The trouble with queer celebrity : Aleksandr Aleksandrov (Nadezhda Durova)’s A Year of Life in St Petersburg (1838)

Abstract

“Let my tale be a warning to anyone whose only claim to society’s attention is some kind of anomaly in their lives”, wrote Aleksandr Aleksandrov (Nadezhda Durova) (1783-1866) in the foreword to his novella 'A Year of Life in St Petersburg, or the Trouble with Third Visits' (1838). The chief anomaly of Aleksandrov's own life – that in 1806 he left his life as Nadezhda Durova and crossed genders to serve as a cavalry officer for the next ten years – provided material for his best-selling memoir 'Notes of a Cavalry Maiden' (1836) and turned him into a literary celebrity. In his later novella, Aleksandrov offered his readers another kind of narrative: a unique account of non-heteronormative literary fame in early nineteenth-century Russia. This paper discusses Alesandrov's later texts and considers wider questions posed by attempts to thematise and theorise queer fame: how did queer celebrity function in nineteenth-century Russia? How was it narrated in literary texts, and how did this public representation map onto the private discourses of the queer self in letters and diaries?