We were saddened to hear yesterday of the death of UC Berkeley professor
Simon Karlinsky, renowned as an authority on Russian literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and on homosexuality in pre-Soviet Russia. (He was born in a Russian community in Manchurian China, emigrating to the United Sates with his family in 1938.)
“To a nascent gay audience,” Scott Manning reminds us, “Karlinsky was a pioneering writer of mold-breaking articles for publications spawned by the gay rights movement. For Christopher Street¸Gay Sunshine, and The Advocate he wrote on such topics as Russian gay literature and history from the 11th century onward, pre-Soviet gay life, the impact of the October Revolution on gay literature and culture, Diaghilev, Tchaichovsky, Gogol, and the persecution of the out Russian poet Gennady Trifonov. His biography of Gogol was the first to address the homosexuality of the famed Russian writer, and its impact on his work.”
Karlinsky was also the co-translator of a collection of Anton Chekhov’s correspondence and the author of two books about the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, as well as several other volumes of history and criticism. His work earned the praise of literary critics such as John Updike and Edmund White, the latter of whom praised Karlinsky’s Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol for “its illuminating psychological insights into Gogol’s actions, its informative readings of his fiction and drama, and its own stylistic grace and vivacity.”
Karlinsky died on July 5 of congestive heart failure; in addition to several cousins, he is survived by Peter Carleton, his husband and companion of 35 years.