Go East! LGBTQ+ Literature in Eastern Europe
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Go East! LGBTQ+ Literature in Eastern Europe Zbornik prispevkov s konference Na vzhod! LGBTQ+ književnost v vzhodni Evropi Edited by Andrej Zavrl and Alojzija Zupan Sosič Ljubljana, 2020 Go East! LGBTQ+ Literature in Eastern Europe Editors: Andrej Zavrl, Alojzija Zupan Sosič Reviewers: Vojko Gorjanc, Roman Kuhar Layout: Jure Preglau Published and issued by: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani (Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts) For the publisher: Roman Kuhar, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana Ljubljana, 2020 First e-edition. Publication is available free of charge on https://e-knjige.ff.uni-lj.si/ DOI: 10.4312/9789610603108 To delo je ponujeno pod licenco Creative Commons Priznanje avtorstva-Deljenje pod enakimi pogoji 4.0 Medna- rodna licenca. / This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Kataložni zapis o publikaciji (CIP) pripravili v Narodni in univerzitetni knjižnici v Ljubljani COBISS.SI-ID=304647168 ISBN 978-961-06-0310-8 (pdf) Contents 3 Contents Foreword. .5 LGBT Literature in Eastern Europe: A View from the West . .6 Gregory Woods Comparative Analysis of Two Texts for Young Adults, Dečki [Boys] and Fantje iz gline [The Clay Boys] . 20 Milena Mileva Blažić In Search of Territories of Freedom: Ivan Kozlenko’s Novel Tanzher and the Queer Challenge to the Ukrainian Canon. 31 Vitaly Chernetsky Queer Emotions? The Narrative Shape of Feelings in Noben glas by Suzana Tratnik and Eskorta by Michal Hvorecký . 39 Matteo Colombi and Alenka Koron Wartime Memories from East and West: The Construction of George Faludy’s Gayness . .46 Gábor Csiszár Sappho Was Not a Poet: The Sonoric Character of Poetry and Its Emancipatory Potential. 53 Nina Dragičević Jozef Pronek’s Underwear: Displacement, Queer Desire, and Eastern European Masculinity in Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man . .58 Denis Ferhatović (Post)Communist Queer Identities in Uroš Filipović’s Staklenac and Michał Witkowski’s Lovetown. 65 Jelena Jović “If a Cutie, Then Always Misha”: Evgenii Kharitonov’s Queer Masculinities . 72 Tatiana Klepikova The Subversive Construction of Gender in the Poetry of Kristina Hočevar. 80 Vesna Liponik Reconceptualising the Russian LGBTQ+ Community: The Impact of Russia’s ‘Gay Propaganda’ Laws on LGBTQ+ Discourse . 87 Maruša Maligoj Zygmunt Mycielski’s Blues, or How Some Testimonies Related to Queer History Simply Vanish into Thin Air . 93 Izabela Morska 4 Contents Camp Kharitonov and Russian Gay Identity . 101 Kevin Moss Criticism in the Closet. .112 Maja Šučur Warm, Blue and Bulgarian: The Development and Diffusion of Three Expressions to Denote a “Male Homosexual” in Central and Eastern European Languages . .121 Andrea Trovesi Lesbian Poetry Tradition . .129 Nataša Velikonja The Language of Mystery in One of Witold Gombrowicz’s Stories. .135 Błażej Warkocki Boys and Critics: The Reception of the First Slovenian Homoerotic Novel as a Reflection of Sociocultural Changes. .147 Andrej Zavrl Slovenian LGBTQ Narrative in the New Millennium . 154 Alojzija Zupan Sosič The Apparitional Gay and the Invisible Everyone Else – LGBTQ+ Identities in Contemporary Croatian Playwriting . 162 Jasna Jasna Žmak Contributors . .170 Izvlečki (Abstracts in Slovenian) . .175 Name Index . .186 5 Foreword In late October 2018, 27 scholars, researchers and activists gathered in Ljubljana to present 25 papers at the first international conference on LGBTQ+ literature in Eastern Europe to be organised in Slovenia: Go East! LGBTQ+ Literature in Eastern Europe / Na vzhod! LGBTQ+ književnost v vzhodni Evropi.1 Today, due to the remarkable progress made in recent years, it may seem that LG- BTQ+ literature has been safely mainstreamed and commodified. Moreover, the im- pressive work by LGBTQ+ historians, theorists and writers has been widely recognised and institutionalised. At least in the West. What about the East? How have LGBTQ+ literary production and scholarship developed in Eastern Europe and why has East- ern Europe been (perceived as) less accepting of sexual and gender non-normativity? What are the literary depictions of non-normative sexualities and gender identities by authors from Eastern Europe? What is the place and function of LGBTQ+ literature in Eastern European literary systems and cultures? What about LGBTQ+ literature for young readers? What are the national canons of LGBTQ+ writers and the relationships between LGBTQ+ rights movements and literature? What has been the reception of LGBTQ+ texts at home and abroad? What are the linguistic and discursive features of these texts? These are just some of the issues that the participants who decided to go east ex- amined in their papers, 20 of which are published here in revised and extended versions. The papers are organised in alphabetical order by authors’ names, and Professor Gregory Woods’s keynote speech is published as the introduction. 1 The conference took place on 25 and 26 October 2018 at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, and it was co-organised by Škuc Ljubljana and the Faculty of Arts. The scientific and organising committee consisted of Prof Dr Roman Kuhar (Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana), Prof Dr Alojzija Zupan Sosič (Department of Slovenian Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana), Prof Dr Vojko Gorjanc (Department of Translation Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana), Suzana Tratnik (MA, writer, translator, activist), Brane Mozetič (writer, translator, editor, activist), Dr Andrej Zavrl (independent researcher, teacher, translator). 6 LGBT Literature in Eastern Europe: A View from the West Gregory Woods Out of Ignorance Western ignorance of Eastern European cultures is often at its most conspicuous dur- ing moments of apparent rapprochement, when the magnanimous westerner decides to show an interest. We might think of Allen Ginsberg in 1965, having just been expelled from Cuba, interacting with the young people of Prague like a bull in a china shop, before the authorities put him on a plane to London. Gay sex was not illegal in Czech- oslovakia, but Ginsberg’s very public affirmations and recommendations of gay pride, and the openness of his serial sexual encounters with young Czech men, were more or less unthinkable. His biographer Barry Miles concludes the account of this episode: ‘Allen played straight into the hands of the Stalinists, who were using any excuse to stem the tide of liberalism. Although Allen was acclaimed for his chutzpah—no one else would have dared to behave as he did—for his friends and acquaintances in those countries [Cuba and Czechoslovakia], his visits were not a conspicuous success’ (Miles 368). The obliviousness was not all Ginsberg’s—neither the organisers of the event in which he was crowned ‘King of May’, nor the authorities, had anticipated the huge crowds that would turn up—but Ginsberg’s arrogance is instructive. Looking eastward from the West, such moments should give us pause. It is, at least, worth noting that, while Czechoslovakia had decriminalised homosexual acts in 1961, many of the United States continued to criminalise them well into the twenty-first century. If western gay writers often speak about the East from positions of ignorance, that ignorance is not often diminished by the available text books. In my own History of Gay Literature, the only Eastern Europeans, apart from Russians and Germans, are Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Tadeusz Borowski and Wiesław Kielar (Woods 1998). Know- ing, therefore, that my own work has not been exactly comprehensive in its coverage, I have consulted my reference books in LGBT studies to see how they compared. Of the Eastern European nations, Wayne Dynes’ two-volume Encyclopedia of Homosexuality LGBT Literature in Eastern Europe: A View from the West 7 (1990) has a separate entry only on ‘Russia and USSR’, by Simon Karlinsky (1133- 1138). Claude J. Summers’ The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage (1995) has only an item on ‘Russian Literature’, also by Simon Karlinsky (611-618), plus shorter items on a few individual writers: Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Kuzmin, Sophia Parnok and Marina Tsvetaeva . Despite its ambition for universal coverage, Louis Crompton’s massive book Homosexuality and Civilization contains just one sentence on Russia: ‘Russia, where male relations seem to have been surprisingly open in the 1600s and 1700s, did not have a sodomy statute until 1832’ (321). Neil Miller’s major historical survey, Out of the Past, is more forthcoming, but still almost wholly confined to the one nation: it has a chapter called ‘Czars and Commis- sars: Homosexuality in Russia’. Its main subjects, seen within the context of continuous social change, are Gogol, Tchaikovsky, Kuzmin, Eisenstein; and a discrete section on ‘Diaghilev, Nijinsky, and the Ballets Russes’. The chapter ends with a brief extract from Vasily Grossman’s Forever Flowing, on lesbian relationships in the labour camps (199- 214). Later, Miller mentions the 1993 decriminalisation of male homosexual acts by Boris Yeltsin’s government, and briefly adds: ‘The newly independent Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia repealed their sodomy laws as well’ (485). Unusually, in addition to the obligatory item on ‘Russia’, as well as a separate item on ‘Russian Litera- ture’, George Haggerty’s encyclopaedia Gay Histories and Cultures has others on ‘Czech Republic’, ‘Slovenia’ and ‘Yugoslavia’.1 Even as recent a volume as The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (2014) has only an item on ‘Russian