Congratulations to Prof. Caio Yurgel for publishing a peer-reviewed article, “The alienation of Valerii Pereleshin” in Textual Practice.
ABSTRACT
Valerii Pereleshin, a Russian-Chinese-Brazilian poet, translator, and monk, remains an underexplored and virtually unknown figure despite a life that spanned pivotal political and cultural moments of the twentieth century. Born in 1913 in Russia and dying in obscurity in Brazil in 1992, Pereleshin’s experiences of displacement, queerness, and marginality were central to his identity, yet he has largely been relegated to the periphery of literary scholarship. This article reinterprets his work through the Hegelian notion of alienation (Entäusserung), arguing that alienation is not a deficit but the very condition of freedom. Rather than a source of suffering, alienation enables subjectivity to emerge through misinterpretation, self-division, and eccentricity. Drawing on queer theory and psychoanalysis, and working within the broader Hegelian-psychoanalytic tradition, the article examines how Pereleshin’s queerness unsettles conventional notions of identity and belonging, casting alienation as a dynamic process of becoming. Pereleshin’s life and poetry demonstrate how freedom arises from the disruption of social norms and expectations, rejecting the myth of coherence or unity. By reclaiming alienation as a generative force, this study shows how transformation – of the self and the collective – occurs not through harmony but through shared dissonance.
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Acknowledgments
The early stages of this research were also supported by a small grant from the Center for the Study of Contemporary China (CSCC) at Duke Kunshan University, to which I am grateful.
*This article has greatly benefited from conversations and research conducted with my colleague Zairong Xiang and the students Zhang Tianyu and Xue Chenghan, who assisted with archival research in China and the United States, as well as from Anastasia Titarova, whose invaluable support with the Russian translations has been essential throughout this text.
