Lucas Stratton

Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

University of California, Berkeley

Estados Unidos

Russian author Evgenii Kharitonov (1941-1981), now a cult figure among Russia’s gay cognoscenti, was not able to publish in Russia during his lifetime. Although an outstanding figure of Moscow’s theatrical circles in the seventies, he kept his writing self “underground” and “abroad,” and was ironically posthumously awarded the prestigious Andrey Bely prize for literature in 1981. His works, however, did not begin to appear in print in the Soviet Union until the later half of the 1980s and still retain the attractiveness of anathema in Russian society today. In this essay I offer a close reading of “Dukhovka” (“The Oven”), a tale first published in the journal Chasy (“The Hours”) in France (1979). 

I will investigate the narrator’s all-to-apparent closet-bound discourse while relying, in part, on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet (1990), but while also applying the more recent scholarship of Sarah Ahmed in her Queer Phenomenology (2006). Kharitonov’s narrator avails himself of anecdotes to calm conversational malaise, always evading the unknown and the premeditated; he aims to embody the unimposing in both utterances and actions. He conceals himself with suppositions, cloaks himself with gesticulatory clichés, orienting his body towards conventional objects and places so as to perform the work of a culturally unambiguous existence in space. He maintains the closet, buttressing it just as he “supports conversation,” and having recourse to verbal props capable of concealing what he cannot say—or so he thinks. 

We do know that he longs to open up, but he cannot without the liberating effects of inebriation and he also cannot “cross the line” with a woman without it. Even what he wants to say he must say through others, therefore deflecting his desire by way of socially and culturally-sanctioned relationships. His is a parenthetical “I,” inert even in its fervid pursuit of epistemological control, incapable of direct disclosure. He hides behind things and objects, which serve as pretexts to displace desire and to neutralize it. 

We witness how the narrator aims to “strike the right chord” and how he is determined to always remain in tune, in-line and explainable, never suspicious in his actions or words. I use the musical analogy here on purpose since in this tale the guitar serves as an object of sublimated desire, a metaphor for the epistemological relationship between bodies: playing the guitar is like “strumming” up the “right” words among others, lest the performer betray his “true” tune by an accidental slip of the hand. 

Using Sarah Ahmed’s work as my guide, I will show how the narrator navigates through space, filling it both discursively and “gesticulatingly”—an awkward adverb, admittedly, though I use it in light of the narrator’s agile and calculated maneuvers. Keenly away of the suggestiveness of the verbal as much as the non-verbal, this narrator secretly imbues objects and gestures with cathectic and epistemological value, if only in the end to discover that the object of his desire, Misha, does not view the world through the same queerly phenomenological lens.

About Lucas Stratton

Lucas Stratton is a second-year graduate student in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a B.A. in French and Russian from Dickinson College. His interests include Russian poetry of the "Silver Age," French poets of the Parnassian and Symbolist periods, French récits de voyage pertaining to Russia, and representations of homosexuality in Russian literature.