other; / the friends of that country, they say, / are valued more than those of ours.” In the Russian translation, this idea becomes an extended description. Dmitriev writes that the friends “shared a single thought, loved the same thing, / and every hour / never took their eyes off one another; / all things together — only night ever parted them; / and yet, even at night, soul spoke with soul.” In effect, La Fontaine’s three lines become five emotionally charged lines.

This expansion makes the image of friendship more concrete and more subjective. In Dmitriev’s version, mutuality exceeds everyday closeness: the bond continues even at night, when “soul speaks with soul” in sleep. The translator also rejects the contrast built into the original. La Fontaine sets “that country” against “ours,” emphasizing that such closeness is rare “among us.” Dmitriev removes this opposition. Rather than concluding that such friendship is impossible “in our country,” he lingers on the friends’ shared life, as if concentrating on an ideal of male friendship.

At the same time, Dmitriev removes details he considers unnecessary and makes the plot more dynamic. In his version, La Fontaine’s question disappears: “Which of them loved more, do you think, reader?” The emphasis shifts to reciprocity, rather than to comparing who is more attached.

Similar changes are visible in the moral. In La Fontaine, it is phrased in a courtly, chivalric manner: “What comfort it is to have a true friend; / he seeks out your needs in the depths of your heart; / he spares you the shame / of having to reveal them to him yourself; / a single thought, a trifle, anything alarms him / when it concerns the one he loves.” Dmitriev removes this polished elegance and makes the conclusion less abstract. Instead of general reflections about “comfort,” he shows what a true friend actually does, rendering it more vividly through concrete patterns of behavior. The ending (“A friend in the heart, a friend in the mind — and the same friend on the lips!”) is shaped as an aphorism. Dmitriev insists that one friend should be fully open and fully accessible to the other.

Dmitriev’s emotional register is also evident in punctuation. Where La Fontaine uses no exclamation marks, the Russian translation contains six. In the French text, long, measured sentences dominate. In Dmitriev, especially in the episode of the night visit, short, almost theatrical lines appear. He even uses one unfinished sentence to strengthen the impression of natural spoken speech. The characters in the Russian text also address each other with ty (the familiar “you”), whereas the original uses the more formal vous.

Dmitriev also changes what may seem, at first glance, a secondary detail — yet this shift noticeably affects the overall tone of the story. In La Fontaine, the man who wakes his friend offers three kinds of help: money in case of losses at gambling, his arm and sword if someone has offended him, and a beautiful enslaved woman, assuming his friend is tired of being alone. Dmitriev keeps only the first two offers and removes the third.

Thus, in translating La Fontaine’s fable Dmitriev once again — quietly, “by contraband” — smuggles his own worldview into the text. He introduces into a work that was originally free of homosexual subtexts elements of his own sexual identity. These elements do not appear directly, but through small shifts, omissions, and intensifications that, taken together, noticeably reshape the fable’s meaning and emotional structure.

***

Most scholars of LGBT history and literary studies agree that Dmitriev was likely homosexual or bisexual, although he never expressed this publicly. On the one hand, he held a high state post and was recognized as a man of letters. On the other hand, he had to keep his private life out of view — a pattern typical of his era and, in many respects, difficult to avoid.

Outwardly, Dmitriev conformed to accepted norms. Yet, in the view of researchers, he also managed to leave posterity a kind of “coded” confession, embedded in his translated poems.

A general assessment of his literary importance was expressed by Filipp Vigel:

“As a poet, he will always occupy a remarkable place on the Russian Parnassus. Before him, fashionable society and women did not read Russian verse — or, if they read it, they did not understand it.”

— F. F. Vigel, Memoirs

The Two Friends

Long, long ago two friends lived somewhere,

They shared one thought, loved one and the same thing,

And every hour

They could not take their eyes off one another;

Always together — only a single night ever parted them;

And even then, no: at night their souls still spoke to each other.

Once, one of them had a dreadful dream;

In an instant he was out of the house,

Running, shaken, to his friend,

And woke him. The other sprang up.

“What help do you need? —”

He said, confused. —

“My friend has never been woken so early!

What does your visit mean? Have you lost at cards?

Here is all my money! Has someone wronged you?

Here is my sword! I’ll run — I’ll die, or you’ll be avenged!”

— “No, no, thank you — it’s neither this nor that,”

The gentle friend replied, “stay calm:

A cursed dream is to blame for everything!

At dawn I dreamed my friend was sad,

And I… I was so troubled by it

That I woke at once

And ran to you, to set my mind at ease.”

What a priceless gift — a true, wholehearted friend!

He looks for every way to serve you:

He senses sorrow, he prevents disasters;

A trifle, a dream, a nothing — and he is afraid for you;

A friend in the heart, a friend in the mind — and always on the lips!

<1795>

The Two Doves

Two doves were friends,

Had lived together for a long time,

And ate and drank together.

One grew tired of seeing the same thing day after day;

He decided to go out and wander, and told his friend.

To the other, the news was like a knife;

He shuddered, wept,

And cried out to his friend:

“Have mercy, dear brother — how you’ve struck me!

Is it easy to live in separation?.. Easy for you, cruel one!

I know it; ah, but for me… for me, in deep sorrow,

I won’t live through a single day… and besides, think:

Is this the time to set off on a journey?

At least wait until the zephyrs (warm spring breezes), my dear dove!

Why hurry? We’ll still have time to part!

Only now the raven has cried,

And without a doubt — I fear it beyond measure! —

He foretold some misfortune from the birds,

And a heart in grief believes it even more!

When I am parted from you,

Every day will threaten me with disaster:

Now a bold hawk, now cruel hunters,

Now kites, now snares —

Every evil thought will come back to me at once.

Alas for me! — I’ll say with a sigh — it’s raining!

Is my friend well? Is he suffering from cold?

Does he feel hunger?

And what won’t I imagine then!”

To fools, wise speech is like water in a brook:

It babbles and runs past.

The schemer listens, sighs,

And still wants to fly.

“No, brother, so be it!” he said. “I’ll fly.

But believe me: I won’t want to make you suffer;

Don’t cry — three days will pass, and I’ll be with you again,

To peck

And coo

Once more under the same roof;

And in the evenings I’ll begin to tell you —

For it will all come down to the same old refrain for us anyway —

What I saw, where I was, what was good, what was bad;

I’ll say: I was there, I saw such a wonder,

And there this happened to me,

And you, my dear friend,

Listening to me, will be so well informed by summer

As if you yourself had wandered the wide world.

Farewell!” — At these words,

Instead of all the “alas!” and “ah!”

The friends looked at each other, pecked,

Sighed, and parted.

One, with his beak drooping, sat down;

The other fluttered up, rose, and flew, flew like an arrow.

And surely, in the heat of it, he would have flown to the edge of the world;

But suddenly the sky was covered with gloom,

And straight into the traveler’s eyes

From a cloud came pouring rain, hail, a whirlwind — in a word,

A thunderstorm, with all its retinue, as is usual!

In such a case — dangerous, though not new —

The poor dove quickly perches on a branch,

And is even glad that he only got soaked.

The storm died down, the dove dried himself,

And set off again.

He flies and sees from on high

Scattered millet, and beside it — a she-dove;

He lands, and in an instant

Gets tangled in a net; but the net was weak,

So he armed himself with his beak against it;

Now with beak, now pulling with his little foot, pulling, he broke free

From the net without harm,

Losing only feathers. But is that a misfortune?

To make his fear still worse,

A falcon appeared, and with all his force

Attacked the poor wretch,

Who, like a criminal, was bound in chains,

Dragging behind him a cord with scraps of the snare.

But luckily, an eagle with broad wings

Dropped from the clouds to meet the falcon;

And so, thanks to a chance gathering of thieves,

Our traveler did not become the falcon’s prey.

Yet he still was not free of trouble:

In panic, losing both sense and keen sight,

He struck a roof edge head-on

And dislocated his wing; then a boy —

Clearly there was dove-blood in him, and some wit besides —

For a joke, flung a pebble with a slingshot (lúkнул — threw / shot),

And hit him so hard he almost collapsed;

Then… then, cursing himself, his fate, the road,

He decided to limp back, half-dead, half-lame;

And at last he arrived home a cripple,

Dragging his wing and trailing his leg.

O you whom the god of love has joined!

Do you want to travel? Forget the proud Nile,

And do not part farther than the nearest stream.

What is there for you to admire? Admire one another!

Let each find in the other, every hour,

A beautiful new world, always varied!

Is there, in love, even a moment when the heart is idle?

Love, believe me, will replace everything for you.

I myself have loved: then, for a lonely meadow,

Lit up by the presence of my beloved,

I would not have taken, in exchange, marble palaces

Nor a kingdom in the heavens!.. Will you return

Those minutes of joy, those minutes of rapture?

Or am I to live on memory alone?

Has the time of such sweet enchantments really passed,

And is it time for me to stop loving?

<1795>


🇷🇺 This piece is part of the article series “LGBT History of Russia”:

  1. Homosexuality in Ancient and Medieval Russia
  2. A Cross-Dressing Epic Hero: the Russian Folk Epic of Mikhaylo Potyk, Where He Disguises Himself as a Woman
  3. The Homosexuality of Russian Tsars: Vasily III and Ivan IV “the Terrible
  4. Uncensored Russian Folklore: Highlights from Afanasyev’s “Russian Secret Tales
  5. Homosexuality in the 18th-Century Russian Empire — Europe-Imported Homophobic Laws and How They Were Enforced
  6. Peter the Great’s Sexuality: Wives, Mistresses, Men, and His Connection to Menshikov
  7. Russian Empress Anna Leopoldovna and the Maid of Honour Juliana: Possibly the First Documented Lesbian Relationship in Russian History
  8. Grigory Teplov and the Sodomy Case in 18th-Century Russia
  9. Russian Poet Ivan Dmitriev, Boy Favourites, and Same-Sex Desire His the Fables ‘The Two Doves’ and ‘The Two Friends’
  10. The Diary of the Moscow Bisexual Merchant Pyotr Medvedev in the 1860s
  11. Sergei Romanov: A Homosexual Member of the Imperial Family

📣 Subscribe to our Telegram channel (in Russian): Urania. With Telegram Premium, you can translate posts in-app. Without it, many posts link to our website, where you can switch languages — most new articles are published in multiple languages from the start.


References and Sources

  • Дмитриев И. И. Басни («Два голубя», «Два друга»). 1800-е гг. [Dmitriev, I. I. - Fables (“The Two Doves,” “The Two Friends”). 1800s.]
  • Вигель Ф. Ф. Записки. 1864. [Vigel, F. F. - Memoirs. 1864.]
  • Tyulenev S. Translation as smuggling. 2010.
  • Baer B. J. Russian gay and lesbian literature. 2014.