This project examines nineteenth-century Russian literature through the lens of queer theory. The main goal is to illuminate the queer undercurrents in nineteenth-century Russian literature, with a focus on the authors canonized as its official “classics.” Russian state propaganda is profusely using nineteenth-century Russian literature to support Putin’s ideas about society and family both in mass media and in the classroom despite the fact that the motifs and discourses of heteronormative exclusion/superfluity, heterosexual failure, marriage phobia, utopianism, and anti-reproduction run through the canonized texts. In adopting a broader theoretical understanding of “queerness,” less as a sexual orientation/identity and more as disruption of heteronormative conventions and resistance to gender policies, this project establishes queerness as a key, constitutive element of Russian literary history. Reading Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov alongside marginalized works by gay, lesbian, and transgender authors, my research outlines the silenced and overlooked counter-history of Russian literature. The project meets a recent call to revise Russian literary canon in the wake of Russian aggression in Ukraine rooted in the 19th century imperialist and nationalist metanarrative. It acquires a special urgency in the context of repression and criminalization of LGBTQ+ communities in contemporary Russia.