Anwyn Urquhart

In Mikhail Kuzmin’s "Underground Streams" there is an obsession with romance and love. Kuzmin offers an optimistic journey to finding joy through Pavel Nikolayevich and Maria Rodionovna’s separate narratives. Even though Maria and Pavel offer different narratives of love, both end on a hopeful note. Maria and Pavel each deal with a love that is presumed unattainable, but both still hold out hope. Kuzmin argues that forbidden love isn’t always permanent, and it can prevail when Maria’s husband returns home after being presumed dead. By connecting Maria and Pavel, he suggests that Pavel’s forbidden gay love could become reality. 

Kuzmin makes certain passages reflect both Maria and Pavel’s desires and thoughts, thus linking their narratives of forbidden love. Despite these key passages being from Maria’s notebook, they are recalled and read by Pavel. The narrator prefaces the passages with the admission of his personal interpretations as “he may well have omitted the scenes that were most dramatic, the thoughts that were most significant” (218). What he remembers is whatever is most significant to him, but they are still the words of Maria.  

Maria’s unattainable love becomes attainable when her husband who she believed was dead returns home. She is resilient against temptation which ultimately makes her happy because she “waited for [her husband] faithfully” which grew her into a “better adapted” person (221). She became resilient with hope that she would remain faithful to her husband and that he might return. Cheating is moving on and abandoning the fight for one’s love and without the fight there is no reward. The optimistic future requires some struggle and sacrifice and she feels that she overcame that struggle. Her notebook “turned out to be ‘notes in anticipation of life’” instead of “in anticipation of death” (222). Maria lived with hope and optimism for a future that is better since her husband was almost miraculously returned to her and that is what excited her about life. 

Underground streams is the metaphor Maria uses to explain how struggling can lead to a rewarding future. Maria describes the pain of waiting for her husband as being “under the earth now, blindly digging” (222). However she believes “that the valley where my faithful waves break through will be cool and fragrant” (222). She believes there is something beautiful waiting for her once she makes it through the dark challenging times. Love is what pushes her towards the blissful valley. Forbidden love may be feel like the world is crashing down at first, but it will ultimately give way to unbridled hope and excitement for life.

Pavel’s narrative of forbidden love follows the unattainable love of a man with another man. The first hint at this is when Pavel first meets Maria he mentions a lack of romantic feelings, but goes on to add that “nothing could have been further from his thoughts” (214). He repeats a similar aggressive denial of romance between himself and this woman. Then when he is reading her passages one that is significant to him discusses differences among humans as a product of evil. Humans’ differences are created by evil to create conflict, thus the union of two men who are more similar than a man and a woman would actually be good. They should “be joined in equality of esteem, in equality of love and in equality of advantage” (219). Men’s sameness is a failure by “the spirit of evil,” therefore they should join together in all matters of life, including love (219). In addition Kuzmin did not use a man’s notes about unattainable love, he chose to connect Pavel to Maria and her relationship with a man. Kuzmin made Pavel the reader of Maria’s passages, so it is both Pavel and Maria telling the story of this romantic relationship with men. Ultimately Maria is reunited with her presumed dead husband leaving Pavel and the reader with the hope that the impossible can happen.

Kuzmin wrote this story in 1922 which was during the Russian Civil War, a period of great violence and turmoil. He draws a parallel between two kinds of struggles to offer a hopeful ending, giving people hope for their own "forbidden" love.

Bibliography
Kuzmin, Mikhail. “Underground Streams.” In Selected Writings, edited by Michael A. Green and Stanislav A. Shvabrin, 213–22. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2005.