2026 Theses Doctoral

The Genius of Unhappiness: Queer Literary Heroism and Critical Self-Regard

Payne, Uma

This dissertation challenges presiding narratives in the critical receptions of three Russian queer writers active in the 1970s and 1980s: Evgenii Kharitonov, Gennadii Trifonov, and Eduard Limonov. I argue that these narratives are basically romantic, espousing a progressive moral vision of queer literary history, in which Kharitonov and Trifonov are stylized as heroes, and their legacies are theorized as an enduring force of queer resistance. By contrast, this romantic sense of queer literary history tends to exclude Eduard Limonov, since his nationalist politics contradict its progressive moral frame. This dissertation seeks to deconstruct the romantic tropes surrounding queer writers in pursuit of a fuller understanding of their literary politics.

In my first and second chapters, I argue that, in order to authenticate Kharitonov and Trifonov as plausible protagonists for queer Russian culture, literary historians have excused or overlooked considerable evidence of their pessimistic and reactionary political worldviews. My final chapter contends that Limonov’s undeniable post-Soviet Russian nationalism has led scholars to downplay, or to deny outright, the real significance of his autobiographical novel, Eto ia, Edichka (It’s Me, Eddie) to the country’s queer intellectual history.

My first chapter identifies the persistent heroization of Kharitonov in his apparently divergent Russophone and Anglophone critical receptions. Noting the same idealizing tendency in my own prior theoretical analysis of the writer, I work to divest myself of any retrospective assumption of radical Queer politics, and thus clarifying Kharitonov’s genuine significance to broader queer intellectual history. My second chapter works through archival documentation of Trifonov’s legal cases, both in the Soviet dissident press and in Western gay activist outlets, reconciling competing political narratives to present a fuller picture of the poet’s persecution. Trifonov’s collaboration with the KGB appears to have been instrumental to his freedom, suggesting that previous historical representations of Trifonov’s case as a moral victory for international gay activism were seriously idealized.

In my final chapter, I contest the depiction of Limonov’s Eto ia, Edichka as inauthentic to Russian queer literature. I argue that Edichka’s narrator evinces a clear preoccupation with the potentialities of concepts like anti-essentialism, marginal identity, and performativity—the same notions that fascinated the foundational thinkers of Queer Theory. These intellectual resonances with Queer Theory can be traced back to a pervasive climate of leftist disillusionment with Soviet totalitarianism in the 1970s, which likewise motivated French feminist philosophers like Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva. I end the chapter by analyzing the parallelism of Limonov’s romantic striving and the critical cultivation of a heroic sense of queer identity, underscoring the ease with which anti-essentialist language can yield to essentializing aestheticism.

In my conclusion, I speculate that the heroic framing of Russian queer literary history is the result of a conceptual slippage in Queer Studies, which has seen scholars valorize the language of Queer Theory itself as uniquely liberatory. This romantic understanding of Queer Theory’s transformative potential casts academics as stewards of queer resistance, leveraging the power of our critical methodology to retrieve the means of queer struggle from the lives and works of our historical subjects. Such readings, though premised upon the anti-essentialist frameworks of Queer Theory, lose sight of their own historical contingency, and produce paradoxically essentialist readings of their analytical objects. These interpretative strategies dramatize the stakes of analysis and queer intellectual labor, eliding, in the process, the remoteness of our professional spheres from more significant spheres of political struggle.