2026-09-22T19:24:09Z https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/129383 2025-10-20 col_2142_5131 col_2142_29955 com_2142_5130 com_2142_29954 com_2142_8903

application/pdf en text Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2025-10-19 without embargo terms The student, Marija Fedjanina, accepted the attached license on 2025-04-07 at 16:03. The student, Marija Fedjanina, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2025-04-07 at 16:19. This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2025-04-08 at 11:37. DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #21720 on 2025-10-19 at 18:17:56 Cogito ergo vir sum: The “men’s question” from the perspective of the post-Soviet Russian intelligentsia of the 2000s Fedjanina, Marija 2025-04-08 Tempest, Richard Tempest, Richard Hassan, Waïl Kaganovsky, Lilya Sobol, Valeria post-Soviet literature gender masculinity postmodernism Venedikt Erofeev Viktor Pelevin Brigada Marina Palei Russian intelligentsia masculinity of an artist eng The collapse of the Soviet Union caused sentiments of national defeat and anxieties of impotence. As a response, Russian popular culture developed images of compensatory masculinity. One of these images appears in a series Brigada (The Brigade, 2002). It depicts a leader of a criminal gang as an example of hegemonic masculinity, a desirable model at the time. Unsatisfied with the crude images created for the general public, Russian intelligentsia responded with ridicule and offered alternatives. Suggesting an escape from empirical reality where hegemonic masculinity seem to prevail, Victor Pelevin’s Sviashchennaya kniga oborotnia (The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, 2004) portrays a path to quasi-Buddhist liberation. Employing Vladimir Nabokov’s disdain for psychoanalysis, Pelevin challenges Western claims to universality by reducing its achievements to strictly material. Consequently, the Western-inspired values of hegemonic masculinity like financial success or high social status appear default and irrelevant. Another attempt to offer an alternative masculinity model that portrays success as morally default appears in Venedikt Erofeev’s Moskva—Petushki (Moscow to the End of the Line, 1970), where the diegetic narrator’s marginalized status underlines his artistic talents and spiritual and intellectual superiority. Endorsed by the Russian intelligentsia, this model responded to the post-Soviet realities where survival was difficult and social status of many men drastically diminished. However, to lead such a purely spiritual existence, an artist needs someone to cover the material side of things—that is where women, chastised for their concerns with mundane matters of everyday survival, came into play. Responding to this incongruency, Marina Palei satirizes the image of the exceptional male artist in Pod nebom Afriki moei… (Under the Sky of My Africa, 2009), showing him without the idealizing fleur of literary conventions and exposing dangerous effects of his undeniable but unexplainable charm. 2025-05 Thesis https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129383 Copyright 2025 Marija Fedjanina Slavic Languages & Literature Slavic Languages & Literature University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Ph.D. Dissertation