Speaker: Mariia Semashyna, Central European University (Budapest, Hungary).
Discussant: Mattias Ågren, Uppsala University.
Chair: Roman Privalov, Södertörn University.

Leonid Lipavsky (1904–1941) was a children’s writer, editor, and philosopher of chinari – an informal circle of Leningrad avant-garde writers and thinkers, which included Daniil Kharms, Aleksandr Vvedensky, Yakov Druskin, Nikolay Oleynikov, Tamara Meyer, and, at certain times, Nikolay Zabolotsky. In his rethinking of Russian modernist and avant-garde projects of revised, de- and re-centered human subjectivity and sexuality, Lipavsky foregrounds the elemental as the main actor in his cosmology. This chapter offers a close reading of his philosophical essays written in mid-1930s (primarily “A Study in Horror,” “Water Tractatus,” “On Bodily Union,” and “Dreams”), in order to show how Lipavsky imagines the relationship between the radical otherness of the elements lying beneath the appearance of individuality, horror, sexuality, and love. This presence of a difference within, is, Lipavsky argues, crucial for the very possibility of existence, of time and space: in order to exist, all things must necessarily contain within them that which they are not. Every body therefore acts as a “shapeshifter”: always pretending to be something other than it is. Lipavsky offers a rather pessimistic view on the consequenses this poses for human subjectivity, which has to come to terms with containing something radically non-human within itself, and with seeing itself as merely a temporary and unstable concentration of matter. In this vision, gender and sexuality mediate this conflicted relationship between the elemental and the necessary illusion of individuality: every body hides something radically other within itself, but some bodies – gendered, racialised, and pathologised – more so than others.

Mariia Semashyna is a PhD candidate at the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University (Budapest, Hungary). She graduated from an MA program in Gender Studies at CEU in 2015, and did her BA at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Ukraine). She also completed an Erasmus+ Study exchange at the program of Russian studies, University of Helsinki, in 2017. Her dissertation project, “The Body is a Cupboard: Kharms, Lipavsky, and Druskin Thinking Embodiment and Sexuality between the Human and the Non-Human,” is focused on how gendered embodiment mediates the radical problematisation of the human/non-human boundaries in the Russian avant-garde literature of the 1930s.

Her research stay at Södertörn University was sponsored by the Doctoral Research Support Grant from Central European University Foundation, Budapest (CEUBPF). The theses explained in the paper to be presented are representing the own ideas of the author, but not necessarily reflect the opinion of CEUBPF.