the great vessel is never finished @chiliadhand - Tumblr Blog

hungwy

I don't want to escape the cycle of death and rebirth. I love it here. I'll be anything at all

#THIS

lindriart

♪ ♫

nedlittle

so frustrating when you go to see if anyone has written about homoerotic subtext in dostoevsky's work and you get maybe one academic article and the rest is substacks summarizing the book in question and one (1) person on reddit earnestly trying to engage in discussion before being immediately shot down. i'm not saying the man was an #ally or anything but there's a throughline particularly in his later works that at the very fucking least implies that a) he was aware that people can be gay b) he utilized this in some of his Great Works to explore human psychology. like can we please talk about netochka nezvanova being thrown out onto the street after she and katya are found kissing. or nastasya psychologically manipulating aglaya by writing her love letters in the idiot. or trusotsky goading velchaninov into kissing him on the mouth and confessing his love, which velchaninov calls "shameful and unnatural and immoderate" in the eternal husband. or stavrogin using his charisma to radicalize young men into heavily eroticized violence in demons. can we please talk about it. i feel like i'm in an echo chamber.

nedlittle

dostoevsky employed a rather putin-esque rhetoric towards homosexuality, considering it a western vice that would destabilize russia, as shown from this quote by his colleague varvara v timofeevna (c. 1873, trans by irene zohrab)

so it wasn't as though he was writing it in by accident. in fact, it's extremely easy to read this passage and understand some of the examples i gave above as being purposeful. in idiot, rogozhin and nastasya both use queerness to manipulate myshkin and aglaya respectively. both characters are "damaged goods" both mentally and in terms of sexual development, leading to perversion. in the cases of trusotsky and stavrogin, both characters are explicitly villainous and their villainy comes in part from their willingness to corrupt other men by any means possible, including sexually.

i can't think of any god-fearing excuse for whatever the hell happens in netochka nezvanova. the state tried to execute him because they knew that if he wrote a complete novel with a lesbian protagonist he would be too powerful. sad!

obviously this isn't woke or anything, and there were authors writing in the same period and similar circumstances who wrote much more liberal viewpoints into their works. however dostoevsky was a conservative & intensely religious man, so this isn't exactly surprising. i just wish that people could talk about this subtext without being shot down or ignored. these toxic relationships are among the most interesting parts of dostoevsky's novels to me as a gay person and i'm sick of people pretending that dostoevsky couldn't have been a) an incredible writer b) a conservative christian c) purposefully engaging with a spectre of queerness.

anyway. here are some articles i've found that do discuss the topic. i haven't had a chance to read through all of them, but they at least look interesting (all free and available for download)

dostoevsky and the (missing) marriage plot by anna a. berman (2021)

dostoevsky's comley boy: homoerotic desire and aesthetic strategies in a raw youth by susanne fusso (2000)

+ fusso has a whole book called "discovering sexuality in dostoevsky"

a falliable narrator and an inscrutable object: desire as structure in dostoevsky's the eternal husband by james phillips (2024)

"mann-mannliche" love in dostoevsky's fiction (an approach to the possessed) by irene zohrab (2002)

dostoevsky in europe: "the life of a great sinner" as source material for "the possessed" and "the adolescent", and ulrichs's confessional 'third sex' theory and some court cases in germany by irene zohrab (2001)

dostoyevsky: epilepsy, mysticism, and homosexuality by j.r. maze (1981)

myshkin's queer failure: (mis)reading masculinity in dostoevskii's the idiot by connor doak (2019)

ritahayworrth

happy fourth of july to the philippines ONLY

ritahayworrth

link to article

cassiterite-tenring

hi, filipino here. just want to say that our independence day is june 12, not july 4. july 4 is when the united states government decided that they would recognize our freedom, specifically because it is your independence day and they wanted to cement their cultural hegemony over our country. and because of their influence on our country this was recognized for a time as our independence day. we still commemorate it, but i hope you can understand why we don’t want our independence day to be associated so closely with our former colonizer. it wasn’t even a work holiday for us.

june 12 is the day that we filipinos declared our own independence for ourselves, and that is what we celebrate as independence day

houseofglass

happy june 12 to you

lawbutch

you don't have to be scared of your suicidal friends. you don't have to be scared of your psychotic or delusional friends. you don't have to call the police every time someone says they feel like they want to die. you can say things like, "that sounds really hard" and "I'm going to bring you some food and you can tell me more about it"