Aleksandr Aleksandrov was an author and soldier in service of the Russian tsar, active in the Prussian theater of the War of the Fourth Coalition (1806-7) and in the Napoleonic wars. In scholarship, he is better known by his birth name, Nadezhda Andreevna Durova, and often referred to with the female pronouns bestowed upon him at birth. In this first book-length study of Aleksandrov, Ruth Averbach argues that we should understand this celebrated figure of Imperial Russia, whose sex was legally changed by Tsar Aleksandr I, simply as a man, one whose masculinity was intimately connected to the imperialist cause and Russian nationalism. For the majority of his life, Aleksandrov lived, wrote, and fought as a man, and was recognized as such by most of his contemporaries. This contradicts the dominant position in especially Western feminist scholarship, which understands "Durova" either as a woman so patriotic that she dressed as a man to fight Russia's wars or as a woman so frustrated by gender restrictions that she dramatically sought to cast them aside. Averbach makes the contrary case that we should take Aleksandrov at his word and accept his transition as genuine. Doing so allows for fresh interpretations of both his autobiographical writings and his works of fiction, interpretations that Averbach deftly shows have salience not just for a single man's life but also for how we understand masculinity, imperialism, and nationalism in nineteenth-century Russia more broadly.
Ruth Averbach is associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
Note on Transliteration Introduction: The (Un)Making of a Man 1. The Making of a Man: Becoming Aleksandrov 2. The Unmaking of a Man 3. A Man of Letters: Sex and Authorship in Aleksandrov's Fiction 4. The Transsexual Empire: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Transsexuality 5. Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Transsexual Heterosexuality in the Military Conclusion: What Is a Man? Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
"Extremely original, incisive, and thought-provoking. Averbach not only sheds light on nineteenth-century Russian literature and its reception but also makes an important intervention into LGBTQ studies." - Alexander Burry, author of Legacies of the Stone Guest: The Don Juan Legend in Russian Literature "Innovatively building on the existing tradition, this study settles the debate about Aleksandrov's gender identity for the next generation of readers. Averbach reads Aleksandrov's texts in the context of Russian imperial expansion, emphasizing the connection between gender and nationalism that has underpinned much of Russian culture since the nineteenth century." - Margarita Vaysman, author of Self-Conscious Realism: Metafiction and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel
