I remember sitting in my Russian literature college elective as clear as day. There was no air conditioning, the building didn’t have a functional elevator, and my coat enveloped my body in all the wrong ways.

My classmates and I sat in a high school-esque fishbowl, discussing various religious interpretations of Zinaida Gippius’ play Sacred Blood. Despite the fact that Russian is my first language, I didn’t know much at all about Gippius at the time. And yet, I felt like I fully understood, in that moment, what it meant to be them – the abject isolation that came from being queer and Russian.

The dirty looks I regularly faced on Brighton Beach in Brooklyn – with its large Russian community – the awkwardness of family reunions, and the othering from my Slavic peers all reflected back in someone else’s work.

People contributed religious interpretations of Gippius’ text, quoting scripture and sermons, and drew comparisons to more Western authors, but among the dissonant chorus of voices, nobody saw what I saw in the play: a clear-cut trans allegory that felt tailor-made for me.

Header image: Zinaida Gippius, portrait by Leon Bakst, 1906

Russia’s Silver Age of literature, lasting from the mid-1890s to 1917, was arguably a queer renaissance.

It was in that period when Mikhail Kuzmin published Wings, the first-ever Russian novel centered around homosexuality. It was also then when legendary poet Marina Tsvetaeva published dozens of poems about her love affair with another woman. And yet, trans interpretations within this renaissance are rarely discussed.

Zinaida Gippius, a Silver Age poet, critic and playwright, offers a trans allegory in Sacred Blood.

In Gippius’ play, a mermaid is disillusioned with her fate as an “unclean” creature without a soul. She knows that mermaids have an easy life, living 300–400 years and then “disappearing into the fog”. However, humans have an immortal soul because God shed His blood for them. The protagonist speaks with an older mermaid, asking if she will really disappear forever one day. The older mermaid answers: “Why do you want more?”

The mermaid is advised to see a witch, who tells her to leave the lake and approach two priests living in a secluded lakeside chapel. The witch instructs the young mermaid to get closer to one of these men, close enough to eventually reveal to him that she has not been baptised. This will grant her the coveted immortal soul.

She gets closer to the older, more easygoing man of the two. She confesses to the older man that she has not been baptised yet due to her mortal soul. He agrees to baptise her out of pity, but notes that the procedure may leave him soulless.

The mermaid, devastated, runs back to the lake, ready to leave her dream behind. But as she is about to re-enter, the witch stops her: “You’ll probably drown in the lake now… Your blood may not be warm, but your body is solid. You got it from the humans.”

The witch tells her that if she loves this man, she should kill him to preserve his soul. So, out of her desire, both for him and a human soul, she does just that.

Zinaida Gippius. Portrait by Leon Bakst, 1906.

Zinaida Gippius themselves lived a rather queer life.

Between their affairs with women, highly publicised threesomes, cross-dressing and use of male pseudonyms, it may be fair to assume that Gippius was gender-nonconforming. As a trans man, I’d seen myself in the reflection of the mermaid’s lake far too many times.

For that reason, a trans reading of Sacred Blood is not too far-fetched.

Take the mermaid protagonist’s discontent with a life in the lake. She wants to do, or be something more, but is limited by the way her body has come into this world devoid of soul. She is filled with desire, but cannot act on it until she meets the witch.

As soon as she finds out the process of gaining a soul is possible, she jumps at the opportunity, begging the witch to teach her how to transform her dysphoric, soulless being.

The mermaid’s attempt to return to the lake adds another layer to this allegory. Reminded of how much easier it is to live as a soulless object, she attempts to go back, but she cannot. By acting on her desires, she has already begun to change – baptism or no baptism.

As the witch tells her, “I know it’s easier, little fish. It’s so much easier in the lake.” To the witch, the young mermaid has already become un-fishlike, though not human either; mermaids are no longer the protagonist’s kin, but “the kind [she] used to be”.

Despite how much ‘easier’ it may seem to be gender-conforming and live a palatable life as one’s assigned gender, the task becomes impossible once they’re exposed to the joys of expressing their true self. The mermaid’s transition doesn’t just happen during the baptism, or the priest’s murder – it starts from the mermaid’s very first step out of the water.

There is also a deeply religious aspect of Sacred Blood, with the chapel representing a masculine, human life. In this sense, the play can be interpreted as an argument for queer inclusion in religious life – that queer existence is not inherently sinful, as the sacrifice it requires can be compared to Jesus’ own.

This interpretation is supported by Gippius’ own religious endeavours. At around the time that Sacred Blood was published, Gippius and their colleagues formed The New Church: a Russian Orthodox Church accepting of nontraditional sexuality.

Gippius’ church combined marriage and communion to wed groups of more than two, a move considered deeply controversial both then and now. The New Church, while small in following, lasted 15 years.

Sacred Blood found its way to me at a tumultuous time in my life. I was freshly out of conversion therapy, and was navigating life in a large city with essentially no trans community.

Just when I had been considering retreating back to my own lake – a ‘female’ body and life – Gippius had found me, and seen right through me.

From my reading of the play, I didn’t gather a disdain of detransition, but rather a vindication of its impossibility: there was no feasible way to repress the man I’d spent so much time growing into.

I consider myself both a transgender man and a rather casual Russian Orthodox Christian. My God is deconstructed and fragmented, scattered like ashes into everything I have ever come to know, but just as kind and forgiving as more traditional Christians make Him out to be.