Please join CSEEES for our Autumn 2026 Graduate Student Lecture featuring Jay Hadfield (Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures). A light lunch will be provided to in-person attendees who register by Wednesday, October 21.
Speaker Bio
Jay Hadfield is a PhD candidate in SEELC who specializes in Russian Literature from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Jay earned a BA in Russian Language and Literature from Willamette University in 2020 and completed their MA at Ohio State in 2025. Their research incorporates queer theory, aesthetic theory, and existential philosophy. Jay’s work is principally informed by Russian formalism, post-structuralist narratology, and the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin. Their ongoing dissertation work develops a theorization of narrative subjectivity through close analyses of Russian fiction.
Abstract
At the turn of the 20th century, discourse on queer sexuality and gender proliferated in European Russia. Few works of literature attempt to capture the zeitgeist of that era as ambitiously as Andrey Bely’s modernist masterwork Petersburg, in which the student Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov is ordered by a secretive revolutionary party to kill his father, a conservative statesman, with a makeshift bomb. The novel’s experimental Symbolist poetics marked a major development in Russian literature, and, along with its daring and prescient thematic content, canonized Petersburg as one of the most important works of its epoch. Relatively little attention has thus far been paid to the novel’s queer tendencies, though some scholars have noted its homoerotic subtexts and preoccupation with androgyny. This analysis foregrounds precisely the text’s queerness as an intrinsic and essential feature of Bely’s narrative, and proposes that, like the bomb at the heart of the novel’s drama, the phenomenon of the “closet” exerts a pressure on the text which seems to threaten the very social order upon which dominant systems of meaning and identity are built. The queerness of Bely’s discourse ultimately communicates a profound sense of anxiety, both experienced by the characters in the story and replicated in narrative forms, borne precisely of what is not said about gender and sexuality, and which must instead be reconstructed hermeneutically.
