Psychoanlaysis and my senior thesis

[Deborah Hoffman]

Hi John,
I suspect you will meet with a lot of knee-jerk, well,
jerkish responses to your topic, rather than responses
geared toward helping you pursue an idea that has
really piqued your interest, something which at least
in theory those in academia claim to want for their
students.  

That being said, are you thinking to examine this as
an overview of many different fictional characters, or
to focus on Igor' in particular?  It might be useful
to make a distinction between gay as in carnal desire
of one man for another (which could be situational,
experimental, could constitute bisexuality, etc.), and
gay identity as such, something familiar to
twentieth-century denizens but that probably shouldn't
be retroactively superimposed on earlier figures. 
There is also the Platonic love model, which
theoretically does not involve carnal desire.  Take a
look at Boswell's The Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex
Unions in Pre-Modern Europe which examines extant
church rituals for unions between men, which if memory
serves includes a number of medieval Slavic documents.
 If this practice was widespread or at least part of
what a literate individual would be been familiar
with, it might provide support for your arguments, at
least in the medieval period.

Keep in mind that I am not a professional academic,
but only an M.A. candidate, and I'm hoping there are
others who are willing to provide serious and helpful
feedback as well.

Best,
Deborah

> ------------------------------
> 
> Date:    Sun, 26 Mar 2006 08:16:54 -0800
> From:    John Reed <johnvitebsk69 at YAHOO.COM>
> Subject: Psychoanlaysis and my senior thesis
> 
>   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

Deborah Hoffman
Finance Chair, Graduate Student Senate
Modern and Classical Language Studies
Kent State University
http://users.ameritech.net/lino59/index.htm

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