Konstantin Shildkret’s Wings of a Serf (1926): Blasphemous Bodies and Past Perversions

• In Event: Literature and/as Liberation: Studying Early Queer Literature from Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

This paper concerns Wings of a Serf (Крылья холопа, 1926), the historical novella by Konstantin Shildkret, published in tandem with an eponymous film directed by Yuri Tarich known among cinema scholars as a significant influence on Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. Shildkret’s pulpy neo-Gothic thriller contains one of the most explicit depictions of the tsar’s rumored erotic relationship with a male favorite to be found in officially-published russophone literature. This study examines the literary strategies and cultural contexts at play in this unusual little book long overdue for scholarly re-appraisal.

Author

• Maya Aracelia Acevedo Garcia, Harvard U