“…he said I was the living image of his youth, and should have been his support in old age and brought honor to his name, had I been born a boy!”

I came to love blogs in the 2000s, reading economists and political scientists who weren’t afraid to hit the same main points again and again, to link to their opponents as well as their allies, and to admit their ignorance about important things in their own field. The one place where I’ve been able to do what they did is in letting my own ignorance show, like when I wrote in 2013 that Nadezhda Durova “used male pseudonyms as a soldier, but AFAIK not as a writer.”

I still haven’t read Durova, but now I’ve read an article about that author and can instead say that I haven’t read Aleksandr Aleksandrov. For Aleksandrov, as Ruth Averbach writes, did not briefly pose as a man to fight in a war, but “spent approximately sixty of his eighty-three years living and speaking exclusively as a man” (988). His literary career happened because of “a chance encounter between his younger brother, Vasilii Durov, and Aleksandr Pushkin in 1829” (982). He wanted his memoirs to appear “under his male name, Aleksandrov,” but Pushkin insisted on The Notes of N. A. Durova, Published by A. Pushkin (984). Pushkin also wrote an introduction that “went even further in sealing the author’s reputation as a woman,” with lines like “Cornet Aleksandrov was really the maiden Nadezhda Durova” and “now, N. A. Durova herself reveals her secret” (984). That was in the July 1836 issue of The Contemporary, and when the memoir was published as a book, a different editor used the title The Cavalry Maiden: An Incident in Russia (Кавалерист-девица: Происшествие в России, 1836), against the author’s wishes. In 1839 a new edition had the new title Notes of Aleksandrov (989).

In Russian, gender shows up not only in personal pronouns, but also in verb endings: when people speak about themselves in the past tense, you can hear what gender they’re presenting themselves as. In the text of The Cavalry Maiden as it has come down to us, Aleksandrov uses masculine forms in direct speech, but the narrator uses feminine first-person forms when addressing the reader. Averbach suspects that the feminine grammatical forms came from editors, just as the titles Notes of N. A. Durova and The Cavalry Maiden did (985). Evidence: “Aleksandrov is thoroughly documented as using his male name and masculine verb forms, frequently insisting that others use his preferred pronouns in spoken language, even asking his son to address him as roditel’ (parent, father) instead of ‘mother,’ and surviving documents and letters attest that he did so in written language as well” (981). When Pushkin wrote to Aleksandrov, he consistently either used masculine forms or found ways to avoid the choice (985). I gather any manuscript of Aleksandrov’s memoirs with masculine forms for both narration and reported speech has been lost, which is a pity—it really does make a difference whose pen we attribute those feminine verb endings to—but Averbach makes a persuasive case that it may well have existed.

From Pushkin to Averbach, I have the impression that people are quite interested in Aleksandrov’s unconventional gender identity and only secondarily in what Aleksandrov wrote on all other topics. As you might expect, different people at different times have interpreted his gender differently. In the 1830s Aleksandrov’s brother refers to his “military service and masculine presentation as a ‘prank’ or ‘antics’ (shalost’)¨ (982). (Here it’s worth remembering Joe Peschio on how important pranks were for Pushkin’s generation, and how versatile the concept was.) In the twentieth century, feminist critics see Aleksandrov (or rather, from this point of view, Durova) “as a woman ‘pretending’ to be male,” and “even recent attempts to approach the author from a feminist and queer studies–informed perspective by Ann Marsh-Flores [2003] and Ona Renner-Fahey [2009] rely on the language of masquerade, positing that Aleksandrov was ‘really’ a cis woman posing as a man” (978). Averbach herself sees Aleksandrov this way:

While I am sensitive to the optics of “removing” a female writer from the canon and claiming him for men, I believe that Aleksandrov and his work requires a new critical approach, a trans reading that reconciles his initial position as a female and his conscious decision to become male. After all, in describing his transition, Aleksandrov wrote he wanted not only to “part company forever from the sex whose sad lot and eternal dependence had begun to terrify me,” a position easily legible to second and third-wave feminists, but also “become a warrior and son to my father,” a sentiment less legible from these perspectives and requiring a trans reading that respects the author’s masculinity. (977)

If you’re reading my poor summary and thinking that Averbach is crudely projecting twenty-first-century concepts back in time, know that she has anticipated this objection and has quite a thoughtful approach to it, even as she doesn’t shy away from talking about misgendering and deadnaming and TERF ideology (concepts which help us understand episodes like Aleksandrov’s reaction to Pushkin trying to kiss his hand at their first meeting, 983). Averbach spends half the article analyzing contemporary responses to Aleksandrov’s memoirs and fiction by two critics I don’t often see grouped together, Faddei Bulgarin (pp. 985–90) and Vissarion Belinskii (pp. 990–93). If you read their pieces about Aleksandrov in chronological order, somewhere in the middle each critic shifts to using masculine forms to talk about him (989, 992). In other ways the critics are each as you expect them to be: Bulgarin is interested in Aleksandrov’s memoir accounts of his meetings with powerful people (987), while Belinskii reads Aleksandrov’s story “Pavilion” (Павильон, 1839) as a contrast of “the desire to control and define the other, termed here as ‘passion,’ with ‘love,’ which assumes the free, equal, and consensual participation of all parties” (992).

Bulgarin also compares Aleksandrov to an earlier public figure who did not conform to contemporary notions of gender, the Chevalier d’Éon (pp. 987–88). In an odd coincidence, my non-Russian reading this year included a 46-year-old mystery novel (title at this link to avoid spoilers) that hinges on a detective figuring out that “eonism” has to do with the Chevalier d’Éon and the kind of life that Averbach says Aleksandrov led, trans avant la lettre. But as Averbach says, the two historical figures were different: “Éon’s gender expression varied over time, often adapting dress and language situationally” (988).

See Ruth Averbach, “The (Un)making of a Man: Aleksandr Aleksandrov/Nadezhda Durova,” Slavic Review 81.4 (2022): 976–93. Thanks to Margarita Vaysman (who has written on Aleksandrov too) for telling me about this article! The title of this post is from the same paragraph of The Cavalry Maiden as “become a warrior and son to my father.”