I Enjoy Being A Girl
In the prologue of Student, Athlete, Komsomol Girl, the man who will be Natasha is taking stock of his life in the moments before the heart attack that kills him, and the picture is not pretty. In the decades since the Soviet collapse, the world has become a hostile, alien environment even as his body has begun to betray him. The first page is a litany of complaints that are the familiar lot of the elderly: his body can no longer handle the cold, nor can he walk without a cane. But not all of his dissatisfaction is the inevitable result of old age. He has to rely on humanitarian aid (expired dog food and stale bread), because after he pays his rent and utilities, his pension is almost exhausted. It is when he mentions money that we begin to see the strangeness of his world, as all the prices are calculated in euros rather than rubles.
He has the classically masculine instincts of a protector, sheltering a 70-year-old widowed neighbor who has been evicted from her apartment, even if she dies in her sleep just three months later. But overall, he has been a failure as a protector and provider, albeit through no fault of his own: Both his children are dead, and his young granddaughter has been murdered. When he dies, he leaves behind a world that could not let him succeed as a man.
The protagonist's gender-swap allows him to redeem both himself and his country, rewriting the literal past of the Soviet Union while symbolically reversing the biggest tragedies of his own life. On the one hand, everything bad that happened to him in the original timeline can be attributed at least indirectly to the collapse of the USSR; on the other hand, his losses are also experienced as the personal failures of a father, husband, and grandfather. The USSR fell apart due to incompetent or treacherous leadership, leading to destruction of the narrator's family as a failure of his husbandry. Reborn as Natasha, he becomes both a hypercompetent caretaker (no one will die on his watch now, with one key exception) and the world's least likely, but most successful political assassin. In so doing, he exchanges helplessness for agency.
Young Natasha immediately distinguishes himself on the domestic front. On his eighth birthday, not long after giving birth to twin boys, Natasha's mother dies suddenly, leaving behind a husband who is incapable of running their home (he goes out on a drinking spree for three days before Natasha whips him back into shape). With the help of a girlfriend his age, Natasha takes over the cooking and the cleaning, along with the care of his infant brothers. He is, of course, exhausted, but he does not let his new burdens impede his efforts to build a new book collection for his school and assume a leadership position among her peers.
As he grows older, Natasha moves from triumph to triumph, even starring in a movie that was one of his (original) childhood favorites. His never-ending success, along with the constant praise he receives from all those who surround him, are the hallmarks of a classic Mary Sue. Yet the story's wish-fulfillment fantasy is always complicated by Natasha's own complicated gender identity. In his mind and in his narration, Natasha remains stubbornly male, using masculine pronouns and maintaining a sense of continuity with his previous life as a man. In his daily interactions, however, he functions as female, using feminine pronouns and grammatical forms. If Student, Komsomol Girl, Athlete is the author's fantasy of trans rebirth, it is certainly idiosyncratic. If we take the narrator's words at face value, the novel creates rather than solves gender dysphoria. According to the logic of the novel itself, Student is not the story of a transman reborn as a cisgender girl, but of a cisgender man reborn as a transgender boy who never comes out to those around him.
If we follow the logic of the hostile Fantlab commentator discussed earlier, we have before us a Freudian return of the repressed. Rather than confront what Skepsis assumes is the assigned-male writer's forbidden fantasy of being a girl, Arsenyev addresses his dysphoria by reversing it: his Mary Sue must live life as a girl while knowing he is a man. But if we refrain from imputing motive and desire to Arsenyev himself, we are left with an even more intriguing statement about the Time Crasher fantasy. In such a reading, gender dysphoria is the Time Crasher's price of entry, the burden he must bear if he is to travel to the past and rewrite history for the better.
Once Natasha has arrived in 1960, gender dysphoria is the only true conflict in the novel. Otherwise, nearly everything goes according to plan. The real flaw the book struggles with is the Mary Sue-ishness not of the protagonist, but of the setting: Brezhnev-era Russia is overwhelmingly wonderful, a utopian alternative to the dystopian 2040s. By having Natasha live in the "wrong" body, Arsenyev unites both time periods in a shared discomfort, amplifying the uncanny effect of a familiar malaise throughout the novel. Contrary to the reading that imputes trans desire to the author, the saving grace of Student, Komsomol Girl, Athlete is its refusal to be a perfect fulfillment of a fantasy. Natasha can be a girl saving her beloved homeland from turning into a neoliberal hellscape, or he can reside in said hellscape as a man. Like the lead in one of those perennial American feature stories about women's progress, Natasha cannot "have it all."
As a child, Natasha resists his mother's efforts to get him to wear bows, eventually managing to have his hair cut short. He checks himself for signs of sexual interest in boys, but finds none. This does not mean he has resolved never to have sex. If sleeping with a man will get him closer to his goal, then he'll do it. Instead, he is interested in girls, even kissing a German girl in public: "When it comes right down to it, why do Brezhnev and Honneker get to do it, but not Elsa and me, huh? "
Still, the book suggests that gender dysphoria is a small price for Natasha to pay in exchange for a better world. When he was an old man in the 2040s, Natasha's focus was on his family and friends, and all the misery they endured; the sociopolitical situation that caused them was always in the background, but far beyond his ability to affect. In his own time, "everyone understood that they had lost. Fighting on was impossible. No one believed in victory." The 1970s were another matter: "People believe in the future. In the future of themselves and their children."
In the hands of a more subtle writer, we might identify productive irony and ambiguity in a declaration about "belief in the future" made by a time traveler to the past. Natasha, who has seen the terrible future, is the last person who should have any optimism. As an 11-year-old girl in 1972, he can soberly assess the world he came from and the world in which he now lives: "Now this country is perhaps at the peak of its might. And no one can see that we are heading towards the abyss, and in literally a decade and a half it will all end in a grandiose Catastrophe."
On their own, the optimists of the 1970s cannot create the future in which they believe. It will take the machinations of a visitor from a terrible future to make the bright future that ordinary people expect. He will never be able to live in the world that he creates, but that does not matter. In the scheme of things, his first death meant nothing, just as the deaths of all his loved ones were pointless. Now he can choose to make a sacrifice. In an inversion of the Stalinist slogan, Natasha dies and is reborn to bring a fairy tale to life.
To Natasha, saving the USSR from collapse means preventing the deaths of his loved ones in the future (never mind the time paradoxes involved). His impending Christ-like sacrifice is preceded by a brief digression into a Gethsemane of doubt:
"I could just stop, to hell with the Plan. Live the life of a normal Soviet person. Or go into business. Or even government. I could try to get into Yeltsin's inner circle (even if it means sleeping my way there) and get towed along into the Kremlin. [...] And watch my Motherland die. [...]
No! I'm not going to stop. Ninochka! I remember you and I'll save you! "
Right before the assassination, he reminds himself of his purpose: "For my Vovka, killed by NATO. For my old, sick neighbor Sergei Kuz'mich, mugged at the drug store. For my only granddaughter Nina, raped and tortured to death. For the impoverished, half-starved existence of old people who worked all their lives."
The whole point of Natasha's second life is to right wrongs: post-Soviet Russia was never really his home, because it was the corrupt wreckage of a once great country. Natasha's rebirth as a girl works because it helps prevent him from ever being truly comfortable in the world that he needs to save, thereby helping him resist the temptation to remain behind. Granted, this discomfort manifests itself rather rarely once Natasha is no longer an infant, perhaps supporting the reading of the book as the author's forbidden transgender fantasy. Either way, the resulting world that lives on after Natasha's (second) death is a restoration of a lost world, a projection of a vibrant Soviet Union into the post -1991 future. What was broken is now whole, and this new integrity is reinforced by a minor plot point from the middle of the book. Teenage Natasha encounters his original mother as she is taking her baby out for a stroll:
"The baby in her carriage was named....Natasha! Now that was something I never expected. […] It's me. But in this work I was born a girl! So it's either the "butterfly effect," or HE has a truly outstanding sense of humor. ..."
As with The Dark Side of the Moon, we are back on unusual Oedipal ground, though this time with just a hint of the time paradox of Robert Heinlein's classic short story, "All You Zombies" (in which every character turns out to be a version of the narrator from a different moment in time, including the protagonist's mother and father). No matter who his parents are, Natasha will now always be Natasha. Natasha-the-narrator and Natasha-the-baby might best be seen as two different transgender fantasies. The narrator, by retaining his memories of himself as a man, is either newly dysphoric (because he was fine in a male body before), or a fulfillment of a fantasy of existing in an assigned-female boy while maintaining continuity of consciousness with his previous self. In the second scenario, Natasha-the-narrator remains a trans character in a new body. Natasha-the-baby, who will never have had the life experiences of Natasha-the-narrator, has the chance to grow up as a cisgender girl. Just as the citizens of the twenty-first century Soviet Union will have no memory of the Soviet collapse, the new Natasha will have no memory of having lived in the world as an adult man. The promised land not only undoes all rupture and dysphoria, but hides the traces that they ever existed. If Arsenyev really is working through his own gender troubles in his fiction without acknowledging them, then he has landed on the perfect fantasy: a Soviet Union that lives up to ideals, and a rebirth as a girl that amounts to a kind of trans erasure.
This erasure carries over to the stories that serve as sequels to the novel proper. Each is narrated by a girl with a distant connection to Natasha, but with virtually no tonal or stylistic distinction from the narration of Natasha herself. They benefit from Natasha's sacrifice (living in the world Natasha created), living a life free of both the general malaise of the previous, post-Soviet iteration of reality and the gender dysphoria that haunts the novel. They are just like Natasha, except that they are girls living with no contradiction to the gender assigned to them at birth. One of them even manages to repeat Natasha's heroic rewriting of history, becoming the Mother of All Mary Sues: accidentally finding herself in Nazi Germany in 1941 (?), she befriends Hitler, prevents World War II and the Holocaust, becomes the first cosmonaut (even appropriating Yuri Gagarin's famous catchphrase), founds a new world order based on a Nazi/Soviet alliance, and takes over for Hitler as the Fuhrer of the Third Reich. Arsenyev's fictional world is now several steps removed not just from our reality, but from the dystopian future imagined in the collection's first pages. Through the efforts of multiple Time Crashers, Arsenyev has erased all trace of both the original sin of our reality (the collapse of the USSR) and the complicated gender issues that the initial novel could not ignore. It is the perfect utopian move, erasing all traces of the unpleasant history that led up to it in order to create a perfect, self-contained world whose past, present, and future all form an idealized closed loop immune to the profane misery of actual history.
Note
[1] Leonid Fishman sees the popodanets as the heir to the Strugatsky Brothers' progressors: when he ends up in the past, he is a modernizer by default.