> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://theparnassian.com/en/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Mikhail Kuzmin's diary at the Literary Museum and a reprimand for Bonch-Bruevich
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/v-kontse-1933-g-direktor-gosudarstvennogo-literaturnogo-muzeia-vladimir-bonch-bruevich-priobrel-arkhiv-poeta-mikhaila-kuzmina/
- Published: 2020-03-23T08:00:06.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T19:01:29.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Books, Museums, Society, People

In late 1933 Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, director of the State Literary Museum, acquired the archive of the poet Mikhail Kuzmin. The papers included the celebrated diary of the Leningrad poet. For the diary entries covering August 1905 to December 1931, Kuzmin received an enormous sum: 25 thousand roubles. Needless to say, those pages held a wealth of details about his private life, and direct indications of the homosexuality of the writer himself and of many of his acquaintances…

A few months later, in February 1934, the OGPU took an interest in the purchase: the Literary Museum was required to hand over the entire Kuzmin archive for examination. By April they had dealt with the papers, and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) then set up a special commission to investigate the museum director's activities. Bonch-Bruevich had to write to the People's Commissar for Education, Bubnov, defending the value of the acquisition, if only for the study of bourgeois society. To deny the plainly homosexual themes of the acquired collection of papers was pointless.

In the end Bonch-Bruevich was given a reprimand. The director of the Literary Museum was henceforth obliged to clear any further purchases with the People's Commissar for Education.