2.6 - Queerness

Summary

This chapter provides an overview of the longue durée of Russian literature’s engagement with non-heteronormative sexuality and non-normative genders as well as a more extended focus on the Modernist period as a time when queerness operated as a particularly generative cultural mechanism, stimulating new modes of literary production. While queer literary expression can be observed since the beginning of literature in Russia, the chapter argues that the early twentieth century saw the development of specific forms of literary poetics that were at once expressive of queerness and associated with it. The chapter also considers the history and philosophical connections of the most significant of these forms: the existential prosaic fragment.