Dr Connor B Doak

In broad terms, Connor Doak's research explores the relationship between literature and life, art and society, language and power. His area of specialization is Russian literature, culture and society from the Romantic period to the present day. He has a particular interest in cultural manifestations of gender and sexuality, especially the treatment of masculinity in experimental texts in Russian literature.

Connor has published on queer aspects of Dostoevsky's novels, on fatherhood in Chekhov's short stories, and contested national identities and histories in Pushkin and Byron's narrative poems. He is currently working on a monograph on masculinity and power in the work of Vladimir Maiakovskii. The book deconstructs the popular image of Maiakovskii as a 'manly' poet, a myth propagated not only by the writer himself, but by generations of critics in both Russia and the West, seduced by his work, and in possession of a powerful, but unarticulated and uncritical, gender essentialism. The book offers a new approach to Maiakovskii, going beyond essentialist readings, to show the poet as using verse to negotiate the shifting terrain of masculinity in revolutionary Russia and the early Soviet period.