Queering Translation, Translating the Queer by Baer Brian James Kaindl Klaus

Author:Baer, Brian James,Kaindl, Klaus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2017-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

The Diaries

All his life Konstantin Romanov kept diaries, in which with startling honesty he revealed his anguish but also more positive puzzlement over his same-sex desire. In an 1876 entry, he wrote, “Male beauty seduces me” (Chernyshova-Mel’nik 2008: 38). Diaries of later years contain numerous stories of K.R.’s visits to local bathhouses for sex, such as the following entry written in 1904: “I was overwhelmed by sinful thoughts […] I walked up and down twice past the bathhouse doors; the third time, I went in. And so, I have once again sinned in the same way” (Romanov 1903–5).4

K.R.’s openness in his diaries makes them, according to our classification, speech about his same-sex desire, yet, strikingly, speech qua silence because this speech was entrusted only to his diaries. Only after his death, speech qua silence was permitted to become speech proper.

From what can be seen in surviving evidence about K.R., the situation of the mid-nineteenth-century USA as described in Katz (2001a: 53) is similar to that of Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century. Like in the USA, in Russia there was no distinction made between a same- and different-sex desire; nor did bisexuality form a third category between homo- and heterosexuality. Dan Healey writes specifically of the context of nineteenth-century Russia:

Masters and servants, coachmen and their passengers, bathhouse patrons and attendants, craftsmen and apprentices, and clergy and their novices exploited the opportunities of their positions to obtain or offer sexual favors. These men and youths should not be mistaken for homosexuals in a modern, European sense; their culture of masculinity included indulgence in same-sex eros, and it did not enforce the necessarily severe penalties associated in a later era with the stigmatized, medicalized condition of homosexuality.

(2001: 32)

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