Sergueï Shikalov

This essay reads Sergueï Shikalov's "Espèces dangereuses" (Seuil, 2024) as a poetologically highly reflective text about homophobia in post-Soviet Russia, in which an entire generation of gay men becomes visible between a brief historical "springtime" and a renewed authoritarian ice age. At its core is less a linear narrative than a collective form of experience articulated in the indeterminate "on": a litany-like, fragmented discourse that suspends individual biography in favor of a shared existence marked by violence, shame, and precarious desire. This very refusal of the self becomes an aesthetic strategy that both documents and counteracts disappearance by transforming anonymity into a process of witnessing. The novel addresses homophobia not only as a social reality—in the form of attacks, institutional indifference, and political repression—but also as a discursive order that classifies, devalues, and excludes bodies from the realm of expression. Crucially, the novel articulates this experience in the learned French language, which, as a medium of exile, opens up a paradoxical space: distance and the possibility of articulation coincide, making the unspeakable speakable in the first place. Against this backdrop, the question of French citizenship also takes shape: while it marks a legal and existential break, it remains—as Shikalov's essay "Français de papier" (2025) demonstrates—ambivalent, insofar as belonging remains conditional and the logics of exclusion continue to perpetuate themselves in new forms.