Cogito ergo vir sum: The “men’s question” from the perspective of the post-Soviet Russian intelligentsia of the 2000s

The collapse of the Soviet Union caused sentiments of national defeat and anxieties of impotence. As a response, Russian popular culture developed images of compensatory masculinity. One of these images appears in a series Brigada (The Brigade, 2002). It depicts a leader of a criminal gang as an example of hegemonic masculinity, a desirable model at the time. Unsatisfied with the crude images created for the general public, Russian intelligentsia responded with ridicule and offered alternatives. Suggesting an escape from empirical reality where hegemonic masculinity seem to prevail, Victor Pelevin’s Sviashchennaya kniga oborotnia (The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, 2004) portrays a path to quasi-Buddhist liberation. Employing Vladimir Nabokov’s disdain for psychoanalysis, Pelevin challenges Western claims to universality by reducing its achievements to strictly material. Consequently, the Western-inspired values of hegemonic masculinity like financial success or high social status appear default and irrelevant. Another attempt to offer an alternative masculinity model that portrays success as morally default appears in Venedikt Erofeev’s Moskva—Petushki (Moscow to the End of the Line, 1970), where the diegetic narrator’s marginalized status underlines his artistic talents and spiritual and intellectual superiority. Endorsed by the Russian intelligentsia, this model responded to the post-Soviet realities where survival was difficult and social status of many men drastically diminished. However, to lead such a purely spiritual existence, an artist needs someone to cover the material side of things—that is where women, chastised for their concerns with mundane matters of everyday survival, came into play. Responding to this incongruency, Marina Palei satirizes the image of the exceptional male artist in Pod nebom Afriki moei… (Under the Sky of My Africa, 2009), showing him without the idealizing fleur of literary conventions and exposing dangerous effects of his undeniable but unexplainable charm.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Slavic Languages & Literature

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Fedjanina, Marija

Contributors dc:contributor

• Tempest, Richard
• Hassan, Waïl
• Kaganovsky, Lilya
• Sobol, Valeria

• post-Soviet literature
• gender
• masculinity
• postmodernism
• Venedikt Erofeev
• Viktor Pelevin
• Brigada
• Marina Palei
• Russian intelligentsia
• masculinity of an artist

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Marija Fedjanina

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129383

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F129383