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Engendering Suspicion: Homosexual Panic in the Post-Soviet Detektiv
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Abstract
This article examines the workings of the sexual closet within the enormously popular genre of the Russian detektiv, or detective story. Informed by the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and D. A. Miller, the article focuses on the dramatization of homosexual panic among various male characters in Aleksandra Marinina's Stilist (1996) and Boris Akunin's Koronatsiia (2001) in order to explore the experience of masculine subjectivity in post-Soviet culture. In both novels, a perceived crisis in patriarchal authority unleashes suspicions and anxieties regarding the experience of being and becoming a man, which is defined against the feminine and the homosexual. Figured both as an effect of and as a threat to male-male bonds, homosexual panic testifies to the interiorization of sexual and gender norms, which makes being male a highly self-conscious enterprise and fuels nostalgia for a mythic time before the appearance of homosexuality.
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References
This article has benefited from the advice of many people, in particular Eliot Borenstein, Serguei Oushakine, and all the participants in the “Masculinities in Russia” conference and workshop sponsored by the Summer Research Lab of the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign in 2003.
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20. A good example of this can be found in Dar'ia Dontsova's detective novel, Krutye naslednichki, in which the murderess is discovered to be, despite appearances to the contrary, “a person with a sick psyche [s bol'noi psikhikoi],” whose motivations are not political or economic; they are vaguely oedipal: “Seven years ago Lisa MacMayer decided to kill her loved ones [rodnykh]. The reason was weighty [vesomaia]—she hated them. She hated Susanne, because she loved [her brother] Jean more than anyone in the world. Jean, because Susanne loved him, despite all the ugliness he created. Eduard, because he wasn't her father.” In fact, one of the central questions of the plot is: “Who is the real father of these children?” Dontsova, Krutye naslednichki (Moscow, 2003), 269, 277.
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23. These two novels are especially illustrative of post-Soviet crime fiction and the reorganization of the public and private spheres in post-Soviet culture. Stilist is referred to repeatedly by Catharine Nepomnyashchy, Olcott, and Vishevsky in their discussions of the detektiv. Moreover, in the novel the heroine, Nastia Kamenskaia, is put into contact with a former lover, which results in the uncomfortable blurring of her private and professional identities. Similarly, in Koronatsiia the model of the patriarchal family is used to connect a private drama (the kidnapping of a grand duke's son) with a public drama: the fall of the house of Romanov. For more on the treatment of homosexuality in post-Soviet detective fiction, see Elena Baraban, “Obyknovennaia gomofobiia,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 5, no. 19 (2001), available at http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2001/5/ (last consulted 28 December 2001).
24. Nepomnyashchy makes this argument concerning gender issues in Marinina's novels in “Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem: Aleksandra Marinina and the Rise of the New Russian Detektiv,” in Adele Marie Barker, ed., Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev (Durham, 1999), 173.
25. Ibid., 178.
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29. Sedgwick, Between Men, 25.
30. Akunin, Boris, Koronatsiia, ili, poslednii iz. romanov (Moscow, 2000), 31.Google Scholar All translations are mine.
31. Ibid., 145.
32. Ibid., 43, 295.
33. Ibid., 46.
34. Ibid., 70-71.
35. Ibid., 76, 22, 75.
36. Ibid., 144.
37. Ibid., 182.
38. Ibid., 345.
39. Ibid., 236, 272.
40. Gender and sexual deviance are associated with crime in several of Marinina's novels, in particular, Svetlyi lik smerti (1997), whose villain is a cross-dressing murderer, Smert’ radi smerti (1995), which features a lesbian, and Ne meshaite palachu (1997), which describes the rape of a man.
41. Marinina, Aleksandra, Stilist (Moscow, 2002), 230.Google Scholar All translations are mine.
42. Ibid., 31 (emphasis added).
43. Ibid., 84.
44. Many of the most insightful critical works dealing with gender issues in the novels of Marinina stress the vulnerability of the female detective and her functional equivalence to the crime victim. See, for example, Nepomnyashchy, “Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem“; Tronmova, Elena, “Fenomen detektivnykh romanov Aleksandry Marininoi vkul'ture sovremennoi Rossii,” in Trofimova, E. I., ed., Tvorchestvo Aleksandry Marininoi kak otrazhenie sovremennoi rossiiskoi mental'nosti (Moscow, 2002), 19–35 Google Scholar; Ponomareva, Galina, “Zhenshchina kak ‘granitsa’ v proizvedeniiakh Aleksandry Marininoi,” in Shore, Elizabeth and Haider, Karoline, eds., Pol, gender, kul'lura (Moscow, 1999), 181-92.Google Scholar Stilist, on the other hand, explores the vulnerability of Russian men.
45. Marinina, Stilist, 25.
46. Ibid., 20, 22.
47. Ibid., 38.
48. Ibid., 168, 148, 140.
49. Here Akunin incorrecdy distinguishes between the word tapetka, which he uses to refer to female-identified homosexuals, and tetka, which he uses to refer to male-identified homosexuals. In fact, both tapedta and tedxa refer to effeminate, female-identified homosexual men. The absence of a specific term for masculine, male-identified homosexuals suggests die fact that they were not generally considered to be homosexual at all. At that time only effeminate, passive men were stigmatized as homosexual.
50. Marinina, Stilist, 82.
51. Ibid., 422.
52. This is typical of many of Akunin's novels in the Fandorin series. A single woman finds herself amid a group of competing and competitive men so that male interest in the woman appears as a function of male rivalry. Varvara in Turelskii gambit (Moscow, 2000) is a good example.
53. Marinina, Stilist, 391, 353, 183.
54. Ibid., 444.
55. Ibid., 388.
56. Ibid., 246.
57. Ibid., 266, 276.
58. Ibid., 374, 376, 377.
59. Ibid., 54.
60. Ibid., 49.
61. Ibid., 24.
62. Ibid., 369. “Pechal'nym— / (I ia byl takim) / Stanovitsia serdtse rebenka, kotoryi ne plachet, / Khotia i rugaiut i b'iut!” This poem, which Kamenskaia recognizes in one of Solov'ev's “translations” as an original work by her ex-lover, suggests that the translator may be not only a closeted homosexual, but also a closeted writer, a “stylist” who adds literary style to poorly written foreign novels, making them bestsellers. So successful are his “translations” that his publishers have him beaten and surveilled in order to keep him in Russia.
63. Marinina, Stilist, 438.
64. Ibid., 440 (emphasis added).
65. Ibid., 441.
66. Ibid., 442.
67. Ibid.
68. Nepomnyashchy argues that at least part of the popularity of the detective stories is due to their ability to simultaneously “express and neutralize” the fears and anxieties of a society. “Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem,” 173.
69. Sedgwick, Epistemology, 185.
70. Akunin, Koronatsiia, 93.
71. Ibid., 249, 246.
72. Ibid., 93, 95.
73. Ibid., 192, 47, 5, 149.
74. Ibid., 253.
75. Ibid., 86, 89.
76. Ibid., 124.
77. Ibid., 151. The orphaned Fandorin also experiences a similar emotional, indeed physical, reaction to seeing his mentor and father figure Brilling in Azazel’ (Moscow, 2000), 83. While Fandorin's reaction is less sexualized Uian Ziukin's, it is ambivalent (“priatnotrevozhnoe“) and physical (“shchekatanie“), underscoring the intensity of male-male bonds and their proximity to the sexual.
78. Akunin, Koronatsiia, 259.
79. Ibid., 198.
80. Akunin in fact describes an incident of homosexual blackmail in Turetskii gambit. Evidence of a homosexual relationship is used to frame Colonel Kazanzaki, which, in the words of the general, is “a story as old as the world.” Akunin, Turetskii gambit, 131.
81. Akunin, Koronatsiia, 210, 214.
82. Ibid., 197 (emphasis added).
83. The navy has long been a site of homosexual fantasies.
84. Marinina, Stilist, 202-3, 386.
85. Ibid., 234.
86. While the male characters in Stilist find no peace, Kamenskaia herself makes a gesture toward the reestablishment of traditional gender roles at the end of die novel. Exhausted by the investigation, she cries and then offers to make her male colleague a cup of tea.
87. Akunin, Koronatsiia, 348. It is unclear whether he is mourning here the loss of Mile Decliqueorof Fandorin. In any case, it is at precisely this moment that he recalls Endlung's suggestion that he join the navy.
88. Goscilo, Helena, “Style and S(t)imulation: Popular Magazines, or the Aestheticization of Postsoviet Russia,” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 24, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 15–50.Google Scholar
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90. Sedgwick, Epistemology, 184.