This article has benefited from the advice of many people, in particular Eliot Borenstein, Serguei Oushakine, and all the participants in the “Masculinities in Russia” conference and workshop sponsored by the Summer Research Lab of the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign in 2003.

1. Samoilov, Lev, Perevernutyi mir (Saint Petersburg, 1993), 7.Google Scholar

2. In the few letters in which homosexuality is mentioned, it is in the context of Soviet prisons and the army, where homosexuality reflects brutal social hierarchies. There, homosexuals are “made,” not born.

3. Moss, Kevin, “The Underground Closet: Political and Sexual Dissidence in East European Culture,” in Berry, Ellen E., ed., Post-Communism and the Body Politic (New York, 1995), 229.Google Scholar

4. In the phrase of D. A. Miller. Miller, , The Novel and the Police (Berkeley, 1988), 206.Google Scholar

5. As one Russian lesbian explained to David Tuller: “I don't want to fight for the rights of lesbians—they never repressed lesbians here because no one ever knew that they existed…. The problems for lesbians only start when they fight for their rights. Because now the Russian public knows the word. They know that lesbians exist.” Tuller, , Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay and Lesbian Russia (Boston, 1996), 61.Google Scholar

6. As Toporov puts it: “[Klein], of course, lied about everything, about prison and about his release, but, frothing at the mouth, he attempted to prove that he was right. ‘Get rid of that rotten faggot (gnoinogo pidera),’ I advised Boria Davydov [the editor of Neva].” Viktor Toporov, Dvoinoe dno: Priznaniia skandalista (Moscow, 1999), 304.

7. Klein, Lev, Drugaia liubov': Priroda cheloveka i gomoseksual'nost’ (Saint Petersburg, 2000), 16.Google Scholar

8. Sinfeld, Alan, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (New York, 1994), 9.Google Scholar

9. The dubious ontological status of homosexuality is reflected in, among other things, the use of double entendre and euphemism. Consider, for example, the use of the Russian word goluboi, which can denote either the color light blue or homosexual—or both—in the titles of works that feature gay characters and themes, such as the novels Goluboe salo (2002) by Vladimir Sorokin, Golubaia krov’ (1999) by Marusia Klimova, Golubye shineli (1994) by Natali Brande, Pesn’ golubogo marlina (2001) by Andrei Buklin, the short story “Golubchik” (2001) by Liudmila Ulitskaia, and the song “Golubaia luna” by Boris Moiseev.

10. Borenstein, Eliot, “Slavophilia: The Incitement to Russian Sexual Discourse,” Slavic and East European Journal 40, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 143.CrossRefGoogle Scholar An expanded version of this article was published as “About That: Deploying and Deploring Sex in Postsoviet Russia,” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 24, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 51-84.

11. Vishevsky, Anatoly, “The Other Among Us: Homosexuality in Recent Russian Literature,” Slavic and East European Journal 42, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 723-29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990), 185.Google Scholar

13. Ibid.

14. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), 89.Google Scholar

15. Miller, Novel and the Police, viii-ix.

16. Olcott, Anthony, Russian Pulp: The Detektiv and the Russian Way of Crime (Lanham, Md., 2001), 13.Google Scholar

17. Practitioners of psychoanalysis, such as Slavoj Žižek and Renata Salecl, have pointed to a “cynical distance from the ruling ideology that enabled the average Soviet citizen to ‘stay sane.'” Salecl, , The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism after the Fall of Socialism (London, 1994), 109.Google Scholar Panic, as a thoroughly interiorized experience, however, suggests the collapse of that cynical distance and the emergence of a new post-Soviet subjectivity.

18. Olcott, Russian Pulp, 109. For more on late Soviet crime fiction, see Oushakine, Serguei, “Crimes of Substitution: Detection in Late Soviet Society,” Public Culture 15, no. 3 (2003): 427-51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Olcott comments that “the corpses pile up so quickly in most of the new detektivy that one could begin to suspect authors are paid by the body. Serial killers are a popular genre topic.” Olcott, Russian Pulp, 19. See also Renata Salecl's analysis of media coverage of the Chikitilo case as evidence of the depoliticization of crime during perestroika in Spoils of Freedom, 99-111.

20. A good example of this can be found in Dar'ia Dontsova's detective novel, Krutye naslednichki, in which the murderess is discovered to be, despite appearances to the contrary, “a person with a sick psyche [s bol'noi psikhikoi],” whose motivations are not political or economic; they are vaguely oedipal: “Seven years ago Lisa MacMayer decided to kill her loved ones [rodnykh]. The reason was weighty [vesomaia]—she hated them. She hated Susanne, because she loved [her brother] Jean more than anyone in the world. Jean, because Susanne loved him, despite all the ugliness he created. Eduard, because he wasn't her father.” In fact, one of the central questions of the plot is: “Who is the real father of these children?” Dontsova, Krutye naslednichki (Moscow, 2003), 269, 277.

21. Anthony Easthope comments: “There is no shortage of objections to psychoanalysis, and one of the main ones is that it ignores history. Psychoanalysis tends to regard human beings as though they are the same everywhere and always were.” Easthope, , What's a Man Gotta Do ? The Masculine Myth in Popular Culture (New York, 1990), 4.Google Scholar

22. Vishevsky, Anatoly, “Answers to Eternal Questions in Soft Cover: Post-Soviet Detective Stories,” Slavic and East European Journal 45, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 733.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. These two novels are especially illustrative of post-Soviet crime fiction and the reorganization of the public and private spheres in post-Soviet culture. Stilist is referred to repeatedly by Catharine Nepomnyashchy, Olcott, and Vishevsky in their discussions of the detektiv. Moreover, in the novel the heroine, Nastia Kamenskaia, is put into contact with a former lover, which results in the uncomfortable blurring of her private and professional identities. Similarly, in Koronatsiia the model of the patriarchal family is used to connect a private drama (the kidnapping of a grand duke's son) with a public drama: the fall of the house of Romanov. For more on the treatment of homosexuality in post-Soviet detective fiction, see Elena Baraban, “Obyknovennaia gomofobiia,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 5, no. 19 (2001), available at http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2001/5/ (last consulted 28 December 2001).

24. Nepomnyashchy makes this argument concerning gender issues in Marinina's novels in “Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem: Aleksandra Marinina and the Rise of the New Russian Detektiv,” in Adele Marie Barker, ed., Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev (Durham, 1999), 173.

25. Ibid., 178.

26. On gender and sexual anxiety in fin-de-siècle Russian society, see Engelstein, Laura, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca, 1992).Google Scholar On the topic of gender and sexual anxiety in the post-Soviet period, see Kon, Igor, Seksual'naia kul'tura v Rossii: Klubnichka na berezke (Moscow, 1997)Google Scholar, especially chapters 8 and 9; Pilkington, Hilary, ed., Gender, Generation and Identity in Contemporary Russia (London, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Larsen, Susan, “Melodramatic Masculinity, National Identity, and the Stalinist Past in Postsoviet Cinema,” in Studies in Tiuentieth Century Literature 24, no. 1 (Winter, 2000): 85–120 Google Scholar; and Rimmel, Lesley, “Commentary: Pornography in Russia Today; Men's Anxieties, Women's Silences,” in Levitt, M. and Toporkov, A., eds., Eros and Pornography in Russian Culture (Moscow, 1999), 639-42Google Scholar.

27. On the centrality of gender categories in the articulation of homosexuality in contemporary Russian culture, see Baer, Brian James, “Russian Gays/Western Gaze: Mapping (Homo)Sexual Desire in Post-Soviet Russia,” GLQ, 8 no. 4 (2002):499–521, especially 513-16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28. On the homosexual as a symbol of social decadence, see Showalter, Elaine, “Decadence, Homosexuality, and Feminism,” in Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York, 1990), 169-87.Google Scholar

29. Sedgwick, Between Men, 25.

30. Akunin, Boris, Koronatsiia, ili, poslednii iz. romanov (Moscow, 2000), 31.Google Scholar All translations are mine.

31. Ibid., 145.

32. Ibid., 43, 295.

33. Ibid., 46.

34. Ibid., 70-71.

35. Ibid., 76, 22, 75.

36. Ibid., 144.

37. Ibid., 182.

38. Ibid., 345.

39. Ibid., 236, 272.

40. Gender and sexual deviance are associated with crime in several of Marinina's novels, in particular, Svetlyi lik smerti (1997), whose villain is a cross-dressing murderer, Smert’ radi smerti (1995), which features a lesbian, and Ne meshaite palachu (1997), which describes the rape of a man.

41. Marinina, Aleksandra, Stilist (Moscow, 2002), 230.Google Scholar All translations are mine.

42. Ibid., 31 (emphasis added).

43. Ibid., 84.

44. Many of the most insightful critical works dealing with gender issues in the novels of Marinina stress the vulnerability of the female detective and her functional equivalence to the crime victim. See, for example, Nepomnyashchy, “Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem“; Tronmova, Elena, “Fenomen detektivnykh romanov Aleksandry Marininoi vkul'ture sovremennoi Rossii,” in Trofimova, E. I., ed., Tvorchestvo Aleksandry Marininoi kak otrazhenie sovremennoi rossiiskoi mental'nosti (Moscow, 2002), 19–35 Google Scholar; Ponomareva, Galina, “Zhenshchina kak ‘granitsa’ v proizvedeniiakh Aleksandry Marininoi,” in Shore, Elizabeth and Haider, Karoline, eds., Pol, gender, kul'lura (Moscow, 1999), 181-92.Google Scholar Stilist, on the other hand, explores the vulnerability of Russian men.

45. Marinina, Stilist, 25.

46. Ibid., 20, 22.

47. Ibid., 38.

48. Ibid., 168, 148, 140.

49. Here Akunin incorrecdy distinguishes between the word tapetka, which he uses to refer to female-identified homosexuals, and tetka, which he uses to refer to male-identified homosexuals. In fact, both tapedta and tedxa refer to effeminate, female-identified homosexual men. The absence of a specific term for masculine, male-identified homosexuals suggests die fact that they were not generally considered to be homosexual at all. At that time only effeminate, passive men were stigmatized as homosexual.

50. Marinina, Stilist, 82.

51. Ibid., 422.

52. This is typical of many of Akunin's novels in the Fandorin series. A single woman finds herself amid a group of competing and competitive men so that male interest in the woman appears as a function of male rivalry. Varvara in Turelskii gambit (Moscow, 2000) is a good example.

53. Marinina, Stilist, 391, 353, 183.

54. Ibid., 444.

55. Ibid., 388.

56. Ibid., 246.

57. Ibid., 266, 276.

58. Ibid., 374, 376, 377.

59. Ibid., 54.

60. Ibid., 49.

61. Ibid., 24.

62. Ibid., 369. “Pechal'nym— / (I ia byl takim) / Stanovitsia serdtse rebenka, kotoryi ne plachet, / Khotia i rugaiut i b'iut!” This poem, which Kamenskaia recognizes in one of Solov'ev's “translations” as an original work by her ex-lover, suggests that the translator may be not only a closeted homosexual, but also a closeted writer, a “stylist” who adds literary style to poorly written foreign novels, making them bestsellers. So successful are his “translations” that his publishers have him beaten and surveilled in order to keep him in Russia.

63. Marinina, Stilist, 438.

64. Ibid., 440 (emphasis added).

65. Ibid., 441.

66. Ibid., 442.

67. Ibid.

68. Nepomnyashchy argues that at least part of the popularity of the detective stories is due to their ability to simultaneously “express and neutralize” the fears and anxieties of a society. “Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem,” 173.

69. Sedgwick, Epistemology, 185.

70. Akunin, Koronatsiia, 93.

71. Ibid., 249, 246.

72. Ibid., 93, 95.

73. Ibid., 192, 47, 5, 149.

74. Ibid., 253.

75. Ibid., 86, 89.

76. Ibid., 124.

77. Ibid., 151. The orphaned Fandorin also experiences a similar emotional, indeed physical, reaction to seeing his mentor and father figure Brilling in Azazel’ (Moscow, 2000), 83. While Fandorin's reaction is less sexualized Uian Ziukin's, it is ambivalent (“priatnotrevozhnoe“) and physical (“shchekatanie“), underscoring the intensity of male-male bonds and their proximity to the sexual.

78. Akunin, Koronatsiia, 259.

79. Ibid., 198.

80. Akunin in fact describes an incident of homosexual blackmail in Turetskii gambit. Evidence of a homosexual relationship is used to frame Colonel Kazanzaki, which, in the words of the general, is “a story as old as the world.” Akunin, Turetskii gambit, 131.

81. Akunin, Koronatsiia, 210, 214.

82. Ibid., 197 (emphasis added).

83. The navy has long been a site of homosexual fantasies.

84. Marinina, Stilist, 202-3, 386.

85. Ibid., 234.

86. While the male characters in Stilist find no peace, Kamenskaia herself makes a gesture toward the reestablishment of traditional gender roles at the end of die novel. Exhausted by the investigation, she cries and then offers to make her male colleague a cup of tea.

87. Akunin, Koronatsiia, 348. It is unclear whether he is mourning here the loss of Mile Decliqueorof Fandorin. In any case, it is at precisely this moment that he recalls Endlung's suggestion that he join the navy.

88. Goscilo, Helena, “Style and S(t)imulation: Popular Magazines, or the Aestheticization of Postsoviet Russia,” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 24, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 15–50.Google Scholar

89. Zhirinovskii, Vladimir and Iurovitskii, Vladimir, Azbuka seksa: Ocherki seksual'noi kul'tury v rynochnom mire (Moscow, 1998), 108.Google Scholar

90. Sedgwick, Epistemology, 184.