Authors
Connor Doak1; 1 University of Bristol, UK Discussion
What does it mean to read Dostoevsky queerly? He is hardly an obvious candidate for a queer reading: he is often understood as a reactionary thinker, who has arguably contributed to the same current of Russian exceptionalism that Putin would later draw on. Simon Karlinsky quipped that it was remarkable that Dostoevsky, supposedly a great psychologist, 'did not seem to have been aware of the existence of gayness'. Yet scholars have increasingly picked up on countercurrents of sexual non-conformity throughout Dostoevsky's work (Fusso, Katz, Naiman), even as others such as Igor' Volgin have protested (too much?) that Dostoevsky disdained the decadent vice. This paper argues that Dostoevsky's work consistently -- if implicitly -- articulate a critique of gender and sexuality norms in nineteenth-century Russia, as well as offering glimpses of queer alternatives. I conclude by suggesting how this critique is relevance to current debates about how Dostoevsky should be read in the light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. 
