Portrait of a Grandpa as a Young Girl

In the Introduction, I noted that the genre's inherent dissatisfaction with the present creates an uncanny effect:  something about the present simply does not feel right.  Even more, in the Time Crasher stories the present day is dysphoric:  the hero has a continual sense of not quite fitting into his own time and place.  One  particularly unusual set of Time Crasher  narratives intensifies the dysphoria by attaching it to the hero's body:  the novel that gives the collection Student, Komsomol Girl, Athlete (Studentka, komsomolka, sportsmenka) its title requires the male author's stand-in to be reborn as a girl.  Gary Stu must become Mary Sue.

Student, Komsomol Girl, Athlete is narrated by an old man who, sometime in the 2040s, has reached the end of a life marked by disappointments and tragedy. His son died defending his motherland (now renamed the "Democratic Republic of Muscovy," abbreviated as "SHIT" in Russian), his daughter died in a nuclear blast in the "Baltic Republic," and his young granddaughter was tortured and murdered.  He drops dead of a heart attack and wakes up in the body of an infant girl named Natasha on December 31, 1960. He has all his memories and mental capacities, which allow him to become a child prodigy. Continuing to use the masculine pronoun in his first-person narration, Natasha excels in organizational work at his elementary school, joins the pioneers at an early age, has a brief, successful film career while still a teenager, and then becomes an athlete who eventually specializes in marksmanship. [1]  This is all part of his master plan, which succeeds when, in 1980, Natasha is presented to the leadership of the Soviet Union at the opening of the Moscow Olympics, whereupon he shoots and kills Andropov, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin, saving the Soviet Union from collapse. He dies happy, knowing that he has created a new timeline, one whose further history is explored (and again rewritten) in the other two stories collected in the volume. 

The author, Sergei Vladimirovich Arsenyev, appears to be an elderly man who got his start writing online.  Most of his work is hosted by "Samizdat" (samlib.ru),  a self-publishing portal ironically reappropriating the Soviet term used for writing disseminated unofficially.  Student, Komsomol Girl, Athlete  was posted in November of 2011, and then picked up by EKSMO for commercial publication the following year (it seems to be the only one of his works to make this sort of crossover).  These are not Arsenyev's only Time Crasher stories, though he has written in numerous F&SF subgenres, as well as in historical realism.  

Imputing psychological motivations to an author is always tricky business, and all the more so when information is so sparse.  But Arsenyev's Samizdat page contains a brief manifesto entitled "Sergei Arsenyev on His Work" (Sergei Arsen'ev o svoem tvorchestve") (2010). It consists of 10 points, condemning capitalism and democracy, praising Stalin and denying that the Terror happened, calling for tolerance of national minorities  ("as long as the migrant behaves like a person, and not like an ape that 's escaped from the circus”), declaring the collapse of the USSR one of the greatest catastrophes in history, heaping disdain on the "opportunists" in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and declaring that Hitler was "not an idiot," a leader who did a great deal for his country in the 1930s (even if by 1945 he had degenerated into "a total shit").  All in all, this is fairly standard stuff for both contemporary Russian science fiction and fan fiction, but there is one more point that stands out:  "6. I hate homos" ("Nenavizhu gomosekov"). This, too, is hardly unusual, but its placement in the middle of the manifesto, as the shortest, and therefore presumably least complicated, proposition is intriguing. Especially when one considers that his favorite trope is the transmigration of an old man's mind into a little girl's body.

While I may not be comfortable psychoanalyzing Arsenyev from a distance, commenters on-line have no qualms about offering an armchair diagnosis.  A self-identified gay man writing under the username "Skepsis" on March 5, 2021 asks how it is possible to "seriously" espouse an ideology combining homophobia, tolerance of ethnic minorities, and an admiration for Hitler (the earlier Hitler, as if the Fuhrer were an indy band that did their best work before they got popular):

It's extremely sad, Arsenyev, that you are a man-hater who is disgusted with his own body.  Because only such clinical abnormalities can explain the SIMULTANEOUS presence of the red thread running throughout your entire work--the transfer of an adult man's consciousness into the body of a little girl while maintaining a sexual orientation towards girls that is normal for a man, but not normal for a girl.  Moreover you manage to describe this along with straightforward disgust for intimacy with a man and a declaration of your hatred of homosexuals. 

But, alas, I must remind you that female homosexuality, which is clearly found in your novels, is ALSO homosexuality and eroticism, characteristic of "homos." 

Skepsis's take on Arsenyev isn't quite a model of progressive critique; his attack on the author's homophobia is predicated on a notion of the "normal," and his characterization of the book's same-sex eroticism manages to combine trans erasure with outright transphobia. But the tension he finds between Arsenyev's homophobia and his predilection for magical trans narratives is undeniable.  The temptation to attribute stealth trans longing to the author's own psychological make-up is all the stronger given what one fantlab commentator calls the unrelenting "merisiushnost'" (Mary-Sue-ishness) of his hyper-competent heroines. 

We cannot know for sure if Arsenyev's own personal gender dysphoria is finding its way into his texts like some repressed Freudian symptom, with the author's militant homophobia serving as cover for his own trans desire. What we can do, however, is ask what role the text's explicit gender dysphoria might play in this particular strain of Time Crasher narrative. [2]  Just as Solovyov's Oedipal crisis points to the regressive character of Time Crasher nostalgia, the gender dysphoria in Arsenyev's work highlights the sociopolitical dysphoria of the post-Soviet subject and the uncanny ontology of this subject in both the present day and the imagined past.

Note

[1] Though he would be unlikely to use such terminology, Natasha's preferred pronouns are masculine (at least in the privacy of his own thoughts).  I am following his example.