Valery Pereleshin: Asserting Queer Time in Three Brazilian Sonnets

• In Event: The Wrinkled Borders of Freedom: Russian Migration to the Americas across the 20th Century

Abstract

Through analysis of three late-in-life sonnets by the Russian poet Valery Pereleshin (1913-1992), this paper reveals how an underappreciated collection’s problematic erotics registers a dislocated historical actor desperately attempting to reassert his place in both time and place. Pereleshin’s biography traced a unique path, from early childhood in Irkutsk, through a move to Harbin in 1920, to eventual settlement in Rio de Janeiro in 1953. Despite the historic insularity of the Harbin Russian community, Pereleshin’s academic trajectory led him to study Chinese. However, he soon after joined an Orthodox monastery when pressures of heteronormative society became overwhelming. Nonetheless, in this period he began to actively embrace a queer lifestyle–a principal theme of his poetry written for global Russian émigrés. These romantic pursuits were most often with his students and other young men. In Brazil, Pereleshin learned Portuguese, and continued to write and translate until the end of his life. The three selected sonnets come from Pereleshin’s only Portuguese collection Nos odres velhos (In Old Wineskins). Analytical frameworks regarding queer temporality allow for an examination of how futurity, chronobiopolitics, and transness function in both liberatory and transgressive ways, as entangled in important questions of exoticization, orientalism, and exploitation.

Author

• Asher Anthony Maria, U of Pennsylvania