The event is online only. Join the meeting here.
DATE: Wednesday, March 25, 2026 at 12.00 noon ET (New York)
Drawing on queer theory’s insights into disorientation and failure, this talk asks: what happens if we read the superfluous man archive askew—reimagining its genealogy as a queer misalignment that resists closure, coherence, and developmental logic? From Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man (1850) to mid-century criticism, the superfluous man (лишний человек) was framed as a national pathology of inaction—a category central to Russian literary discourse and school curricula, yet strikingly unstable. Nineteenth-century critics debated its meaning, while later interpretations stretched it to encompass dissenters and existential outsiders.
This talk traces competing genealogies of the superfluous man in four essays: Dobrolyubov’s “What is Oblomovism?”, Chernyshevsky’s “A Russian at a Rendezvous,” Annenkov’s “The Literary Type of the Weak Man,” and Herzen’s “Very Dangerous!” My interest is in how these critics construct a genealogy of failure—linking emotional defeat with the inability to fulfill expectations of social utility, or foregrounding broken lines and sideways paths that unsettle the straight trajectories of social futurism. Importantly, the critics themselves were not disembodied voices: private writings reveal affective ambivalence or self-identification with the type they diagnose. My reading, informed by queer theorists such as Sara Ahmed, Jack Halberstam, and Elizabeth Freeman, seeks to illuminate the queer potential of Russian realism and to explore alternative ways of approaching Russian nineteenth century.
SPEAKER: Alexandra Urakova (Södertörn University)
SOBESEDNIK: Olga Petri (Cambridge Univ.)
IMAGE: Pushkin's Onegin, by Elena Samokish-Sudkovskaia https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%B8%D1%88
