A Gay Futurity or a Queer Death Drive?: The Case of Ivan Ignatyev

• In Event: Reframing Gender and Sexuality in Slavic Literary Modernisms and Avant-Gardes

Abstract

The historical avant-garde played a central role in the transformations of sexual discourses and practices in early-twentieth-century Russia. While this development can be seen in terms of a transition from the self-feminisation of Russian symbolism to the hypermasculinity of futurism, closer scrutiny reveals more complex connections between the generations of Russian modernism. My paper recovers one strikingly overlooked poet from the first cohort of the Russian avant-garde, Ivan Ignatyev (1892–1914), offering a queer reading of his life and work. A major theorist and practitioner of egofuturism, Ignatyev has remained on the margins of scholarly attention in large part due to his early suicide, committed the morning after his wedding. This suicide, as a symbolic event anticipated in Ignatyev’s necropoetics, allows us an insight into the queerness of his short-lived project. By juxtaposing images of universal destruction with motifs of masturbation and anal sex, Ignatyev’s poetry was distinct in bridging the eschatological visions of symbolism with the scatological poetics of cubofuturism. I examine the decadent sources of Ignatyev’s work and foreground its ambiguous temporality. Unlike the gay futurity envisioned by Mikhail Kuzmin, Ignatyev points to the far more precarious status of non-heteronormative sexuality in the Russian fin de siècle than that suggested by the conventional accounts of the period as an “erotic utopia.” I argue that Ignatyev’s cult of protean sexuality sublimated in an all-consuming death drive anticipates Lee Edelman’s theorisation of queer negativity and situate this futurist who negated the future within the gender context of his era.

Author

• Ivan Sokolov, UC Berkeley