Abstract As the only bestseller in Russian to depict boys in love, Pioneer Summer (2021) by Elena Malisova and Kateryna Sylvanova appears unique at first glance. Female fans of the book created countless videos in which they wept as they described their reading experience. At the same time, cultural authorities targeted the book as “gay propaganda.” Outside Russia, however, Pioneer Summer hardly seems unique since it represents the global genre of boys love (BL) in which women author and consume a fantasy of the emotional vulnerability of men. While Pioneer Summer conforms to most of BL’s generic characteristics, it breaks the most important one: the creation of a fictional world that enables romance between men. The failure of the book to comply with this core feature brings into focus its queerness in Putin’s Russia. Pioneer Summer ’s nostalgic depiction of the late Soviet era as a bastion of male intimacy queers Putinism’s heteronormativity and homophobia, providing respite from these two props of Putin’s regime. The fracas surrounding the novel points to the broader political potential of BL across post‐Soviet space, suggesting that for its readers, Pioneer Summer represents the tip of an iceberg of Russophone BL with the potential to puncture and perhaps even sink the titanic heteronormativity drifting across the region.
Julie A. Cassiday (Mon,) studied this question.