From the age of six, she wrote poetry in a style quite distinct from the predominant poets of her times, revealing instead her own sense of Russianness, Jewish identity and lesbianism.

Her mother died after giving birth to her twin siblings and she was raised by her father and her step-mother, leaving her feeling her childhood lacked emotional support.

In a succession of relationships with Marina Tsvetaeva, Lyudmila Erarskaya, Olga Tsuberbiller, Maria Maksakova and Nina Vedeneyeva, her muses propelled her to publish five collections of poetry and write several librettos for opera, before her disease claimed her life in 1933.

[5] The oldest of three children, Parnokh, was the only one to have been raised by her mother, as Alexandra died shortly after giving birth to her twins Valentin, known as "Valya", and Yelizaveta, known as "Liza".

Using her contact with Volkenstein as leverage, she asked him to help her find a publisher and instructed him to have the work printed under the name of Sophia Parnok because "I detest the letter kh (Russian: х)".

The couple owned the journal Northern Annals (Russian: Северные записки), publishing the works of poets such as Alexander Blok, Mikhail Kuzmin, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Fyodor Sologub, and Maximilian Voloshin.

[41] She wrote a series of articles in Northern Annals in 1913, including Noteworthy Names, a review of works by Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Klyuev and Igor Severyanin and Seeking the Path of Art, an anti-acmeist essay.

In the spring of 1913, she fell in love with the Moscovite socialite, Iraida Karlovna Albrecht (Russian: Ираида Карловна Альбрехт), who spurred her into a creative period.

[43] After spending the summer together in Butovo, she returned to working on a novella, Anton Ivanovich, began a collaboration with Maximilian Steinberg on an opera based on the Arabian Nights and rented the first permanent housing she had held in a long time, even acquiring a monkey.

[45] In the spring of 1914, Parnok and Albrecht began an extended trip abroad, traveling through Ascona to the Italian area of Switzerland, and then visiting Milan, Rome and Venice before heading north to Hamburg.

[46] Learning that World War I had broken out, the couple made immediate plans to return to Moscow, where Parnok frantically tried to locate her siblings.

[48] In 1914, at one of the literary salons hosted by Adelaida Gertsyk, Parnok met the young poet Marina Tsvetaeva, with whom she became involved in an affair that left important imprints on the poetry of both women.

[54] In Tsvetaeva's Podruga (Girlfriend) cycle, she acted as a seer, peering into Parnok's future, predicting she was a doomed, tragic figure cursed by her passions.

[75] As a result of the February Revolution in 1917, Northern Annals closed, ending abruptly Parnok's career as a critic and her most constant source of income.

[77] Parnok left Moscow in late summer 1917 and spent the Russian Civil War years in the Crimean town of Sudak with Erarskaya.

Parnok immediately set to work, sourcing her dramatic verse on the epic poem, The Taking of Tmuk Fortress, by Hovhannes Tumanyan and using Erarskaya as her inspiration.

Both physical love and desire, were perceived as masculine traits, thus women poets who wrote erotic lyrics without shame, regardless of their sexual orientation, were often given the label Sapphic.

[81] Sudak proved to be a productive writing time for Parnok and in 1919, she published in an almanac a substantial number of lyrics, which focused on her new-found spiritual journey.

The poems reflected her attempt to write of her experiences and desire as a sexually active lover of women,[83] but she stylized her homoerotic verse in a way that was almost alien to her natural poetic voice.

Using biblical symbolism, she wrote of the physical rapture and suffering of her body which diverted her quest to grow spiritually and produce poetry as her dedicated vocation.

[91] In early 1922, Parnok returned to Moscow with Erarskaya[92] and was assisted by Vladimir Mayakovsky, who helped her find lodging and join the Writer's Union.

[100] She joined the group known as the "Lyrical Circle", which included members like Lev Gornung, Leonid Grossman [fr], Vladislav Khodasevich, and Vladimir Lidin.

[106] Increasingly Parnok felt isolated from her readers and alienated from her peers,[107] in part because by 1926, GLAVLIT's authority had been extended to cover both public and private publishing.

[115] By spring, sales of "The Knot"′s publications had been quite good and Parnok felt revived enough to spend the summer with Erarskaya and Tsuberbiller in the small town of Khalepye in the Kiev Oblast of Ukraine.

[119] She was depressed, "The Knot" had been forced to close after publishing Half-Whispered, she was suffering from writer's block with her poetry, and Spendiaryan had died without finishing the score to Almast.

She made her living solely by translating poems by Charles Baudelaire, novels by Romain Rolland, Marcel Proust, Henri Barbusse and others.

[125][126] When Maria Maksakova left the title role, Parnok severed her interest in the project,[127] though it toured successfully in Odessa (1930), Tbilissi (1932), Yerevan (1933) and in Paris (1951), among others.

Vedeneyeva's son, Yevgeny, was living in exile at that time and Tsuberbiller, who had written a textbook used for decades in the high schools of Russia, helped her obtain books for him to maintain his studies.

They incorporate the themes running through all her works: "anguish, poetry, the elements (wind, water, earth, fire), heat and cold, illness, madness, remembering, and death".

[118] The name, literally sotto voce, reflected the dark thoughts which had pervaded her life over the period, worries of isolation, madness, and death, sprinkled with a few rare lyrics of rapture and vigor.