Lesbian Vignettes: A Russian Triptych from the 1890s

Abstract

Little is known about the development of the idea of homosexuality in nineteenth-century Russian medical works, or about popular Russian conceptions of same-sex love, or about the social practices that might have corresponded to or inspired such representation. Did differences of culture, religion, and social organization mean the Russian construction of gender diverged from the European construction in legal, ideological, or anthropological terms? What can the Russian example tell us about the power and limits of the modern Western construction of sexual categories and norms? The texts translated here purport to describe the social reality of lesbian love in the diverse cultural terrain of late nineteenthcentury Russia. They offer a Russian example of a clinical genre pioneered by physicians in the West and show how contemporary paradigms of sexual deviation were modified to fit a different set of cultural presuppositions. The three vignettes that follow form the centerpiece of what seems to be the only clinical study of homosexuality among women in the Russian medical literature of the period. Published in 1895, this study was written by obstetriciangynecologist Ippolit Mikhailovich Tarnovskii (1833-99), then assistant director of a St. Petersburg maternity hospital.' Available