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Queue Time, Animation, and the Queer Childhood of Late Socialism

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The Queerness of Childhood

Abstract

This chapter argues that the Brezhnev-era queue, films, and literature gave rise to and enacted what Jack Halberstam and others have called queer temporality—a mode of time that epitomized the late socialist imagination and continues to haunt the cultural production of the Soviet and post-Soviet diasporas. The first sections of the chapter demonstrate the ways diverse forms of popular culture—specifically, the animated films Goluboi shchenok (1976), the Cheburashka series (1969–83), and Natalia Baranskaya’s novella, A Week Like Any Other (1969)—evoked queer time and space. It then moves on to the queue as portrayed in Vladimir Sorokin’s The Queue (1983). The last part of the chapter suggests that Russian-American novels like Olga Grushin’s The Line (2010) and David Bezmozgis’s The Free World (2011) recapitulate the queer temporality of the queue and invite exaltation in chronology-stop**, non-reproductive spaces.

A shorter version of this chapter originally appeared as “Queue Time as Queer Time: An Occasion for Pleasure and Desire in the Brezhnev Era and Today,” Slavic and East European Journal 61, no. 3 (2017): 542–66. It is reprinted here with the permission of the publisher.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child: Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

  2. 2.

    See, for example, Natalya Baranskaya, “A Week Like Any Other,” trans. Pieta Monks, A Week Like Any Other: Novellas and Stories (Seattle, WA, 1990), 1–62; and Carolyn Humphrey, The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism (Ithaca, NY, 2002), 40–64.

  3. 3.

    Katherine Verdery, “The ‘Etatization’ of Time in Ceauşescu’s Romania,” in What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton, NJ 1996), 40.

  4. 4.

    Ibid., 39–58.

  5. 5.

    Ibid., 46, 57.

  6. 6.

    Ibid., 53–56. See also Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC, 2010), 3–4, 18–19.

  7. 7.

    Here I paraphrase Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (Boston, MA, 1993), 218.

  8. 8.

    Lewis Siegelbaum, ed., Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet Russia (New York, 2006); James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi, eds, Into the Cosmos, Space Exploration and Soviet Societies (Pittsburgh, PA, 2011); Andrew Chapman, “Trofeinost’ and the Phantasmagoria of Everyday Consumption in Late Soviet Culture,” Studies in Slavic Cultures 11 (2013): 24–49; Anastasia Kayiatos, “Silent Plasticity: Reenchanting Soviet Stagnation,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 40: 3–4 (2012): 105–125; Juliane Fürst, “Love, Peace and Rock ‘n’ Roll on Gorky Street: The ‘Emotional Style’ of the Soviet Hippie Community,” Contemporary European History 23: 4 (2014): 565–587; Anna Krylova, “Soviet Modernity: Stephen Kotkin and the Bolshevik Predicament,” Contemporary European History 23: 2 (2014): 167–192.

  9. 9.

    Lilya Kaganovsky, “The Cultural Logic of Late Socialism,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 3: 2 (2009): 185–199.

  10. 10.

    Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford, CA, 2013), 43.

  11. 11.

    Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ, 2006), 60–75.

  12. 12.

    Ibid., 243–249.

  13. 13.

    The Stagnation Era is a designation attributed by Mikhail Gorbachev to Brezhnev’s tenure; it evokes widespread political disenchantment, hopelessness, and exhaustion. Although Gorbachev coined the phrase in the 1980s for the purpose of criticizing Brezhnev’s economic policies and launching perestroika, I argue that stagnation indeed was the central experience of the 1970s.

  14. 14.

    On “mimetic mourning,” see Etkind, Warped Mourning, 5–24. On the dreary circularity of Balaian’s film, see Andrey Shcherbenok, “Everything Was Over Before It Was No More: Decaying Civilization in Late Stagnation Cinema,” in Dina Fainberg and Artemy M. Kalinovsky, eds., Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era: Ideology and Exchange (London, 2016), 79–82.

  15. 15.

    J. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York, 2005), 2.

  16. 16.

    Ibid., 5.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 6.

  18. 18.

    Kristen Welsh has made a similar point in a paper about the contemporary novels of Olga Grushin, David Bezmozgis, and Gary Shteyngart. Welsh, “Treating Time and History in the Contemporary Russian-American Novel: The Chronotope in The Line, The Free World, and Super Sad True Love Story.” Unpublished paper presented at the annual Association for the Study of Eastern European and Eurasian Studies National Meeting. Washington, DC, United States. November 17–20, 2011.

  19. 19.

    Stockton, The Queer Child, Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, 5–7.

  20. 20.

    Sigmund Freud’s account of melancholic introjection, which informs the present argument, spans two works: his 1917 paper “Mourning and Melancholia,” and The Ego and the Id of 1923. Freud made a distinction between the work of mourning—an ego activity involving the binding of painful memories after the loss of an object—and melancholia, a diminished self-regard resulting from a disappointment in, and an unconscious taking into the ego of, an abandoned love object. Rather than eventually withdrawing cathexis (libidinal investment), as in mourning, the subject identifies with and becomes attached to the ambivalently perceived object. One might also consider, drawing on the work of psychoanalyst Maria Torok, an alternate conclusion: the spectral Soviet child cannot fully be introjected by the post-Soviet adult, leaving the work of mourning incomplete and producing a fixation. Torok understood introjection as a process whereby the ego extends its autoerotic interests and is broadened and enhanced by taking into itself the traits of an external love object. When an object is not properly introjected because of sudden loss or rejection, it is incorporated and traumatically “encrypted” within the subject; an imaginal fixation ensues and the work of mourning cannot be completed. Torok, “The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse,” in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, ed., The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Vol. 1 (Chicago, 1994), 107–124. See Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Vol. 14, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London, 1953), 237–260, and “The Ego and the Id” (1923) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Vol. 19, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London, 1953), 1–66.

  21. 21.

    Iefim Gamburg, Goluboi shchenok: muzykal’naia skazka. Moscow: Melodiia, 1976.

  22. 22.

    Iefim Gamburg, dir., Goluboi shchenok. Moscow: Soiuzmul’tfil’m, 1976.

  23. 23.

    Goluboi-as-gay was not in widespread usage until the late 1980s but was most likely employed earlier within Soviet gay subcultures.

  24. 24.

    Fabio Cleto, “Introduction: Queering the Camp,” in Cleto, ed., Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject (Ann Arbor, MI, 1999), 14.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., 15, 18. See also Susan Sontag’s classic essay from 1964, “Notes on Camp,” in ibid., 53–65.

  26. 26.

    On the transposition of shestidesiatniki ideals into the theatrical and filmic adaptations of Astrid Lindgren’s Karlsson books (as well as their critical reviews), see Mariia Maiofis, “Milyi, milyi trikster: Karlson i sovetskaia utopiia o ‘nastoiashchem detstve,’” in Il’ia Kukulin, Mark Lipovetskii and Maiofis, eds., Veselye chelovechki: kul’turnye geroi sovetskogo detstva (Moscow, 2008), 241–286. On Soviet children’s culture as a haven for subversive content and experimentation, see also Larissa Rudova, “Invitation to a Subversion: the Playful Literature of Grigorii Oster,” in Marina Balina and Rudova, eds., Russian Children’s Literature and Culture (New York, 2008), 325–342. Sandra Becket has written on the dual (i.e., children and adult) intended audiences of children’s literature. Becket, ed., Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults (New York, 1999).

  27. 27.

    J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC, 2011), 46, 47, 51. Stockton also comments on alliances between children and animals as well as children’s animality in The Queer Child, 89–120.

  28. 28.

    The animated film series, produced by Roman Kachanov and designed by Leonid Shvartsman, is based on the 1966 Eduard Uspenskii story Krokodil Gena i ego druz’ia (Crocodile Gena and His Friends): Krokodil Gena (1969), Cheburashka (1972), Shapokliak (1974), and Cheburashka idet v shkolu (1983). For good plot summaries of the episodes, see Birgit Beumers, “Comforting Creatures in Children’s Cartoons,” Balina and Rudova, eds., Russian Children’s Literature and Culture, 166–167. For a discussion of the technical and artistic aspects of Cheburashka and other Soviet animation, see David MacFadyen, Yellow Crocodiles and Blue Oranges: Russian Animated Film Since World War Two (Montreal, 2005).

  29. 29.

    Roman Kachanov, dir., Krokodil Gena. Moscow: Soiuzmul’tfil’m, 1969.

  30. 30.

    “Cheburashka” denotes “topple” and is the nickname given to them by the store clerk.

  31. 31.

    My thoughts on Cheburashka’s “unknowing” are inspired by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay, “Privilege of Unknowing: Diderot’s The Nun” in Michele Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, and Sedgwick, eds., Tendencies (Durham, NC, 1993), 23–51.

  32. 32.

    Roman Kachanov, dir., Cheburashka idet v shkolu. Moscow: Soiuzmul’tfil’m, 1983.

  33. 33.

    This reading of Gena draws on Slavoj Žižek’s discussion of Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan in Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York, 1989), 33–47.

  34. 34.

    Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford, UK, 1991), 310–311.

  35. 35.

    Roman Kachanov, dir., Cheburashka. Moscow: Soiuzmul’tfil’m, 1972. The music is by Vladimir Shainskii and the lyrics by Aleksandr Timofeevskii. The translation is mine. Russian lyrics online at lyricstranslate.com/en/пусть-бегут-неуклюже-russianbirthday-song.html (last accessed October 12, 2017).

  36. 36.

    Roman Kachanov, Shapokliak. Moscow: Soiuzmul’tfil’m, 1974. The melody is composed by Vladimir Shainskii and lyrics by Eduard Uspenskii. The translation is mine. Russian lyrics online at http://www.happy-kids.ru/page.php?id=730 (last accessed October 12, 2017).

  37. 37.

    Here, as in Goluboi shchenok, Troe iz prostokvashino (1978), and the Karlson films (1968, 1970), extraordinary time is instantiated through queer embodiment and temporal drag—sartorial and bodily references to bygone eras and older personages that disrupt linear maturation and its reproductive rationale, inciting anticipation and surprise. Shapokliak’s name, a Russian transliteration of the French chapeau claque, a collapsible men’s top hat, adds to her gender ambiguity and datedness. For more on the concept “temporal drag,” see Freeman, Time Binds, 59–65.

  38. 38.

    Gena and Shapokliak, in other words, can be read as representatives of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called the “avunculate”—spaces and relations forged with uncles and aunts whose nonconforming sexualities and life trajectories function for the child as alternatives to the law of the biological domestic father, offering pleasures and futures unavailable within the normative family. See Sedgwick, “Tales of the Avunculate: The Importance of Being Earnest” in Barale et al., eds., Tendencies, 63. Karlson and Freken Bok function in similar ways in the animated film Karlson Returns (1970).

  39. 39.

    In the second Cheburashka episode (1972) our hero tries to gain acceptance into the Young Pioneers, who are depicted rather unsympathetically. They initially exclude Cheburashka due to their lack of skills (e.g., they cannot build a fire or nesting box) and offer instead to place Cheburashka in their petting zoo (zhivoi ugolok). Late Soviet cartoons tend to depict animal-child alliances against the backdrop and in contrast to dull family scenarios with emasculated or ineffectual fathers. In Troe iz Prostokvashino, for example, an overly serious six-year-old nicknamed Uncle Fedor runs away from the urban home of his narcissistic mother and submissive intelligentsia father to set up house in the country with the worldly cat Matroskin and the earnest mutt Sharik. Matroskin and Sharik enable for Uncle Fedor a temporary detour from oedipal resolution, expanding the boy’s personality through lateral rather than vertical child-parent bonds. In the Karlson series, the Kid uses Karlson in a similar way and to a similar end, also in defiance of his working mother and bespectacled, newspaper-toting intelligentsia father (who, like the milder and more involved dad of the Prostokvashino films, sports a chin curtain beard). Karlson instantiates queer, colorful time and is a perfect antidote to wearisome and sanctimonious parental maturity.

  40. 40.

    On socialist diary writing, autobiography, and other self-practices, see Igal Halfin, Red Autobiographies: Initiating the Bolshevik Self. Seattle, WA, 2011, and Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin, Cambridge, MA, 2009.

  41. 41.

    Baranskaya, “A Week Like Any Other,” 18–20, 48–50.

  42. 42.

    Verdery, “The ‘Etatization’ of Time in Ceauşescu’s Romania,” 55.

  43. 43.

    Baranskaya, “A Week Like Any Other,” 16–17, 21–24, 29–34, 42–43, 55–60.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., 44–48.

  45. 45.

    The abundance of male or vaguely masculine couples, often consisting of an older eccentric mentor and young protégé, has not escaped the notice of recent interpreters of late Soviet animation, nor has their overt queerness: unusual family structures and living arrangements, alternative life schedules and modes of association, transgender embodiment, and, why not, non-heterosexuality. Konstantine Klioutchkine goes so far as to call pedophilic, if not homosexual, the relationships of Karlson and the Kid (1968, 1970) and Gena and Cheburashka, or at the very least examples of non-normative upbringing and moral development in the tradition of the coming-out story and its precursor, the Bildungsroman. Lilya Kaganovsky has written about gender fluidity, transvestism, and self/other confusion of the Wolf and Rabbit in the very popular cartoon Nu Pogodi! See Lilia Kaganovskaia, “Gonka vooruzhenii, transgender i zastoi: Volk i Zaiats v kon/podtekste ‘kholodnoi voiny,’” and Konstantin Kliuchkin, “Zavetnyi mul’tfil’m: prichiny populiarnosti ‘Cheburashki,’” in Il’ia Kukulin, Mark Lipovetskii and Mariia Maiofis, eds., Veselye chelovechki, 370–372, 378–392.

  46. 46.

    Vladimir Sorokin, The Queue, trans. Sally Laird (New York, 2008).

  47. 47.

    Olga Grushin, The Line (New York, 2010), 199.

  48. 48.

    David Bezmozgis, The Free World: A Novel (New York, 2012), 289–290.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., 291.

  50. 50.

    Oleg Gerasimov, director, Alisa v strane chudes: muzikal’naia skazka. Moscow: Melodiia, 1977. The translation is mine.

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  1. Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), New York, NY, USA

    Anna Fishzon

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  1. Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), New York, USA

    Anna Fishzon

  2. Eugene Lang College The New School, NY, USA

    Emma Lieber

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Fishzon, A. (2022). Queue Time, Animation, and the Queer Childhood of Late Socialism. In: Fishzon, A., Lieber, E. (eds) The Queerness of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59195-1_12

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