November 12, 2020

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By Aniyah Lewis & Stephanie Trujillo

Yevgeny Khariatonov was an independent writer and actor boundless from what he could do. He was not a union member nor a political dissident; he didn't try to get published either. Khariatonov wrote for the sake of creating and expressed himself in ways never done before in Russian literature. He did not allow societal norms take reigns of his art as he expressed his sexuality openly -- his work is inseperably bound to his sexually. Heterosexual sexual writers criticized, "...he felt it was a cross to bear, a sin he wanted to redeem--some even go as far as to claim his homosecuality itself a pose!" Society had not reached a point of acceptance yet that Kharitonov retelling of his sexuality pestered them. Khariatonov published five connected pieces: "the Oven", "One Boy's Story", "How I Got It Like That", "Alyosha-Seryosha" and "the Leaflet." There is a strong theme of lonlieness that begins to loom from the first page in "The Oven" because he shares, "I walked home somehow but left alone and nobody to talk to." Khariatonov writes of a boy who likes another boy, Misha, but struggles to find his happy ending. He depicts a simple rom-com moment: a stranger on the hill with a guitar and the dazed lover. His lack of pronouns in the beginning of the oven, instead, invited his heterosexual audience of the 1960s to relate to love. By doing so, he radically challenges the rejection of queers in Russian society. Khariatonov writes mini encounters of love sprinkled in all four pieces. In the end, he refers to queers as flowers and adds, "We are barren fatal flowers...but the best flower of our shallow people is called like no other to dance the dance of impossible love and to sing of it sweetly." He describes gay love as impossible which parallels the experiences the narrators in all the pieces. In the Oven, the narrator goes through long periods of sadness and isolation because he is an outcast. Khariatonov takes a different approach in How I Got It Like That as he takes the reader through the sexuality of a gay man. He depicts a scene of two men talking about the sex they have had. The narrator gets seduced by a 60 year old man that he described as "repulsive." Yet he allows this older man to almost take him under his wing as an artist as well as a gay man. The professor sends him to Moscow where the narrator gets a blowjob in the men's bathroom. The narrator later reveals to the man he's talking to that as a child, "...there was one friend, we used to jerk each other off." The narrator enthusiatically shares the homosexual details of his trip but is almost disgusted when asaked if he has had a girlfriend. He responds, "Well, they're like stupid, all of them...they don't want to sleep with you..." Kharitonov may be hinting at a psychological layer of being a gay man in Russia during his time. He 'rejects' women because he believes they do not want to have sex. He parallels this to three encounters where he was sexual with a man. Is it really the sex he's turned off by or society's expectations that someone would even ask him if he's been with a women? The man he is talking to further pushes, "Well, do you like it better with girls or with boys?" to which the narrator quickly responds, "Of course with girls..." Though, he just listed a multidue of reasons he does not like women. Russian society forced gay men and women to be subjected to a dissnonance of existence. The narrator wants to express his homosexuality as he shares moments where he let himself experience it but rejects directly saying "I am gay and I like men." Instead, he tip toes around the concept.