Reframing Gender and Sexuality in Slavic Literary Modernisms and Avant-Gardes

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The panel revisits the Slavic literatures of the early twentieth century to gain a better view of the aesthetic interrogations of modern gender norms in Eastern Europe. Our four papers recover six understudied but highly original writers from Czechoslovakia, Russia and Poland, bringing new scholarly attention to these overlooked voices. We approach gender expression as a complex libidinal interface between identity and society, the spiritual and the material and wish to shed light on the different epistemologies and phenomenologies involved in the remaking of the human that modernism understood to be its goal. Thus, in the Czech context, an analysis of the literary coding in Jiří Karásek’s decadent novels emphasises the role of aristocratic self-stylisation in his model of queerness, whereas the symbolist poetry of Otokar Březina and Jiří Mordechai Langer reveals the radical spirituality underwriting their non-heteronormative embodied experiences. In Russia, the futurist Ivan Ignatyev plumbed the catastrophic negativity of queer desire in an experimental poetic project cut short by his suicide, while Nina Khabias, as well as Mila Elin in Poland, imagined fluid selves and porous bodies in avant-garde poetry that reflected the experience of the new woman in the period of accelerated modernisation. In studying the innovative poetics of each particular author, we remain alert to the diachronic connections between the various generations of Slavic modernists shifting from symbolism to the avant-garde. The forum is conceived as a broadly comparatist enterprise exploring family resemblances across national literatures at a uniquely cosmopolitan moment in modern history.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Jonathan Craig Stone, Franklin & Marshall College

Papers

• Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic: Coding, Class, and Queer Literary Expression - Carleton Bulkin, Independent Scholar

• Queer Embodiment in the Czech Proto-Avant-Garde: Comparing the Poetry of Otokar Březina and Jiří Mordechai Langer - Alexander Wöll, U of Potsdam (Germany)

• A Gay Futurity or a Queer Death Drive?: The Case of Ivan Ignatyev - Ivan Sokolov, UC Berkeley

• Feminizing the Slavic Avant-Garde: Embodied Writing and a Fluid Self in Nina Khabias and Mila Elin - Tatiana Krasilnikova, Columbia U

Discussant

• Vitaly Chernetsky, U of Kansas