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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HEATED RIVALRY AND MODEST FANTASIES FOR MONSTROUS TIMES  
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Helen Stuhr-Rommereim
February 8, 2026
Jacobin
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_ An obscure 19th-century Russian novel about love and class and a
21st-century gay hockey romance might seem worlds apart. But both
Heated Rivalry and Molotov offer the same thing: small parables of
tenderness and bravery in overwhelming times. _

At their most modest, happy-ending romance stories like Heated
Rivalry soothe troubled minds amid social turmoil. At their most
radical, they expand who gets to imagine themselves living well in an
unjust society. , (Accent Aigu Entertainment / Bell Media)

 

The appeal of the Canadian gay hockey romance show _Heated Rivalry_
isn’t hard to understand. Its young stars are beautiful and
appealing, and their romance is sexy and sweet. But perhaps most
appealing of all, in this era of performative cruelty, it is a
television show in which the central characters’ fears — that if
they reveal their true feelings they will be romantically rejected,
and that if their homosexual love affair is discovered they will be
disowned and ruined — are ultimately unfounded. We wait the entire
show for the other shoe to drop, and this anxiety lends the romance a
special charge, but ultimately nothing bad happens at all.

The world of _Heated Rivalry_ is just a _little_ bit better than the
one that exists, but entirely imaginable from where we currently
stand. The way to get there appears easy. A few people just have to be
decent to each other, to carve out space to live well within the
structures and institutions that exist. It’s nothing revolutionary,
but the show has been devoured with an urgency that suggests this
image of an ever-so-slightly better reality was sorely needed.

Romance is a genre built on fantasy, of course. But there’s
something poignant and telling about _Heated Rivalry’_s breakout
popularity cresting against the backdrop of US imperial
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aggression
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domestic authoritarianism
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disturbing revelations about private abuses of power among the
political
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financial
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elite. Perhaps this vision of kind and handsome boys in love is
helping viewers cope with a degraded present — inviting them into an
alternative world where the biggest problems can be overcome through
personal bravery and interpersonal tenderness.

Perhaps this vision of kind and handsome boys in love is helping
viewers cope with a degraded present.

If so, it wouldn’t be the first popular romance to fulfill this
social role. One hundred and fifty years ago, in the Russian Empire,
an obscure novel served much the same purpose for its readers. Small
fantasies of decency and love, it turns out, often serve a political
function. At their most modest, they can soothe our troubled minds
with surmountable challenges and happy endings. At their most radical,
they can expand the boundaries of who gets to imagine themselves
living well in a society ruthlessly determined to hoard the spoils of
the good life for a privileged few.

The Story of Molotov

Strange as it may sound, the Russian writer Nikolai Pomialovsky wrote
a very similar kind of romantic work in 1861 called _Molotov_. While
it concerned the limitations of class rather than sexual orientation,
it was perhaps the _Heated Rivalry_ of his day, offering readers a
clean, comprehensible, novel vignette of romantic tension and ultimate
triumph at a time of social repression and profound change.

Pomialovsky’s name is probably not familiar if you are not a scholar
of nineteenth-century Russian literature, and _Molotov_ has never been
translated. If it had, anglophone readers might have a slightly
different idea about nineteenth-century Russian fiction. _Molotov_ is
a mostly happy, mostly undramatic story. Nothing bad happens. No
alienated young man commits murder just to prove to himself he is
powerful, as in _Crime and Punishment_. No married woman commits
suicide because she cannot be both mother to her son and public
partner to her extramarital lover, as in _Anna Karenina_. Instead, a
young woman and a young man realize that they love each other and,
despite initial objections from the young woman’s family, they marry
and appear poised to live happily ever after.

Nikolai Pomialovsky depicted in the 1901 Gallery of Russian Writers.

This is not the kind of ending that nineteenth-century Russian
literature is best known for. But, like the blissful and nearly
conflict-free final “cottage episode” of _Heated Rivalry_, it
offers a compensatory fantasy for a society in which basic aspects of
a simple, good life are inaccessible for many. A novel can’t give
anyone real material access to the good life. But _Molotov_ gave its
contemporary non-noble readers a chance to envision themselves living
it — something they would never have encountered in literature
before.

_Molotov_ was written by the poor son of a clergy family and about
lower-class people at a time when both authors and novelistic
protagonists from outside the nobility were rare. In 1861, the most
celebrated Russian writer was the nobleman Ivan Turgenev. His novels
_Rudin_, _A Gentry Nest_, and _On the Eve_ established a tradition of
melancholy realist prose fiction, in which aristocratic characters
love passionately, and — contra the Jane Austen–style marriage
plot of the British tradition — never end up happily together.
(Turgenev’s most famous novel, _Fathers and Sons_, was published
shortly after _Molotov_.)

In Pomialovsky’s _Molotov_, the young protagonist Nadia Dorogova,
the daughter of a mid-level civil servant, experiences an emotional
awakening by reading Turgenev. She’s convinced, however, that the
experiences she has read about are only for aristocrats. She imagines
she will only ever experience love mediated by literature in stories
about landowners because all of the protagonists in her books, unlike
her, live “without worrying about their daily bread.”

The conflict is the same as in _Heated Rivalry_, where Shane, a
romantic at heart but a closeted gay man, is convinced that ordinary
romance is beyond his reach. He thus resigns himself to secret sexual
trysts with his professional hockey rival, Ilya, struggling to
suppress his romantic feelings since coupledom appears out of the
question.

Shane’s defeatism is eventually eroded, as Ilya loves him in return.
Likewise, Nadia’s relationship with the novel’s other protagonist,
Egor Molotov, a mid-level civil servant himself, disproves her cynical
theory about romance only being for higher-class people.

Nadia confesses to Egor that she has read Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe’s _Faust_, which she found through Turgenev’s novella of
the same name. While the novels consume her with romantic emotion,
they also feel ridiculously far from her experience. She confesses to
Egor, “You must agree it’s funny” that “the daughter of a
civil servant” would read _Faust_.

But Egor mounts a forceful response. The passionate emotional
experiences found in Goethe’s and Turgenev’s writings are for
everyone because “absolutely everyone” loves. “The poetry of
life — love — is not so easy to notice,” he declares. It
sometimes “needs to be excavated from the depths of everyday
life,” but “it exists for everyone.” Egor wins the argument
because Nadia and Egor realize that they are in love.

Molotov’s Modest Radicalism

That Pomialovsky would write a character so convinced that the kind of
love one reads about in novels could not be for her gives a sense of
how stratified Russian Imperial society was in the 1860s, and how
small were the worlds of readers and writers. Pomialovsky expanded
both, and Egor and Nadia are themselves representative of the
breakdown of the old estate system for organizing and administering
Imperial society.

Estate, or “soslovie,” was a heritable administrative category by
way of which the state conferred rights, privileges, and obligations.
The estates included the nobility, the peasantry, merchants, and the
clergy. In 1861, this system was on its way out. _Molotov_ was
published the same year Tsar Alexander II signed the abolition of
serfdom into law. Although emancipation left peasants without land and
thus still dependent on their landlords, it also broke down the most
significant distinction between estates. The law no longer separated
subjects into those who could own people (nobles) and those who could
be owned by other people (peasants).

Neither of _Molotov_’s two protagonists belong to any recognizable
estate category. Egor is orphaned as a child and raised by a
professor. He is a “homo novus,” or “new man,” because he has
no predesignated place in society. _Molotov_ is the second of two
novellas by Pomialovsky featuring Egor Molotov, and in the first,
_Bourgeois Happiness_, we learn how he loses his inborn naivety and is
forced to recognize his class status. He is living with a noble family
and working as a tutor when he overhears them describing his
“plebeian” manners. Humiliated, he leaves and joins the world of
St Petersburg bureaucrats.

Nadia’s family story, on the other hand, is one of generational
upward mobility. Her great-grandparents “sewed lousy boots” and
“baked lousy pies” to get by, but eventually birthed an “entire
breed of civil servants.” Nadia’s family has achieved modest
comfort, if not wealth or power. By the time Nadia and Egor become
engaged, Egor, too, is comfortable. He has been frugal and carefully
acquisitive. He has a home full of books and bourgeois objects, decent
savings, and free time that he spends at the opera. He no longer has
to ask himself “every day, every hour, the unavoidable, torturous
questions so draining for the mind: ‘Bread, money, warmth,
rest!’” — and neither will his future wife, Nadia.

On first encounter, this narrative of modest upward mobility and
heterosexual marriage would appear to be about as radical as a TV show
that ends with its gay protagonists planning to found a charity so
they can spend more time together. Yet in 1861, characters like
Molotov and Nadia from the broad, new, and growing “middle” of
society had never been given such a dignified literary existence
before.

In 1861, characters like Molotov and Nadia from the broad, new, and
growing ‘middle’ of society had never been given such a dignified
literary existence.

This was personal for Pomialovsky. His friend Nikolai
Blagoveshchensky, writing about Pomialovsky after his death, described
how he woke up to the fact that “beyond the confines of the seminary
there was another life and other feelings, unknown to the
seminarian” after reading Turgenev. Having chosen not to pursue a
life in the clergy, Pomialovsky, like Nadia and Molotov, fell outside
of estate categories. He chose to make his way by writing, which he
thought of as a kind of useful labor akin to teaching or baking bread.
He had ambitions (never fulfilled) to form a “society of
writer-workers” who would carry out this labor collectively. He
wrote essays on education reform and taught workers to read on
Sundays.

_Molotov _was an education project as well, a kind of bridge to
Turgenev for other young men and women who might, like Nadia, think
such literature isn’t for them. The better world it promises is one
in which the “plebeians” partake as enthusiastically in such
pleasures as anyone else.

Small Dignities in Dark Times

There were other, perhaps grander approaches to political literature
at the time. Pomialovsky wrote for a journal called _The
Contemporary_, which was the primary organ for radical political
thought in the Russian Empire in the early 1860s. One of its editors
and a champion of Pomialovsky’s work was Nikolai Chernyshevsky,
whose revolutionary utopian romance novel _What Is to Be Done?_ was
written from prison.

In that novel, the protagonist Vera Pavlovna Rozalskaya also finds
happiness, security, and a modicum of freedom through the love of a
decent man. But Vera eventually realizes that her love for her husband
is platonic, not passionate. He realizes it too and fakes suicide so
that she can marry his best friend. As Vera’s desires are allowed to
flourish in increasingly mutually satisfying romantic relationships,
she eventually realizes that her own happiness is entangled with the
happiness of others and that there is no individual freedom without
collective freedom. In other words, she achieves class consciousness.

_Molotov_ had the modest aim of making it possible for lower-class
readers to imagine a nice life _within_ society as it existed at the
time.

 
Pomialovsky’s novel stops at the first step toward Vera’s
revelation, with two decent people in love. It was a comparatively
small fantasy — but even so, it was far from the author’s own
experience. He was a hopeless alcoholic, and he died in poverty at age
twenty-eight from a gangrene infection in his leg.

What _Heated Rivalry_ gives us in this moment, in terms of a useful
fantasy, is similarly small. It takes place in a world in which one
might reasonably expect more or less progressive parents and friends
to be accepting and supportive of the protagonists’ sexuality, and
this ends up being the case, despite the characters’ fears. It also
takes place within professional male sports, and out gay players are
to this day vanishingly rare. Scott Hunter’s spectacular coming out
by way of inviting Kip the smoothie guy to come down and make out with
him on the ice is hard to imagine unfolding in real life.

But _Heated Rivalry_ has not, primarily, been taken to be a story
about gay liberation anyway. As has
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been
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much
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discussed [[link removed]], heterosexual
women are its most devoted fans_. _Its fantasy is less about advancing
a vision of a society more accepting of diverse sexualities than it is
about offering an array of sensitive and loving men to populate
beleaguered women’s imaginaries. Amid the rise of the “manosphere
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and the public airing of unapologetic misogyny from the highest
echelons of power, it turns out that this is something women are
desperate for.

There is only so much that art — literature, film, television —
can do, which was part of the point of _Molotov_. Even Nikolai
Chernyshevsky’s revolutionary novel couldn’t chart the path to the
better future it called for. _What Is to Be Done?_ ends with a gap in
time and a mysterious, brief final chapter that takes place after an
undepicted and undepictable revolution. Still, the novel was a
sensation for the way it encouraged its readers to imagine a radically
remade society.

_Molotov_ had the more modest aim of making it possible for
lower-class readers to imagine that a nice life _within_ society as it
existed at the time was within reach. Even if that wasn’t true,
Pomialovsky seemed to believe that the idea of it would feel good, and
that was something in itself. Like _Heated Rivalry_, it was a kind of
emotional medicine for an unbearable time.

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Contributors

Helen Stuhr-Rommereim is a lecturer in Slavonic and russophone
literatures and cultures at the University of St Andrews. Her book
about Nikolai Pomialovsky and other poor working writers in Russia in
the 1860s is forthcoming from Northern Illinois University Press in
2027.

 

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