Saint of the Month: Igor

The coffee-table book “Unholy” by F. G. Borghi (illustrations) and Björn Koll (text) is the first “almost complete hagiography of gay saints” — and as devotional art tends to do, the iconic male figures are no longer confined to the page. They’ve also come to life as a postcard booklet and a calendar. And they’re here with us too. Once a month we bow to the gay saints of the month. In August, before Saint Igor.

Igor Wassili Petrowitsch was born in 1858 in the Siberian village of Bratsk (Russian: Братск) and, at eighteen, walked the 5,150 kilometers to St. Petersburg. It took him exactly 156 days. Along the way, he performed as a dancer every evening in taverns to earn food and a bed (and perhaps a little something else). In St. Petersburg he met the then thirty-four-year-old Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who fell hopelessly in love with him. Igor, however, was in love with the German dancer Siegfried, which caused tensions but also sparked the idea for the ballet Swan Lake, which premiered in 1877 in Moscow, with him dancing the lead, of course. In the ballet, the story centers on the enchanted Swan Prince Igor, who can only be released from the curse of the terribly evil sorcerer Rotbart by Siegfried’s true and eternal love. In later versions, the Swan Prince was replaced by the Swan Princess Odette and, in the Muppet Show, even by Miss Piggy.

The original version also had a truly beautiful ending, in which Igor, Siegfried, and the not-quite-so-evil Rotbart stayed together, very, very happily, for life. Love triumphed over death, good over evil. It’s no wonder Swan Lake later became a televised symbol associated with Russia’s Kremlin leaders Yuri Andropov in 1984 and Konstantin Chernenko in 1985, or even during the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, shown repeatedly on Russian television.

We’ve been waiting for a revival for decades. In 1921, the now-retired saint Igor enjoyed another triumph when the Soviet Union’s new criminal code legalized homosexuality. Unfortunately, that would last only until 1934. After that, sexual acts between men (often described in Russian as мужеложство) were punishable by up to five years of prison or forced labor until 1993. Today, the situation for queer people in Russia isn’t much better.

Therefore: let the swans dance! Perhaps as soon as the next August 13, Igor’s memorial day.

This text is an excerpt from the book “Unholy” by F.G. Borghi (illustrations) and Björn Koll (text), published by Salzgeber. In the preface it states: “What you read in this book belongs to the category Historical Fiction; some would perhaps call it Historical nonsense. In other words: none of the saints described here ever lived, and nothing claimed about them is true.” All “Unholy” products as well as many other non-normative books and films are available at Salzgeber.Shop.