Table Of ContentRussian Studies in Literature
ISSN: 1061-1975 (Print) 1944-7167 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mrsl20
"Our Attitude Toward This Passion"
Aleksandr Chantsev
To cite this article: Aleksandr Chantsev (2009) "Our Attitude Toward This Passion", Russian
Studies in Literature, 45:3, 53-94
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2753/RSL1061-1975450303
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Russian Studies in Literature, vol. 45, no. 3, Summer 2009, pp. 53–94.
© 2009 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1061–1975/2009 $9.50 + 0.00.
DOI 10.2753/RSL1061-1975450303
AleksAndr ChAntsev
“Our Attitude Toward This Passion”
(Lesbian Literature, from Subculture to Culture)
An entire lesbian discourse has been established in Russian culture, with
its own language and its own critical self-reflexiveness, in poems, stories
and novels challenging traditional culture in the 1990s and entering the
Russian mainstream in the mid-2000s.
1
To identify and attempt if not to study, then at least to describe, certain ten-
dencies in lesbian literature as framed by the contemporary Russian literary
process may seem an ostentatious, unnecessary, and even somewhat marginal
endeavor. But it is so only at first sight. It may be said that in Russia of late,
a lesbian culture—or at least a lesbian subculture—has taken shape as a fully
formed phenomenon that finds natural expression not only in literature but
also in other fields of art.1
The lesbian culture has likely announced itself most loudly to the mass
mind in contemporary pop music: implicit homoerotic inclinations are insepa-
rable from the image of some pop singers, are a subject for self-conscious
consideration in the lyrics of their songs (which are often extremely popular),
are debated on occasion in the gutter press, and until recently were even used
in advertising campaigns to pique listener interest. Although the rock/pop
singer Zemfira never discusses her erotic inclinations, her song lyrics, the
English translation © 2009 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text © 2007 “Novoe
literaturnoe obozrenie.” “ ‘Otnoshenie k strasti’ (lesbiiskaia literatura ot subkul’tury—k
kul’ture),” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, vol. 88, no. 6 (2007), pp. 234–69. Translated
by Liv Bliss.
Notes renumbered for this edition.—Ed.
53
54 RuSSiAN StudieS iN LiteRAtuRe
persona she cultivates, and the rumors about her carefully concealed private
life have brought her songs cult status in the lesbian milieu. The girl duo Tatu
(officially written “t.A.T.u.” [the first letter is a non-Cyrillic “t” and the last, a
non-Cyrillic “u”—Trans.]) created a scandalous image for itself by declaring
lesbian propensities (which, as far as can be judged, were all for show). The
[female] pop group Reflex actively exploits lesbian eroticism in its music
videos. From 2000 to around 2005, the singers Elena Pogrebizhskaia (Butch)
and Mara cultivated the stage personae of “active” lesbians.2 The rock band
Night Snipers [Nochnye snaipery] was accepted in the early 2000s as the
voice of the lesbian subculture, and so it goes.
Admittedly, the lesbian elements in the images of those groups functioned
in entirely different ways. Thus, for instance, Night Snipers (which as of 2002
had abandoned its original configuration and split into two separate projects,
Night Snipers and the group Surganova and Orchestra) performed songs with
heterosexual content but gradually became famous among lesbians due to the
hardboiled stage image of the soloists Diana Arbenina and Svetlana Surganova,
for all that they steered clear of discussing their sexual orientation and, for
example, signed up for an appearance on [Andrei] Makarevich’s cooking show
tasty [Smak] in the traditional guise of young homemakers.3 The Tatu duo
was evidently handled from the outset by its producer Ivan Shapovalov as a
pop project for a heterosexual audience, and its lesbian-nymphet vibe was
exclusively designed to scandalize and attract attention. That public relations
stunt together with professionally written and arranged songs and skillful
marketing paid off richly in every respect: the two singers became famous,
first throughout Russia and then worldwide.4
Less “pop-culture” and more elitist but no less socially significant is the
manifestation of lesbian self-awareness in the cinema—not in the Russian
cinema, it is true, but in foreign films on general release in this country. (Since
the Russian film industry is currently focused on appealing to the broadest
possible range of moviegoers, one can hardly expect funds to be earmarked
for a movie intended for an avowedly limited audience that is apt to cause a
scandal in the press.)5 Films with female homoeroticism as a significant plot
element have become quite famous in Russia, including among individuals
of a traditional orientation: i Shot Andy Warhol, about the radical feminist
Valerie Solanas (directed by Mary Harron, 1996); the Hunger, in which
Catherine Deneuve seduces Susan Sarandon (directed by Tony Scott, 1983);
interno Berlinese, about the love affair between a Japanese ambassador’s
daughter and the wife of a German diplomat (directed by Liliana Cavani and
based on a novel by Junichiro Tanizaki, 1985); thelma and Louise (directed
by Ridley Scott, 1991); Fried Green tomatoes, which was based on Fannie
Flagg’s Fried Green tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café (directed by Jon Avnet,
SummeR 2009 55
1991); Chasing Amy (directed by Kevin Smith, 1997), Bound (directed by
Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1996); the first emmanuelle (directed by Just
Jaecklin, 1974), which contained an overtly lesbian scene; and Lost and de-
lirious, titled they Won’t Catch You [Vas ne dogoniat] in its Russian release
(directed by Lea Pool, 2001).6 Evidence of the resonance those films had for
lesbians is seen in the fact that Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly, who played
the leading roles in Bound, are mentioned by the Russian lesbian poet Iashka
Kazanova. in her poem “Rock ’n’ Roll” [Rokenrol].
Indicative in this respect is the reception given in Russia to the American
series the L Word (Showtime, Slovo na bukvu L in Russian), which takes its cue
from Sex in the City, in that it portrays a group of girlfriends going through a
string of encounters and affairs in search of a permanent partner—but, instead
of the lives of heterosexual New York women, it deals with the lives of Los
Angeles lesbians. Its content notwithstanding, that series was quite popular
with “normal” audiences.
Some L Word scripts were written by the Canadian poet Ann Carson,
whose oeuvre has received an approving nod from Susan Sontag and who
drops allusions to Gertrude Stein, Antonin Artaud, and other authors of “high
modernism” into her scripts. The series was shown in Russia on MTV, under
the symptomatic title of Sex in Another City [Seks v drugom gorode], and was
extensively discussed in the Russian sector of the Internet, where audience in-
terest (independent, as far as may be judged, from sexual orientation) attached
more to the heroines’ life stories than to their homoerotic inclinations.
The cinematic evolution of lesbian themes is a reflection of general so-
ciocultural processes: films with lesbian content have traversed a path from
art-house cinema (Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s the Bitter tears of Petra von
Kant, 1979) or movies that are aesthetically trivial but revolutionary in their
“message” to society (emmanuelle again) through popular, high-quality mov-
ies (Bound) to a commercially successful TV series. That path is, as we shall
see below, also relevant to a description of literature.
Lesbian culture has a no less lively presence in Russian periodicals than
it has in music, cinema, and television, with special-interest magazines,
both print (Volga-Volga, Pinx, and temnaia) and electronic (daiki chitaiut,
Kryl’ia, Plokhie devochki, etc.), publishing regularly or nearly so. To avoid
unnecessary repetition, we refer the reader to an article specifically devoted
to lesbian culture (especially in literature) on the Runet.7 Web sites apart,
though, mention must also be made of a resource that has been gaining steadily
in popularity of late, that being the blogs posted at Zhivoi zhurnal (Zhzh).
Zhzh’s Russian sector presently hosts several frequently visited “pink” com-
munities devoted to the discussion of various aspects of the life of lesbians in
Russia; we shall return shortly to the Internet’s role in shaping that culture.
56 RuSSiAN StudieS iN LiteRAtuRe
On the whole, though, it may be argued that Russia’s “pink” culture is now
an entirely independent phenomenon, since in the short time it has existed
(from the mid-1990s to the present moment), it has shaped its own interactive
milieu (which, in addition to the Internet, consists of special-interest clubs,
meeting places in large towns, and concerts by the groups mentioned above
and others less well known) and slang and has hammered out its own aesthetic
values and cultural reference points.8
It is worth dwelling in greater detail on the last three aspects. The opaque-
ness of the lesbian community’s slang to those in the surrounding community
(a buch [butch] is an active lesbian, a klava is a “femme” or passive lesbian,
a daik [dyke] is a lesbian equally drawn to either role, etc.) is characteristic
of any insular community. The same may be said of the shaping of aesthetic
values and of active efforts to stake a claim to given cultural phenomena and
to appropriate particular reference points.9 Lesbians’ desire to wall them-
selves off, to protect themselves behind their own slang, and to create their
own cultural territories, such as special-interest clubs in the megalopolis, is,
however, also proof that their very existence in the “greater” culture remains
semimarginalized. There has yet to be any visible attempt to overcome that
marginality. For example, lesbian slang has not become a mass jargon, as the
argot of “sellout” hippies once did or as the newspeak of showbiz glitz has
today. We do not undertake to judge how uncomfortable the members of the
“pink” community are in being so “enclosed,” but there is no question that
Russia’s society as a whole has yet to acknowledge the lesbian subculture
as a legitimate part of itself. Moreover, the repudiation (more forcefully as
the years go by) of “misfits” and especially of sexual minorities renders such
acknowledgment increasingly problematic.
Indicative in that regard was the May 20, 2004, NTV broadcast of the talk
show to the Barrier [K bar’eru], in which a dispute arose between Bashkirian
State Assembly Deputy Edvard Murzin, who had previously proposed the
legalization of gay marriage in Bashkiria, and Gennadii Raikov, a deputy
of the Russian Federation Duma notorious for his “conservative” rhetoric.
An audience vote taken during the broadcast indicated by an overwhelming
majority that our society is not yet ready for same-sex marriage. The guests
on the domino Principle [Printsip domino]—another talk show that featured,
among others, Evgeniia Debrianskaia, the famous lesbian writer and champion
of civil rights—reached comparable conclusions. But probably the most ac-
tive recent discussion of society’s attitude toward homosexuality came after
the May 2006 skinhead attack on a gay club in Moscow, which was led by
an Orthodox priest, and after Moscow’s City Hall banned a gay parade in the
capital in the summer of 2006.
Yet it cannot be said that there is a wholesale repudiation of “representatives
SummeR 2009 57
of a nontraditional sexual orientation.” For example, Russian cultural aware-
ness has adopted somewhat more of the gay culture, despite the persistence
even there of ambiguous and negative attitudes. There are gay writers,
musicians, directors, and dancers who are perceived even by the masses as
celebrities (admittedly, the examples here are aesthetically disparate, ranging
from Pier Paolo Pasolini to [the dancer and choreographer] Boris Moiseev,
etc.); and the gay magazine Kvir is sold at ordinary newsstands. Meanwhile,
when the talk turns to contemporary show business and cultural colonization
[kul’turtregerstvo] in literature, it occasionally becomes a gossipfest on the
machinations of the “blue mafia,” which allegedly “promotes” individuals of
the appropriate orientation.
Even that kind of acknowledgment, lurid and repudiatory as it may be, is,
however, denied the lesbian culture, which at best languishes in the shadow
of the male homosexual culture. In a 2006 interview, Ed Mishin, the publisher
of Kvir and owner/moderator of the gay.ru portal, noted a certain antagonism
between gays and lesbians: “We have tried to host combined groups but dis-
covered that gays and lesbians have completely different problems and are
not prepared to discuss them together.”10
2
On the subject of how the lesbian culture subsists in the shadow cast, as it were,
by the more powerful gay culture—a fact that not only ordinary scholars but
even specialists seem to overlook—we should now turn our attention to the
chronology of the emergence of homoerotic literature in this country. Pass-
ing over earlier periods in which the direct articulation of homoerotic motifs
was impossible, the appearance of that branch of the literary arts must be
dated back to the Silver Age, which saw the publication of Mikhail Kuzmin’s
Wings [Kryl’ia] (1906), the first openly gay novella written in Russian; Lidiia
Zinov’eva-Annibal’s novella thirty-three Abominations [Tridtsat’ tri uroda]
(1907), which formulated specifically lesbian metaphors; Prince Vasilii
Vasil’evich Rozanov’s People of moonlight [Liudi lunnogo sveta] (1911),
which discussed in detail the cultural role of homosexuality; and certain other
works.11 Although the topic was no longer taboo, however, there were still
no grounds to speak of a homosexual—much less of a lesbian—movement
then in society or literature; nontraditional sexuality was perceived not as a
new type of cultural self-definition but as a deviation (a “degeneracy”) or as
a manifestation of the Silver Age’s generally decadent Zeitgeist.12
Moreover, for understandable reasons, we cannot discuss not only the
cultural differentiation of male and female homosexuality but homosexual
literature in general during the Soviet years (the meticulously articulated
58 RuSSiAN StudieS iN LiteRAtuRe
homosexuality of the underground writer Evgenii Kharitonov being the ex-
ception to that rule). It is probably relevant—not culturally but sociopolitical-
ly—that the political trials of dissenters often included trumped-up sodomy
charges. So, for example, the director Sergei Paradzhanov, the poet and prose
writer Gennadii Trifonov,13 and Zinovii Korogoskii, director of Leningrad’s
Theater for Young Spectators, were sentenced under the infamous article 121
of the RSFSR Criminal Code [which criminalized homosexuality—Trans.];
the analogous article 156 of a prior version of the Criminal Code was used
against the singer Vadim Kozin.14 Nikolai Kliuev, who had been arrested in
1934 and was later shot, stood accused of treason, but high on the list of fac-
tors that turned the authorities against him was his homosexuality.
The only locus in the USSR where openly homoerotic liaisons were not
only possible but a constituent part of a mandatory microsocial ritual was the
prisons and camps of the Gulag. One of the rarest extended descriptions of
female homosexuality in Soviet-era Russian literature came from a man and
is found in “A Soviet Lesbian Love” [Sovetskaia lesbiiskaia], a song by Iuz
Aleshkovskii that has since passed into the realms of folklore:
He* does not paint his mouth with lipstick,
and he walks with a masculine stride;
he is altogether a man to me,
except that his beard never grows.
Homosexual scenes in countercultural or avant-garde works (not includ-
ing Kharitonov’s oeuvre) were more often than not put there for their shock
value. One example is the much-talked-about scene in which the hero of
Eduard Limonov’s15 it’s me, eddie [Eto ia, Edichka] copulates with a young
African-American.16
Although the homoerotic milieu and its attendant literature began to take
shape in this country during perestroika, the gay “subdivision” of that culture
to this day has a higher profile than its lesbian counterpart. Thus, for example,
the high-powered Runet portal gay.ru not only calls itself “gay” but is basically
devoted to male sexuality (only a portion of the site is sexually “pink”).17 But
the mass mind, insofar as it is even remotely inclined to accept the lesbian
culture, still does so exclusively as a part of gay culture, and then as its most
“deranged” part or simply as a nonentity within it.
This situation is extremely reminiscent of the state of Western society some
decades ago. In the West, though, this problem was partially resolved in the
1970s and the 1980s, as a result of efforts by the feminist movement and the
*The heroine’s “intended” (zhenishok).—A.C.
SummeR 2009 59
movement to win equal rights for sexual minorities. One of the first to articulate
the problem was Simone de Beauvoir, who in her famous Second Sex (1949)
discussed lesbianism as a unique form of female emancipation.
But this reconciliation between the active personality and the sexual role is, in
spite of any favorable circumstances, much more difficult for woman than for
man; and there will be many women who will avoid the attempt, rather than
wear themselves out in making the effort involved. Among women artists and
writers there are many lesbians. The point is not that their sexual peculiarity
is the source of the creative energy or that it indicates the existence of this
superior type of energy; it is rather that, being absorbed in serious work, they
do not propose to waste time in playing a feminine role or in struggling with
men. . . . The truth is that homosexuality is no more a perversion deliberately
indulged in than it is a curse of fate. It is an attitude chosen in a certain
situation—that is, at once motivated and freely adopted. . . . Like all human
behavior, homosexuality leads to make-believe, disequilibrium, frustration,
lies, or, on the contrary, it becomes a source of rewarding experiences, in
accordance with its manner of expression in actual living—whether in bad
faith, laziness, or falsity, or in lucidity, generosity, and freedom.18
Even so, as late as 1973, Monique Wittig, a theoretician and advocate for
sexual minorities who had graduated from the Sorbonne with a doctorate
in philosophy and had worked with Beauvoir on the magazine Nouvelles
questions feministes, called lesbian love “a theme which cannot even be de-
scribed as taboo, for it has no real existence in the history of literature. Male
homosexual literature has a past; it has a present. The lesbians, for their part,
are silent.”19 We realize that this attitude applied beyond the public at large,
when we recall, for example, that in 1947, W.H. Auden, who was himself
gay, had denied that women could ever understand homosexuality (although
he was not talking about female homoeroticism): “I don’t think one ought to
behave queerly in front of women. . . . It isn’t good for them. One may want
to discuss the subject seriously with one of them, who may be sympathetic
and understanding. That’s all right. But even there I’m not so sure it’s a good
idea.. Because, you see, women, even the most intelligent of them, can never
quite grasp the idea that there are such things as queers.”20
On the topic of homoeroticism, the essayist and student of culture Aleksandr
Genis made the following statement, which reeks of chauvinism: “Even so,
same-sex love forces us to define our attitude toward this passion that is of
no concern whatsoever to us.”21 Noting parenthetically that “even so” and the
fact that Genis was writing about gays, let us say that all of Russian society is
currently trying to define its “attitude toward this passion” by discussing the
problem of homoeroticism in the media, and that the definition has already
60 RuSSiAN StudieS iN LiteRAtuRe
been made by certain scholars whose works also supply evidence of manifesta-
tions of the lesbian self-awareness in contemporary Russian culture.22
As we can see, not only is the list of works in note 22 dominated by Western
authors and stops short of recent years, but also nowhere is the literature of
the “pink” community per se—the most vivid expression of that subculture’s
self-awareness—treated as a separate topic. This lacuna seems rather strange
if one compares the scope of Russian studies with analogous works in the
West, and especially in the United States, where in recent decades the study
of gay and lesbian literature has been distinguished as a separate discipline
(“queer studies”) within “cultural studies,” which has served as the founda-
tion for entire university courses and for the publication of relevant thematic
anthologies, both literary and critical. The study of the literature of the “les-
bian canon” is important not only as a testament to that hitherto neglected
and quite discrete segment of society, but also because it allows the specific
identification in the works in question of such currently topical themes as the
mobility and synthetic nature of gender and personal self-definition and of
motifs of ostracism, social marginalization, and individual disorientation in
a large and complex world.
With the development of women’s emancipation in society and culture,
“the assertion of female sexuality has become as fragile as that of male sexu-
ality. No one knows where they are.”23 The difficulties of orientation in the
gender and, more broadly, the sociocultural field partially explain the degree
of complexity in lesbian psychology. Literature provides the field wherein
that psychology is thoughtfully explored.
Whereas, in speaking of homoerotic literature in the West, one may say
that in it are represented literally “all shades of blue” (a miscellany of poet-
ics and forms), the new “pink” literature in Russia is still far from boasting
such variety.24 But in examining the most vivid and socially resonant works
in that literature, one may, it seems, also employ those authors to exemplify
the evident variety in the poetics that they represent.
Here and below, we do not consider the authors’ real-life sexual orientation
but only that of the actors in their texts, except when the author—Evgeniia
Debrianskaia, for example, and Iashka Kazanova and Margarita Sharapova
in part—makes a show of her everyday sexuality and invites us to consider
the literary texts as part of her biography or life project.
Our projected overview of lesbian literature in no way claims to encompass
the entire corpus of contemporary texts on these themes and operates instead
with works that seem to us to best represent the tradition. So, for instance, we
leave aside Sveta Litvak’s novella Rewarded by Vera [Nagrada Veroi], which
is about an affair between women burdened with husbands, children, and the
Soviet humdrum—a pseudoromantic narrative interspersed with ostentatiously
SummeR 2009 61
naive verses, whose sole virtue may be its painstaking restoration of a fairly
distant time (the early 1980s).25 We also omit Marina Sazonova’s “Triptych”
[Triptikh], about a homoerotic initiation;26 Margarita Meklina’s avant-garde
novella Blue Guinea [Golubaia Gvineia];27 Lesbi, a frankly “glossy” novel
by Ol’ga Lanskaia; Mikhail Volokhov’s scandalous play Lesbians Roaring
Like a tsunami [Lesbianochki shuma tsunami]; Kseniia Dukhova’s romantic
novel Game of Love [Igra v liubov’]; and several other works. Furthermore, as
evidence of the growing popularity of this topic, note should also be made of
An Anthology of Lesbian Prose [Antologiia lesbiiskoi prozy], which included,
among works by largely unknown authors, four-page sketches by Sharapova
and Meklina.28 This collection is a thematic heir to the same publishers’ Short
Lesbian Prose [Korotkaia lesbiiskaia proza] (1998), which contained Western
examples of the genre (Monique Wittig, Kathy Acker, and others).
3
The first author to make a name for herself within the framework of this dis-
course was Evgeniia Debrianskaia (born in Ekaterinburg in 1953)—whom
journalists have blithely accorded the proud title of “Russia’s chief lesbian”
(as Argumenty i fakty dubbed her in 1997), and who, for services rendered
to the organization of the lesbian movement in this country, had a Moscow
apartment purchased for her with funds donated by the then–mayor of New
York [Rudy Giuliani—Trans.]. To date she has published two books, Swim-
ming Lessons [Uchites’ plavat’] (novellas and stories) and the Spider’s tender
Aggression [Nezhnaia agressiia pautiny], a collection identical to Swimming
Lessons except for the inclusion of one new novella.29
Debrianskaia’s plot and location (America or the Russian backwoods) may
vary, but if they do, this has no particular impact on her stylistics, which, to
my mind, harks back to the “hard” Western tradition of Michael Gira, Wil-
liam S. Burroughs, Tricia Warden, Pierre Guyotat, and others, and in part
to Russian authors such as the early Vladimir Sorokin with his necrophiliac
and coprophagic themes, Iurii Mamleev with his mystically grimy natural-
ism [chernukha], and Baian Shirianov with his ostentatiously enthusiastic
sexuality. Debrianskaia hardly omits a single one of the characteristic themes
of “hard” discourse: cannibalism; sexual perversions of all types; sadomas-
ochistic scenes and the theme of sadistic domination; group sex; incest in
all its manifestations (a boy lusting after his grandmother, a girl pregnant by
her twin brother, etc.); murders, including the slaying of close relatives; the
desecration and mutilation of corpses, and so on. All this is presented to us
with a great deal of obscenity and some faddish formatting (the story “Pain
Triumphant” [Torzhestvo boli] is made up of several sentences set in a huge
