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Articles

Vol. 1 No. 1 (2025): July 2025

Reading Wings Ahistorically: Mikhail Kuzmin’s Reclamation of the Religious Record

Submitted
12 February 2025
Published
2025-07-16

Abstract

This article picks up on a small moment from Mikhail Kuzmin’s seminal novella, Wings, in which the character Maria Dmitrievna turns to the historical and religious record for justification for same-sex desire. After the novel’s protagonist, Vanya, escapes from St. Petersburg and the homosexuality of his mentor to the Volga countryside, an Old Believer, Maria Dmitrievna, helps to inoculate Vanya into acceptance of queerness as not only natural but divinely ordained.

Through close analysis of the cited vitae of Sts. Eugenia of Rome, Nifont of Cyrpus, and Pafnutii of Borovsk, I explore the representations of gender and sexual non-conformity within those texts while also contextualizing their reception through ideas of queerness contemporary to Kuzmin. Guided by theories of queer historiography, I propose that Kuzmin’s Maria Dmitrievna interacts with the historical record in a way quite consonant with Martin Heidegger’s idea of the always already; that is, Maria Dmitrievna views pejorative depictions of queerness in the religious canon as freed from their contemporary condemnations, as the mere act of representation imbues an entity with an unpredictable afterlife in which shifting ways of thinking and value systems can revivify that which was previously latent.

After this exploration of the interaction of Maria Dmitrievna and the religious record, my discussion considers the utility and ethics of queer historiography, specifically in relation to accusations of excerpting or anachronism. Ultimately, I argue in favor of Valerie Rohy’s approach of ahistorical reading, alongside Carla Freccero’s method of analytic metalepsis, especially as it relates to queer hermeneutics.