Avtobiografija

Greshniki

2023-08-26T17:04:20+02:00

This creative text details the author’s impressions of people and events that took place in Russia in 2003. It recalls ‘Greshniki’, a nightclub in St Petersburg that hosted gay rights organisations and offered a space for people on the margins to meet. Names and descriptive details have been changed to protect identities.

Interview with Evgeniy Pisemskiy: LGBTQ+ Activist

2023-08-26T17:10:12+02:00

Evgeny Pisemskiy is an LGBTQ+ activist from Russia, where was the director of an LGBTQ+ organization that was declared a foreign agent. He had to flee Russia and now lives in the UK where he continues his activism supporting the LGBTQ+ community in Russia and abroad. The interview below was conduct ed in July 2022.

Interview by Connor Doak and Callum Doyle. Translation by Callum Doyle and Matilda Hicklin.

Introduction to Grigorii Konovalov's Letters

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Письма к Евгении Гутман, 1938–1939

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“Отец стал художником, вернее, родился поэтом,потому что родился в семье поэтов”. Джузеппина Ларокка беседует с Андреем Андреевичем Тарковским.

2023-08-26T17:22:38+02:00

Evgenij Charitonov. Due racconti (Racconto di un ragazzo: “Come sono diventato così”. Volantino)

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Pivovarov, Viktor. 2017. Serye Tetradi (Moscow: Garazh), 366 pp. Pivovarov, Viktor. 2020. Vliublennyi agent, (Moscow: Garazh), 368 pp. Pivovarov, Victor. 2021. The Agent in Love, trans. Andrew Bromfield (Moscow: Garage), 372 pp. Monastyrski, Andrei. 2021.

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Kuzovkina, Tat'iana, Larisa Najdič and Natal'ia Obraztsova (eds.). 2022. Lotmany. Semeinaia perepiska 1940-1946. Sostavlenie, podgotovka teksta, predislovie i kommentarii T. D. Kuzovkinoi, L. E. Naidich, N. Iu. Obraztsovoi, pri uchastii G.G. Superfina (Ta

2023-08-26T17:30:04+02:00

Losev, Aleksej e Loseva, Valentina. 2021. La gioia per l’eternità. Lettere dal gulag (1931-1933), traduzione e cura di G. Rimondi, postfazione di E. Takho-Godi, (Milano: Guerini e associati), pp. 288.

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Ukrainian Autobiographical Narratives in Their Historical Development

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Introduction to the special cluster of articles dedicated to Life Writing in the Ukrainian literary tradition by the editor, Tetiana Cherkashyna, who reconstructs the history of the development of Ukrainian autobiography throughout the centuries, identifies the key trends and highlights the contribution provided by the articles of the special cluster.

Memoirs of Serhiy Yefremov: Stages of Struggle for the Ukrainian Word

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The article is devoted to the study of diaries and memoirs of the prominent Ukrainian figure of the early twentieth century Serhiy Yefremov. Yefremov was one of the active figures in the creation of Ukrainian periodicals, having worked in the magazine Kievskaia starina, and was an active member of the Old Hromada. His literary works were subjected to strict censorship, which he tried to avoid. Serhiy Yefremov became the founder of the Ukrainian publishing house ‘Vik’, where he conducted active educational activities. He became the founder of the first Ukrainian newspaper, despite the oppression by the authorities and strict censorship of all print media. The diaries and memoirs of Serhiy Yefremov contain many literary portraits of prominent people of that time and analyze the cultural life of that time.

More Subjectivity, More Frankness: Portraits in Ukrainian Autobiographical Texts Stored in Archives

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This article is dedicated to the study of the peculiarities of literary portraiture in the hitherto unpublished autobiographical texts of Ukrainian writers of the twentieth century, which are stored in the Department of Manuscripts and Textology of the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine). Under study are the diaries of Varvara Cherednychenko and Mykhailo Ivchenko. These works contain numerous portrait sketches of Ukrainian and foreign writers of the time, as well as of relatives, friends, colleagues and casual acquaintances of the autobiographers. The peculiarities of literary portraiture in the diaries of Cherednychekno and Ivchenko largely depended on the chosen genre of the autobiographical work and the individual style of the autobiographer. Cherednychenko turned out to be a master of frank, detailed and literary portraits. She wrote literary portraits of almost all the people with whom she met. By contrast, Ivchenko created mostly laconic deconcentrated literary portraits of people he knew personally.

Kharkiv of the 1920s–1930s in Ukrainian Autobiographies of the Twentieth Century

2023-08-26T16:53:52+02:00

In the 1920s–30s Kharkiv was the capital of Ukraine, a powerful intellectual, cultural, scientific, industrial and financial center of Ukraine. State authorities, numerous scientific and educational institutions, theaters were located in the city. Thanks to constructivism, the architectural style of Kharkiv was changing. There were many literary and artistic associations in the city (Pluh, Hart, VAPLITE, VUSPP, Prolitfront and others). The literary portrait of Kharkiv of that period appears from numerous autobiographies of Ukrainian scientists, writers, cultural figures who lived and worked in this city in the 1920s–30s. From the Ukrainian autobiographies of the twentieth century, Kharkiv of this period appears as a place populated by active, effective, creative people who constructed a new reality, built a new life according to new rules. Significant literary loci of the city for Ukrainian autobiographers of this period are the House of Blakytnyi, the Peasant House, the Literary Fair quarter, the Slovo House, the Berezil Theater. From 1933, all spheres of life were strictly controlled by the authorities, many leading figures of that period were repressed, and every mention of them was prohibited. The Soviet system gripped the city.

Biographical Fiction: Love/Patience in Oksana Zabuzhko’s Novel Field Studies in Sphere Ukrainian Sex.

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The novel of the Ukrainian contemporary writer Oksana Zabuzhko (born in 1960) Field Studies in Ukrainian Sex (1998) can be appropriately attributed to the fiction critique (critical fiction) movement of the turn of the twenty-first century. The article identifies emotional and psychological problems in the relationship between a man / woman in the complex syntax of the novel, which is a sign of O. Zabuzhko’s idiostyle. O. Zabuzhko’s parents’ biographical facts are woven into the fabric of the novel. They mentally influenced the formation of the phenomenon of the genius of the Ukrainian writer of the turn of the twentieth–twenty-first centuries, which arose through pain as an overcoming of the feeling of fear and the complex of slave consciousness thanks to love, which fills with meaning any activity of an individual: art, life, relationships.

Il paratesto come pretesto: l’autobiografia di Pavle Solarić

2023-08-26T17:01:38+02:00

This paper analyzes the autobiography of Pavle Solarić (1779-1821), friend and
closest collaborator of Dositej Obradović. The work was actually configured as
part of a paratext, being the preface to Solarić's own translation of Von der
Einsamkeit (1773; it. transl. Saggio sopra la solitudine, 1804), a work by German
physician and philosopher Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann. While
Zimmermann addresses the concepts of loneliness and sociability, Solarić de-
scribes his own understanding of friendship, relationships and loneliness, and
he does so by interweaving the narrative with autobiographical data. He dwells
in particular on his country of origin and his family, but also writes about his
desire to pursue his studies and face existence as a hermit. In the course of the
narrative he often refers, in more or less explicit forms, to Obradović, his con-
stant point of reference. This is what emerges, for example, when he proposes
to live according to models of asceticism and holiness, when he aspires to visit
major centers of study (but unlike Obradović he prefers Serbian ones, such as
Sremski Karlovci), when he rails against superstition, when he admits that he
too harbors prejudices against his fellow man, when he gives authors precise
instructions on how to address Serbian readers, or when he launches the idea
of converting monasteries into schools and monks into teachers. The narrative
of his life ends in January 1809, at the time when his translation of Zimmer-
man’s text came out. It is thus an autobiography that projects its author into
the future since from that year onward Solarić began to publish his theories in
the field of philology. More than a pretext for autobiography, this paratext is a
pretext for the popularization of his philological project.

Authors

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Profile of the authors of the papers.

Introduction: Queer Life Writing in Russia and Beyond

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This piece introduces the special issue of AvtobiografiЯ on ‘Queer Life Writing in Russia and Beyond’. It begins by reflecting on the current climate for LGBTQ+ people in contemporary Russia, noting the legislation prohibiting the promotion of non-traditional relationships, and how the Kremlin has weaponized LGBTQ+ issues as part of Russian national exceptionalism. In place of this binary narrative, which pits a gay-friendly West against a traditionalist Russia, the introduction advocates an alternative course for exploring Russia’s queer culture, one that is dialogic, transnational and multidirectional, revealing how Russia’s homegrown LGBTQ+ community does not exist in isolation, but within a dialogue, speaking and responding to the rest of the world. Indeed, themes of border-crossing – literal or metaphorical – often figure prominently in Russian queer life writing, and the search for gender and sexual identity in these texts is often bound up with a search for national identity. Such journeying also happens at the theoretical level, and the introduction argues against methodological nationalism, suggesting that, when used sensitively, theoretical tools that emerged in one context may prove illuminating in another. Yet queer life-writing itself tends to resist the strictures of existing narratives, genres, and language, and the queer autobiographical ‘I’ often defies easy categorization. The piece concludes by summarizing each of the articles in the special issues, as well as the texts in the ‘Materials’ and Translations section.

‘I Became a Man in a Military Camp’: Negotiating a Transmasculine Identity in Aleksandr Aleksandrov (Nadezhda Durova)’s Personal Documents and Literary Fiction

2023-08-26T15:32:46+02:00

Notes of a Cavalry Maiden [Zapiski kavalerist-devitsy, 1836], an autobiographical narrative by Aleksandr Aleksandrov (born Nadezhda Durova) (1783-1866), a Russian-Ukrainian hero of the Napoleonic wars, has been popular with readers since its first publication in 1836. Despite the obvious gender ambiguity of the narrator in this text, most adaptations and biographies interpret ‘Nadezhda Durova’’s grammatically female gender as proof that her army service was a brief instance of military cross-dressing in the otherwise conventional life of a patriotic woman. However, Aleksandrov’s legacy includes not just Notes and other published fiction, but also a substantial corpus of personal documents, some of which have only recently been recovered from the military archives. These texts form a record of Nadezhda Durova’s documented transition to Aleksandr Aleksandrov and, I argue, testify that from 1808 Aleksandrov consistently identified as a man until his death in 1866. In this article, I focus on Aleksandrov’s military and civil correspondence, to compare his transmasculine voice in personal documents to the more ambiguously gendered voices of his narrators in fiction. Using the narratological category of ‘autofiction’, I argue that even though Aleksandrov had to choose between two binary gender identities in everyday life, literary fiction created a space for him to inhabit the personas of both ‘Nadezhda Durova’ and ‘Aleksandr Aleksandrov’.

Beyond the Censor and the Closet: Re-framing Eisenstein’s Memoirs as Queer Life Writing

2023-08-26T15:47:37+02:00

The voluminous, albeit fragmented, memoiristic writings of Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein are often cited in biographical works on the director to document historical events and his attitude toward those events, or to enhance our understanding of his theoretical writings on cinematography—the memoirs do indeed contain important theoretical passages on filmmaking and the creative mind. The memoirs, however, have yet to be analysed as queer life writing, despite the author’s self-conscious thematization of sex and sexuality and of their place in life writing, which takes place throughout the memoirs, and Eisenstein’s profound playfulness on these topics, which demands interpretive readings. This article represents the first attempt at a systematic interpretation of the memoirs as queer life writing and, together with recent studies of Eisenstein’s homoerotic drawings, of the homoerotic imagery in his films, and of his interest in ‘those who love strangely’, aims to contribute to our understanding of Eisenstein’s distinctly queer performance of his sexuality. To that end, the article analyses Eisenstein’s life writing through the theoretical lens of camp, as defined by Susan Sontag in her seminal essay ‘Notes on Camp’ (1966), and further elaborated by queer linguists, such as Keith Harvey (2002), who focus on the double-voicedness and citationality of camp talk.

Poetic coming-out, (un)masking or ‘autofictional poetry’? Valerii Pereleshin’s Ariel and Poem without a Subject

2023-08-26T15:54:49+02:00

Recent critical interest in queer life writing places much emphasis on prose, instead of poetry, as a medium to express one’s sexual nonconformity. This is no less the case in the Russian context, as poetic life writing by queer writers remains on the margins of literary criticism. While Olga Bakich begins her biography of Valerii Pereleshin (1913-1992) by referring to the poet as a ‘Russian émigré gay poet’, there has been meagre attention on his queer life writing, despite growing scholarly interest in his works as a Russian émigré writer in China and Brazil.

This article explores two poetic works which are considered the poet’s first selfreferential expression of same-sex love in his poetry: Ariel (composed 1971-1975; published 1976), a collection of sonnets, which is Pereleshin’s ‘lyrical diary’ of his fantasized love for a Soviet translator, editor, and writer in Moscow, and Poem without a Subject (composed 1972-1976; published 1989), an autobiographical account of the poet’s life as an émigré writer, as well as his struggles as one whose sexuality is considered ‘deviant’ in a heteronormative society. I explore the poetics of masking and unmasking in the representation of same-sex love in Ariel through an examination of Pereleshin’s appropriation of Shakespeare’s sonnets, with which he develops his own ‘autofictional’ poetry, a genre that enables him to express his passions through the intertwining of factual and fictional elements. My analysis of Poem without a Subject focuses on Pereleshin’s attempt to present his multifaceted literary and sexual life in the classical Russian tradition through the use of Pushkin’s Onegin stanza. Ultimately, I call attention to the limitations of reading Pereleshin’s poetic life writing as a comingout text, and examine strategies employed by the poet, mindful of the challenges in expressing sexual otherness in Russian literature and the threat of literary censorship, to develop his own version of queer life writing.

Olga Zhuk’s Strogaia Devushka: An Uncomfortable Narrative of Queer post-Soviet Diaspora

2023-08-26T16:03:28+02:00

This article analyses Ol'ga Zhuk’s 2013 novel Strogaia devushka from the perspective of queer feminist diaspora studies. The novel stands out as an example of life-writing depicting a woman who migrated from the post-Soviet region to Germany in non-heterosexual relationships. This article analyses its intersectional thematic scope, its complex non-linear migration narrative, its critique of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, as well as Western feminism. The novel depicts a relationship between a Jewish woman of Russian origin with a Dutch woman residing in Germany, exploring topics of violence, drug use, poverty, mental health and art. The article seeks to understand why Strogaia devushka has not become a ‘cult novel’ in its multiple contexts and why it resists classification as a queer feminist diaspora text, even though it fits each of these categories separately. I conclude by suggesting that Zhuk’s Strogaia devushka is best understood as an uncomfortable narrative of queer post-Soviet diaspora, and suggest ways, in which this ‘discomfort’ might contribute to self-reflection for multiply positioned readers.

Russian Trans* Stories: Collective Transgender Autobiography as Activism

2023-08-26T16:07:33+02:00

This article explores contemporary transgender collective autobiography published by Vykhod (Coming Out), an LGBTQ+ activist initiative in Russia. It contributes to the growing literature on trans* issues in Russian Studies by bringing a range of trans* voices to the forefront of discussion, situating them within the Russian context, and bridging literary analysis with trans* life writing theory.

At the centre of this analysis are three collections featuring ‘trans* stories’: We’re Here: Collected Trans*Stories [My zdes': Sbornik trans*istorii, 2017], Who I Am: From Sex and Roles to Queer [Kto ia est': Ot pola i roli k kvir, 2018], and Everyone Has a Body [Telo est' u vsekh, 2018]. These collections defy easy categorisation, combining autobiographical essays, poetry, diary extracts, art, and comic strips. The unifying factor is the first-person perspective, with authors drawing on their lived experiences as either trans* individuals or their loved ones.

The article determines the distinctive features of this ‘trans* story’ genre and demonstrates how Vykhod has mobilised autobiography in their trans* activism. It argues that rather than seeking to establish political visibility, activists are crowdsourcing trans* stories in attempts to create a sense of solidarity and community, achieve better trans* representation in LGBTQ+ projects, and provide a source of advice and self-help for Russian trans* readers facing similar issues.

Although the collections aim to generate the impression of ‘unity’ in these respects, the article equally illustrates that trans* stories are intended to showcase the diversity of trans* people and experiences. Narratives were intentionally curated to unsettle normative trans* life writing structures and work against the limitations placed on trans* bodies, sexualities, and gender expressions by the medical establishment. Specifically, Vykhod’s trans* stories spotlight a remarkable spectrum of gender and sexual identities and are particularly concerned with how trans* and queer (transkvir) experiences can intersect. Tracing these transkvir themes and aesthetics, this article shows how Russian trans* life writers are employing innovative linguistic and stylistic strategies to address the failures of the identity paradigm, the Russian language, and normative discourses to articulate trans* subjectivity or gender ambiguity.

Confessional narratives in digital self- and life-writing of bisexual activists in Russia: A case study of bisexual identity building

2023-08-26T16:15:44+02:00

This article focuses on digital self- and life-writing as a tool of online activism. Drawing on case studies of social media activism for bisexual rights in contemporary Russia, the article explores the ways in which the media genre of confessional narrative is employed by activists for constructing a shared bisexual identity in the process of self-mediation through social media platforms. Applying digital ethnography and interpretive content analysis methods, the paper presents a content analysis of video, textual and visual texts created by bisexual rights activists based in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Perm' and Vladivostok, and published on social media platforms (YouTube, Telegram, Facebook) in 2020 and 2021.

Introduction

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In memory of Natalia Rodigina

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A brief profile of the late Natalia Rodigina and a selected bibliography of her works on Russian auto/biographical studies