Authors

Discussion

Since the landmark appearance of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), scholars have unlocked the queer potential of the nineteenth-century novel, with studies devoted to Balzac (Lucey 2003), Dickens (Furneaux 2009), and Henry James (Pigeon 2005), to name but a few. This trend took some time to reach Russian studies, but recently queer readings of Tolstoi (Wilson 2014; Castro 2023), Goncharov (Kokobobo and McFadden 2021), and Chernyshevskii (Jarris 2022), among others, have emerged. As for Dostoevskii, I have previously offered a queer reading of The Idiot (Doak 2019), building on work that addressed queer sexualities in Dostoevskii from a historical perspective (Katz 2001, Fusso 2006). However, Anna Berman suggests limits to the explanatory power of queer theory for Dostoevskii, raising doubts about whether a theoretical framework developed in the late twentieth century can bear fruit for nineteenth-century Russian literature. She concludes that it is an ‘open question’ whether Dostoevskii’s work can be called queer (Berman 2021: 53).

My talk offers an emphatic ‘yes’ to Berman’s question, but argues that queer readings of Dostoevsky depend upon a rethinking of the relationship between theory and text. I understand queer reading not as an exercise in checking whether a theory ‘fits’ a particular writer, but rather as a set of dynamic encounters between reader and text, between our world and Dostoevskii’s worlds, both historical and imagined. Luc Beaudoin develops such a model of queer reading, one that is not limited to uncovering ‘queer motifs and hidden meanings’ (Beaudoin 2022: 13) but centres the intent, context and positionality of the queer reader. My research uses this approach to offer queer readings of two texts that bookend Dostoevskii’s career, Dvoinik (1846) and Brat’ia Karamazovy (1879–80). I aim not only to offer reinterpretations of two of Dostoevskii’s trickiest characters, Goliadkin and Alesha Karamazov, but also to provide a model of how to read nineteenth-century Russian literature queerly.