Dostoevsky's Timely Castration

Abstract

AbstractThis article is a profile of “the skoptsy,” a Christian sect that emerged in tsarist Russia whose followers, in an effort to divest themselves from the organs of sin, practiced castration as a form of religious piety. The skoptsy believed that before the fall of Adam and Eve, men and women did not have sexual organs; that its—they did not conceive of the original man and woman as being differentiated by their genitalia. The skoptsy were also millenarians, and as such they imagined the world would be transformed following an apocalyptic reckoning. In exploring how the temporal register of the skoptsy was depicted in the novels of Dostoevsky, the author proposes that the apocalyptic religious and political movements that were developing across imperial Russia can deepen contemporary discussions about queer temporality, in that they offer a counterpoint to arguments that the future is the realm of the normative reproducing subject.