Psychoanlaysis and my senior thesis

[John Reed]

  I read Dr. Rancour’s letters with great interest. Although I am in my third year of college and have read a lot of Russian literature, I didn’t realize that Onegin’s gayness was already widely accepted by specialists in the field. I knew from what our professor had told us that Gogol was gay and that’s what drove him crazy in the end, but I didn’t know that Onegin is also firmly rooted in the "Gay Pantheon." I have had ideas along these lines ever since the fall, and I would like to bounce them off of SEELANGers before deciding whether to do my senior thesis on this topic. Actually, I would like to write about a dozen or so characters in Russian literature who are even better candidates for the Gay Pantheon than Onegin (no offense to Dr. Rancour, who, I gather, has laid the cornerstone for this area of Russian studies). They include Oblomov, Pechorin, Bazaroff, Ivan Ilyich and Makar Devushkine, to name only a few. But first I would like to go way back to the early literature. The
 obvious starting point would be Boris and Gleb, but I heard that Simon Karlinky had already covered that one. So I’ll start with the Igor tale. Now, I hope no one will be offended if I say that Igor Svyataslavsky was gay. But in order to catch this, you have to read between the lines. The poet, who was a cosmopolitan, open-minded person (possibly even a woman) who had visited fast-moving centers such as Istanbul, gives us obvious clues throughout the poem. First, Igor is enflamed with passion, even though he pursues no woman. As he sets out, he might be compared to a guy who is off on a camping trip for some male bonding. Igor takes no woman along. The passion can only have a male as its object. Igor wants to break his spear at the end of the enemy prairie. Spear-breaking, like the knife-plunging that was mentioned in one insightful SEELANGS letter, has obvious phallic ramifications. Igor then sees the sky grow dark, an obvious allusion to the notion that the night time is the right
 time. Then the Deev warns the enemy about Igor’s army. The name Deev looks like a thinly veiled reference to a female (devushka), and this part of the tale aligns the female realm against Igor. Although Igor’s men chase fair maidens, Igor gets only a staff (the shaft), presumably while his men are ravishing the maidens. Nominally, Igor has a wife, but when she pleads hysterically for him to come home, what does he do? He bypasses her (gives her the cold shoulder) and goes straight to Kiev, to a competing lover: the Mother of God. The poet is hinting at an obvious repugnance for carnal love with a deserving woman. And at the very end, girls on the Danube are still singing for Igor to come back, but by now he’s far away in Kiev, beyond their reach. Finally, the girls lose out and the poet praises only the males, including the brave bison Vsevold. This is only an introduction, but I would like to hear the opinions of SEELANGers.
    John Vit

			
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