• Queer(ing) Russian Art
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Queer(ing) Russian Art

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Standing at the intersection of Visual Studies and Queer Studies, the volume Queer(ing) Russian Art: Realism, Revolution, Performance exposes and explores the queer imagery and sensibilities in wor...
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  • 28 October 2025
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While the topic of queer sexuality in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union has been investigated for decades by scholars working in the fields of sociology, history, literary studies, and musicology, it has yet to be studied in any comprehensive or systematic way by those working in the visual arts. Queer(ing) Russian Art: Realism, Revolution, Performance is meant to address this lacuna by providing a platform for new scholarship that connects "Russian" art with queerness in a variety of ways. Situated at the intersection of Visual Studies and Queer Studies and working from different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, the contributors expose and explore the queer imagery and sensibilities in works of visual art produced in pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet contexts and beneath the surface of conventional histories of Russian and Soviet art.
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Price: $54.95
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Imprint: Academic Studies Press
Series: Myths and Taboos in Slavic Cultures
Publication Date: 28 October 2025
ISBN: 9798897830978
Format: Paperback
BISACs: ART / LGBTQ+ Artists, HISTORY / Russia / Post-Soviet, SOCIAL SCIENCE / LGBTQ+ Studies / Gay Studies, HISTORY / LGBTQ+, ART / Criticism & Theory, ART / History / Contemporary (1945-), ART / Popular Culture, ART / Russian & Soviet, History of art, LGBTQ+ Studies / topics, European history
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“In this impressive, wide-ranging volume, Brian Baer and Yevgeniy Fiks aim not only to take the initial steps in creating ‘a history of queer Russian art and artists’, but also to imagine ‘queer interventions in art histories’ (p. 18). [T]he volume is groundbreaking for Russian queer studies, particularly in its methodological sophistication and openness, which will undoubtedly inspire further work.”

— Connor Doak, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies


“Everywhere and throughout history queerness is a political act, yet missing narratives remain. That is why the comprehensive survey of queer Russian cultural practice mapped in these pages is so revelatory. The scholarly investigations contained herein are as capacious as the land-mass they mean to situate, and they are indispensable to any contemporary understanding of our accelerating international cultural and political dilemmas. Perhaps more importantly, you will be treated to probative examinations of the consequential disposition of current Russian queer cultural production, which shed light on the bold, resourceful, and inventive radicalism they represent. This book is essential reading for anyone concerned with twenty-first century meaning-making.” 

— Avram Finkelstein, founding member of the Silence=Death collective [OR Avram Finkelstein, artist, writer, activist]
Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University. Founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies and co-editor of the Bloomsbury book series "Literatures, Cultures, Translation," his publications include the monographs Other Russias: Homosexuality and the Crisis of Post-Soviet Identity and Queer Theory and Translation Studies: Language, Politics, Desire, as well as the collected volumes Translation in Russian Contexts, with Susanna Witt, and Queering Translation, Translating the Queer, with Klaus Kaindl. 


Yevgeniy Fiks is a Moscow-born New York-based artist, author, and organizer of art exhibitions. Yevgeniy has produced many projects on the subject of the Post-Soviet dialog in the West. Fiks’ books include Moscow (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), Soviet Moscow’s Yiddish-Gay Dictionary (Cicada Press, 2016), and Mother Tongue (Pleshka Presse, 2018).

Acknowledgements


Note on Transliteration


Introduction

Brian James Baer and Yevgeniy Fiks 


Part One. Theoretical Framings 

1. Between Semiotics and Phenomenology: The Problem of Queer Beauty

Brian James Baer


Part Two. Queer Beauty in Context

2. “In Appearance, Both a Lad and Lass”: Images of Androgyny in Eighteenth-century Russian Art

Olga Khoroshilova (translated by Aleksei Grinenko)

3. The Queer Opacity of Alexander Ivanov’s Nudes: Between Biblical Themes and Greek Love 

Nikolai Ivanov (translated by Aleksei Grinenko)

4. Prostitutes, Pierrots, and Priapus: The Queer Modernism of Konstantin Somov

Brian James Baer 

5. Modernism as the Uncanny of Stalinism: On Alexander Deineka’s Wartime Drawings

Gleb Napreenko (translated by Aleksei Grinenko with Brian James Baer)

6. Carnivalesque Carnality: The Queer Potential of Sergei Eisenstein’s Homoerotic Drawings 

Ada Ackerman

7. Moscow Conceptualism’s Erotic Objects

Yelena Kalinsky

8. Queering Socialist Realism: The Case of Georgy Guryanov

Maria Engström (translated by Ryan Green)

9. A Russian Schizorevolution?: Observations on the New Academy of Fine Arts and Queer Issues in the Late 1980s and Early 1990s

Andrei Khlobystin (translated by Aleksei Grinenko)

10. The Lure of Implied Transgression as Revolutionary Retrospective: The Illicit as la Belleza in Bella Matveeva’s Art

Helena Goscilo

11. Sexual and Gender Dissent in a Bipolar World: Georgy Guryanov and Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe

Andrey Shental 

12. “My Nationality Is My Sexuality”: The Post-Soviet, Diasporic, Non-Russian Queerness of Babi Badalov

Roman Osminkin (translated by Innokenty Grekov)


Part Three. Beyond Queer Beauty? Contemporary Post-Soviet Perspectives on Queer(ing) Art, Art History, and Artists 

13. Architecture, Outer Space, Sex: Queering the Kollontai Commune in 1970s Frunze

Georgy Mamedov and Oksana Shatalova (translated by Aleksei Grinenko with Adrienn Hruska)

14. Soviet Union, July 1991

Yevgeniy Fiks

15. LGBT Violence and the Limits of Realism: Polina Zaslavskaya’s Material Evidence

Victoria Smirnova-Maizel (translated by Ryan Green)

16. The Battle over Names: Radical Queer on the Russian Activist Art Scene

Seroe Fioletovoe (with translations by Innokenty Grekov)

17. Queer in the Land of the Bolsheviks, or the Archeology of Dissent

Nadia Plungian (translated by Aleksei Grinenko)

18. A Queer (Re)Claiming of Russian and Soviet Art: An Interview with Slava Mogutin 

19. “Queer and Russian Art?”: A Conversation between Katharina Wiedlack and Masha Godovannaya

20. Queering Sexual Minorities,: An Interview with Yevgeniy Fiks


Index