This Onegin thing

[Daniel Rancour-Laferriere]

4 April 06

Dear Colleagues,
It is remarkable how persistent this Onegin thing has been.  Have I 
touched on a sore point?  Is it really worth that many postings?  I only 
mentioned Onegin's homosexual/bisexual orientation as one example of how 
psychoanalysis tends to be discriminated against in the Slavic field 
(the editor of _Russian Review_ said over the phone that he would be 
happy to publish that paper if I would just "delete the homosexual 
part").  I wonder, by the way, how many of you whose chains I have 
pulled have actually read the paper (in either its English or Russian 
variants)?  And how many of you have read _Signs of the Flesh_, where 
all the major literature - psychoanalytic, anthropological, 
sociobiological - on homosexuality (up to 1985) is surveyed?  Do you 
know that there are societies/cultures in this world where ALL males are 
expected to engage in homosexual acts in their youth?

Some of you have written me privately or publicly to say that the 
thought of homosexuality never even entered your minds until fairly late 
in life. "I had no idea," says Svetlana Grenier.   I doubt it.  Have you 
tried free association?  Automatic writing?  Have you watched children 
play?  Have you listened to children tell you their dreams?  All this 
would require time, effort, and probably cash if you took the trouble to 
explore your past on an analyst's couch (or took the time to read 
reports of said explorations - as I said earlier, serious 
interdisciplinary study takes an enormous amount of work) .

The unconscious knows much more than is presented to the self or to the 
world at a conscious level (Gogol said this in his Ukrainian tale about 
father-daughter incest long before Freud stated it formally).  Yes, 
Pushkin's narrator does not tell us much about Tat'iana's childhood, and 
lets us just make assumptions, or guides us toward heterosexual 
assumptions.  But psychologists know something about childhood too, and 
in any case Tat'iana IS bright, IS superstitious (a highly creative 
combination), IS desperately in love with Onegin, and so....

Peter Scotto points out an instance where Fedor Pavlovich Karamazov 
spends some time before a mirror.  I do not recall whether this was 
something he did on a regular basis, however (as in Onegin's case), and 
it would be interesting to see the full context of this particular act 
of primping.  In any case, Scotto protests:

>Throughout history, dandyism of one sort of another has been a form of male
>display, and to eqaute it with sexual orientatin strikes me as reductionistic,
>a-historical, and, in fact, puritanical ("any man who pays that much attention
>to his clothes can't be a "real man'".
>
But who "equated" dandyism with sexual orientation?  And who says dandys 
(dandies?) cannot be "real men?"  Certainly Onegin is man enough to 
fight a duel.  There are some pretty tough guys in the gay community, 
and indeed some rather violent S&M practices are encountered.  Also note 
the parenthesis in what I said to Inna Caron:

> I also like "dandy," since Pushkin himself borrows it from English 
> early in the novel.  Historical studies of dandyism have drawn a 
> connection between dandyism and homosexual or bisexual orientation 
> (although not in 100% of the cases).

The studies in question are in my bibliography, and I understand there 
have been more since.

I also point to a commonplace psychiatric observation in SOF: 
tranvestite dressing in males is often NOT accompanied by actual 
homosexual behavior (e.g., the man who needs to wear his wife's dress in 
order to have sex with her).  If it persists over years, however, it 
tends to be incorporated into a pattern of homosexual encounters or a 
homosexual partnership.

Svetlana Grenier writes:

> So, are we assuming that Pushkin believes in "customary 
> psychoanalytic" interpretation of dreams and does _not_ believe in 
> _prophetic_ dreams?  Why? What about Petrusha Grinev's dream in _The 
> Captain's Daughter_?  And does not the narrator's description of 
> Tatiana's dream as "chudnyi" imply its prophetic character? We know 
> that Pushkin himself believed in fate, went to fortune-tellers, and 
> was superstitious.  Or am I confused about your assumption, and you 
> are interpreting Tatiana's dream as that of a "patient" independent of 
> her creator's intention?

Yes, you are indeed confused about my assumption(s).  First, I am not 
asserting that Pushkin makes any "customary psychoanalytic" 
interpretation.  I do that, we do that.  We scholarly readers are the 
ones making the interpretations (Pushkin [via his Tat'iana] creates, we 
interpret).  Secondly, the dream is prophetic AND has its other 
meaning.  Why would these two exclude one another?  Why impoverish 
Pushkin's text with a single-minded reading?  Many critics have already 
said the dream is prophetic - so why deny it?  What most of you seem to 
be denying is Tat'iana's creative oneiric response to the narcissistic 
injury she has received from Onegin.

As for Lord Byron's portrait, that helps US understand Onegin's 
bisexuality (WE know who Byron was).  But for Tat'iana, I think it just 
helps her confirm her sneaking suspicion that Onegin is gay too.

Cheers,

Daniel Rancour-Laferriere

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