Between Silence and Embodiment: Queer Strategies of Memory in Olga Sedakova's 'In Memory of a Heroine'

• In Event: Queer(ing) Archives: Alternative Intimacies, Histories, and Subjectivities

Abstract

My paper explores Olga Sedakova’s essay “In Memory of a Heroine,” published in 1980 in the first issue of the Moscow Christian samizdat almanac Rubezhi. This text, never officially republished by Sedakova, survives exclusively in samizdat archives. Its central figure—an unnamed schoolgirl who commits suicide—emerges and dissolves across a multiplicity of textual reflections: the girl as a singer, an old woman begging with an outstretched hand, death itself, a swimmer, a reader, and the narrator recalling her childhood and contemplating her father. These fragmented embodiments flow into one another, rendering any cohesive narrative—or stable narrative subject—impossible. The verbalized silence surrounding the heroine’s subjectivity becomes a creative space, where she embodies a “language of doubt,” pervasive yet ineffable. I examine this essay as a unique manifestation of late Soviet underground female subjectivity in the 1970s–1980s, analyzing it through the lens of queer theory, which interrogates the complexity of representing female language and desire. Drawing on Luce Irigaray’s and Elizabeth Grosz’s works on the corporeal and discursive dimensions of female desire, as well as Catherine Russell’s and Mejdulene B. Shomali’s studies of archiving queer experience beyond Western contexts, I explore how Sedakova’s strategies of silencing subjectivity and longing “to be seen but not to be known” reflect broader practices of late Soviet women writers. Through elusiveness and refusal, Sedakova and other underground female authors articulated identities that remained invisible to the Soviet cultural mainstream, while creating spaces for alternative intimacies and subversive modes of being.

Author

• Elizaveta Grishechkina, U of Pittsburgh