Authors

Discussion

This paper is part of a larger research project that brings to light a previously scattered and invisible transnational history of sapphic modernism across the territories of the Russian Empire – a history shaped by internal hierarchies, intersecting power dynamics, and unexpected alliances. By examining the works of Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian women writers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, my research investigates how imperial oppression and the nationalist tendencies arising from the conditions of colonized nations translated into specific challenges and limitations for sapphic expression in the region.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian women writers – taking advantage of their dominant position within the hierarchy of the ‘world republic of letters,’ to use Pascale Casanova’s term – participated in a formative moment of modern lesbian visibility, comparable to that of their Western European counterparts. At the same time, Polish and Ukrainian authors from subjugated territories, as representatives of ‘small literatures’ constrained by the demands of their positionalities, were burdened with nation-building tasks. In many cases, this meant sacrificing self-expression to gain literary legitimacy – or to survive within the literary market – making any attempt to articulate same-sex desire a radically more difficult task and pushing them toward more coded and concealed strategies of expression.

While at this pivotal moment a writer’s positionality and belonging to the hegemonic ‘center’ or the subjugated ‘periphery’ seemed to be one of the most critical factors determining the expressibility of same-sex desire, creating a clear divide between the overt and hidden current of sapphic modernism in the region – a look into earlier decades reveals a more nuanced landscape, one that exposes a shared set of difficulites and challenges in the search for strategies of queer expression in the face of hegemonic heteronormativity. 

To illustrate this landscape, I focus on two examples. On the one hand, I examine the case of Narcyza Żmichowska (1819-1876) and her search across the borders for sources of empowerment and catalysts to develop her own strategy of sapphic expression. On the other, I turn to the case of Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850-1891) and her relationship with the Swedish playwright Anne Charlotte Leffler (1849-1892), as well as the queer subtexts of her ‘(auto)biography’ – a hybrid volume composed of childhood reminiscences and an overarching memoir written and published by Leffler shortly after Kovalevskaya’s death – which relies on the socially accepted framework of ‘intimate friendship,’ safely displaced and realized in a foreign land, to tell the story of their relationship.