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Evgenii Kharitonov
(1941 - 1981) Russia

Evgenii Kharitonov

Writer

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Born in Novosibirsk, Kharitonov moved to Moscow to enroll in the VGIK, the state film school. There he studied and then taught acting and pantomine. As a specialist in movement on stage, he was much in demand. At the same time he held a part-time position at Moscow State University in psychology, where he studied speech defects.

In the Soviet Union gay writers risked persecution and arrest. Kharitonov was harassed by the authorities even though he never published his work during his lifetime.

Kharitonov, who was never published by the official Soviet press, is the major figure in gay Russian literature in the 50 years since Kuz'min. Kharitonov, who wrote experimental post-modern prose, was highly respected by his straight writer-colleagues, even as they disapproved of his open treatment of homosexuality.

When Kharitonov died of a heart attack in June of 1981, the pages of his just-completed manuscript blew away down Pushkin St. He had called his volume Pod domashnim arestom (Under House Arrest). As an underground writer and a gay man, Kharitonov was under double pressure from the KGB and the police. In 1979 he was suspected in the murder of a gay friend and interrogated.

The visit by the KGB to Kharitonov caused him to faint, it is not difficult to conjecture that this pressure hastened his death. Kharitonov's writer friends broke into his apartment, which had been sealed by the KGB, to salvage what they could of his writing. Later these materials were seized by the KGB in raids on their own apartments.

The typescript of Under House Arrest was prepared by Kharitonov himself, because the usual typists couldn't be trusted to recreate Kharitonov's layout - the overstrikes and careful arrangement of the words and letters on the page.

Unlike many dissidents and underground writers, who often held official jobs as night watchmen or elevator operators, Kharitonov had a successful official career. Indeed, he was a modern renaissance man in the world of culture, teaching acting and pantomime at the state film institute; directing at the Theater for the Deaf, among other works, his own play, Enchanted Island; choreographing the rock group "Last Chance;" and studying speech defects at Moscow State University. Meanwhile he wrote unpublishable prose, poetry, and drama. And, of course, he lived as a gay man in Moscow.

Not only Kharitonov shows a surprising celebration of his sexuality (given the context), he even claims it is a kind of divine gift directly related to his genius as a writer. Kharitonov was the first Russian writer to use gay slang in his work.

The relaxation of censorship and proliferation of gay journals that began with Gorbachev's glasnost and accelerated with the breakup of the Soviet Union meant that emigré and underground writers could be rediscovered and new writers could be published as well. Unexpurgated editions of the first publication of Kharitonov's work appeared in the early 90s.

Several works by Kharitonov, The Oven, One Boy's Story: How I Got Like That, Alyosha-Seryozha, and text of Kharitonov's gay manifesto, The Leaflet, appear in translation in the anthology Out of the Blue.

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