Aleksei Konakov's monograph examines the life and works of Evgenii Kharitonov (1941–1981), a writer, poet, and theater director who was nearly unique—during the Brezhnev era—in thematizing queer desire and Soviet gay underground in his stunningly effective literary texts. The book productively combines biography and literary analysis, taking advantage of numerous memoirs and recorded interviews about Kharitonov.
In order to conceptualize his subject's biography, the author isolates three essential “layers of Kharitonov's life”: “the body of theater,” “the nets of literature,” and “house arrest” (30). The last biographical section refers metaphorically to Kharitonov's final years, paraphrasing the title of his sole collection of prose and poetry Under House Arrest (201–28). The parts of the monograph that focus on Kharitonov's career in acting and directing paint a detailed and expressive portrait of the gifted and ambitious young man from Siberia who was enjoying success in the Moscow theater world of the 1960s and the bohemian life that came with it. Kharitonov's prominence in the Thaw-period Moscow artistic circles and young Khartonov's overall cheerfully adventurous disposition may come as a surprise to those readers who remember the stifling, lonely, and increasingly tragic atmosphere of Kharitonov's literary worlds created in the next, socially stagnant decade.
Under House Arrest comprises texts written between 1969 to 1981, the period over which Kharitonov's writing style evolved from existentialist psychological prose of “The Oven” toward the Rozanovian fragmentary poetics of “Tears on the Flowers,” “In a Cold Higher Sense,” and “Tears for One Killed and Strangled.” Konakov identifies and details what he sees as “three original stylistic strategies, invented by Kharitonov”: “miniaturization” produced in response to the grandiosity of the Soviet project (40–46), “provincialization” in response to his experience of living as a transplant in the imperial capital (91–98), and “transparentization“ as an answer to his sense of being under state surveillance (158–64). The scholar employs an array of analytical methods, from formalism to deconstruction, in order to discuss the poetics of Kharitonov's texts, and he succeeds in producing the strong and original readings thereof. At the same time, he uses what I would describe as a neo-Marxist sociological approach—rather than, say, the apparatus of queer cultural studies—to explain Kharitonov's artistic methods and his personality as a gay provincial who succeeded in constructing, over a short period of time, several creative careers in the Soviet capital. These careers included one in theater acting and directing, one in teaching pantomime at the VGIK (the Soviet Union's premier film school), one in speech therapy, and finally, the most significant, if unofficial one, in literature.
Konakov's sociological method aims to demonstrate how material, economic, and social conditions shape cultural and literary practices; he employs this method somewhat straightforwardly yet usually quite effectively. For instance, his analysis of how Kharitonov made a literary strategy out of his actual life situation as a transplant from the heartland to Moscow is very insightful and interesting (91–98). It is equally illuminating to learn about the role which Kharitonov's obtaining a typewriter and learning to use it played in forming his poetics of “artistic typing” (241–46). The reader will also be impressed by Konakov's witty explanation of Kharitonov's proto-conceptualist narrative “self-estrangement” and self-observation as reflecting the author's obsessive sense of being watched by the all-seeing state and its repressive organs (164). Occasionally, Konakov takes this approach a bit too far to be fully convincing, as he does when he connects certain features in Kharitonov's aesthetics to the techniques of homosexual intercourse as they are presented in the Soviet manuals on sexual forensics (170–71).
In the late 1970s, Kharitonov found himself to be “a person of interest” to both the KGB and criminal police. Konakov argues that Kharitonov had problems with the Soviet legal system as early as 1963 when he allegedly received a suspended sentence based on the Soviet sodomy law known as Article 121 (63). The only source that Konakov cites for this potentially very significant biographical fact is a “personal communication” of one of Kharitonov's myriad friends. Konakov writes about it in passing, as if not quite believing this report's doubtful validity. Judging by the apparent lack of immediate administrative consequences from this episode for Kharitonov, it appears likely that on said occasion, the police investigated Kharitonov, harassed him, and then dropped the case. This is one of a few instances when Konakov skips the due diligence necessary to establish the facts based on memoirs and “personal communications.” In particular, writer Nikolai Klimontovich, while a good acquaintance of Kharitonov's, later made a career of fictionalizing literary gossip; therefore, there is no reason to accept the juicy details he provided about Kharitonov's romantic and sex life as uncritically as Konakov does (55). It is also hard not to notice that some “personal communications” betray their sources’ utter cluelessness about the ways of gay subculture; when Konakov integrates these remarks into his biographical analysis, it creates a very heteronormative perspective on the book's very queer subject (see especially 213–14).
A few methodological problems notwithstanding, Aleksei Konakov's book is constructed splendidly and written with true inspiration. It is also helpful for the reader that the author cites Kharitonov, a genius literary stylist, copiously. Because of this abundant quoting, the reader gets a very good idea of the stylistic flavors of Kharitonov's oeuvre along with its subtle literary analysis and an ambitious and richly researched survey of Kharitonov's historical and cultural moment. It is an engrossing work that combines historical depth with critical sophistication. Students of Russian literature and Soviet culture will find it both informative and intellectually stimulating.
