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Acknowledgements:

The research was carried out with support of a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (project no. 19-78-10100, https://rscf.ru/project/19-78-10100/) at IWL RAS.

Abstract:

This article analyzes the features of the construction of femininity in the works of V.V. Rozanov and the unpublished legacy of E.F. Gollerbach. Rozanov examines the problem of femininity in the context of gender metaphysics, in which gender is defined in two ways: explicitly (external features, manners) and implicitly (the very idea of femininity). Based on the thesis “Gender is the soul,” Rozanov draws a correlation between the character of a person and their sexual behavior. The analysis of sexual anomalies leads Rozanov to believe in the “flickering of gender”, its nonlinearity and impermanence. E.F. Gollerbach, based on the works of Rozanov, in the early 1920s tries to develop the philosopher’s teaching from the standpoint of phenomenology, defining gender as a worldview phenomenon expressed in the symbolics and aesthetics of sexual life. Gollerbach supports the theses of his “theory of gender” by analyzing literary images. As his teaching develops, he rethinks a number of postulates of Rozanov’s metaphysics of gender. Influenced by Otto Weininger, Gollerbach examines femininity from androcentric position, reflecting on the “animal-human” nature of women. Gollerbach’s work was never completed. In his drafts of 1920–1942, only the sketches of the five chapters of the first part of the book Justification of Gender. The Essay on the Phenomenology of Sexual Life survived. In this article, fragments of Gollerbach’s draft notes are published for the first time, and his paper Gorky and the Female Breasts is reproduced in full (in the appendix).