Authors

Discussion

In this paper, I explore the femslash fanfiction of Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, and Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment on Ficbook.net. These three novels have received the most amount of attention of all curriculum-taught Russian-language novels on Ficbook. Fanfiction spaces like Ficbook have always boasted high levels of slash fanfiction, or fanfiction surrounding male homosexual relationships. While slash as a genre of fanfiction is well studied, and one which also appears heavily in fanfiction of Pushkin, Bulgakov, and Dostoevskii, femslash fanfiction (fanfiction about female homosexual relationships) is a much rarer topic both in scholarship and in fanfiction spaces, as writers often struggle with finding enough suitable characters to make femslash pairings with.

In this paper, I review the limited selection of femslash fanfiction of these works and discuss its depiction of femininity and sexuality, along with changes in plot and characterization from the source material. In particular, I discuss the use of gender-swapped male characters in the creation of female-female romantic pairings and how these characters are represented when they are written as women. I explore how the transformation of source material, character, gender, and transplantation of characters from one text to another can illustrate one instance of popular queer readings of classic Russian-language literature. Through these methods, I pose and explore the question: how do writers adapt these canonical works to allow for femslash imaginings? 

Ficbook is the most popular Russian-language fanfiction website and was banned in Russia in July 2024 by Roskomnadzor due to its slash and femslash content. Despite this ban, Ficbook still actively hosts fanfiction and receives steady reader and writer traffic. Ficbook contains a plethora of classic Russian literature fanfictions, which explore the crevices, corners, and possibilities contemporary readers find in school-taught literature. The exploration of specifically femslash fanfiction proposes interesting questions about women in curriculum favourites, gendered representations of homosexuality, and the mutability of gender among other aspects of identity in fanfiction spaces.