"To Become a Warrior and a Son to My Father": Aleksandr Aleksandrov's (Nadezhda Durova) Notes of a Cavalry Maiden (1836) as Transgender Autobiography

Abstract

Transgender autobiographies have been a subject of narratology since the 1990s. Most of these studies have focused predominantly on twentieth- and, later, twenty-first-century texts, guided by the increasing availability of primary sources and the temporal limitations of transgender history. And yet, as Jay Prosser argued in his influential 1998 work Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Sexuality, “even without the official discourse of sex change, the plot lines of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transgendered subjects are remarkably consistent with those of contemporary transsexuals” (133). This article expands the chronology and geography of narrato-logical analysis of this genre through reading Notes of a Cavalry Maiden [Zapiski kavalerist-devitsy] (1836) by Aleksandr Aleksandrov (Nadezhda Durova) (1783–1866), a Russian-Ukrainian hero of the Napoleonic wars, as a transgender autobiography. This reading brings into consideration new forms, affects, and narrative structures as constituent elements of trans narratives and has the potential to expand anglophone trans imaginaries past the confines of their current locations and temporalities.