The Queer Legacy of Ivan the Terrible

Abstract

Tsar Ivan IV (“the Terrible,” 1530-1584) has inspired centuries of political discourse and commanded the attention of generations of artists looking to history for inspiration. As the paradigm-setting first ruler to take the title of “Tsar of All Russia” and a typical autocratic representative of the early modern era in all its gilt and gore, Ivan the Terrible presents historiographers and historical-fiction authors with manifold discursive and creative possibilities. This dissertation examines how various historical fictions have engaged with a specific aspect of Ivan’s legacy: his rumored sexual relationships with men. Using a combination of rigorous archival research and queer-studies-informed textual and historical analysis, this study re-constructs and examines depictions of Ivan’s sexuality and of his purported lover Feodor Basmanov, a military commander who was the tsar’s favorite during the years of his reign remembered as the height of political terror and internal violence. This dissertation seeks to elucidate the complex interactions between sexuality, gender, power, and the state that underpin artistic works about Ivan the Terrible created in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union after the emergence of secular public discourses on sex and gender in the late 19th century. The first chapter closely examines Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s opera Oprichnik (1874) and its creative incubation during a time of great shifts in both the broader European social and scientific discourses on sexuality and in the composer’s own life. Tchaikovsky belonged to an insular community of self-consciously European gay male aristocrats in St. Petersburg and found himself among different company after moving to Moscow to teach at the new conservatory in the late 1860s. Both Moscow’s history and its present – especially its wide and colorful gay “underworld” – seem to provide inspiration for the composer’s little-studied early opera set in the court of Ivan the Terrible. As librettist and composer, Tchaikovsky explored the topics of sex, gender, and power using a variety of literary and musical devices, most prominent among them the “trouser role” convention by which he inscribed androgyny into the role of Feodor Basmanov, an alto part written to be sung by a woman. The second chapter treats a handful of works from across one particularly artistically fruitful 6-year-span, 1922-1928. The overthrow of the Russian Empire brought great changes to the laws and social expectations surrounding artistic portrayals of both tsars and sexuality. The works treated in this chapter vary widely in their approach to both and the study builds chronologically towards a cluster of works which flesh out a truly innovative depiction of Ivan the Terrible as the grotesque product of historical forces, a venal proto-capitalist empowered by the emergence of early modern economical and technological innovations. This new Soviet Ivan emerges in the film Wings of a Serf (1926) and the eponymous novella by Konstantin Shildkret, who continued to depict the Terrible tsar in his novel The Artificer of Ivan the Terrible (1928). This dissertation is the first academic treatment of these works, introducing to the small but growing body of literature about Wings of a Serf an extensive examination of Shildkret and his literary treatment of the erotic relationship between Ivan and Feodor. The third chapter explores Sergei Eisenstein’s final film project, Ivan the Terrible, begun in 1941 and shut down by the authorities in 1946. Through extensive use of unpublished archival materials, this study traces Eisenstein’s ideas about sexuality and gender in this project as they developed in notes, drawings, drafts, and discussions with collaborators and colleagues. Ivan the Terrible has been extensively discussed by scholars and critics for decades, but the process of reading, deciphering, and analyzing the director’s immense archive of notes, diaries, letters, and other papers is a long-term collaborative effort with much still left to do. Instead of a conclusion, this dissertation ends with a brief and forthright reflection on its principal themes and figures – queerness, state power and national mythology; Ivan the Terrible and Feodor Basmanov – as I its author observed them during my time researching and writing in Russia between 2018 and 2022. My work – and life – became increasingly covert as repressive policies targeting so-called “representatives of non-traditional sexual orientations” and foreign researchers were implemented at a throttling pace in the years leading up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As I leave this secretive phase behind to send my dissertation into the world, I let slip the veil of scholarly convention to give testimony as a witness to a terrible epoch. Political terror and violence are not abstract concepts and many of the people who helped and inspired me in my work on this dissertation face them as daily reality. I cannot maintain a pretense of quiet neutrality.