Psychoanalysis and my senior thesis

[Robert Chandler]

Dear John Reed,

If you want to make fun of something, you need to be a bit more witty than
this.

R.

> 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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