Psychoanlaysis and my senior thesis - a small point

[colkitto]

"Finally, the girls lose out and the poet praises only the males, including 
the brave bison Vsevolod."

Vsevolod is dubbed an aurochs, not a bison.  The two were distinguished 
until the former became extinct (the last specimen died in 1627).

Robert Orr


>  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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