Work Text:
I.
When we meet Ilya Rozanov outside of a rink in Saskatchewan, he has already experienced enough trauma for a lifetime. We don’t know this yet-we are busy watching him flirtatiously chirp Shane Hollander.
“You will not be so nice when we beat you.”
It is a brief peek into the Ilya Rozanov persona, and the start of a life-changing love story. But what we also don’t know is that only five years earlier, at the age of 12, Ilya had been the one to find his mother Irina’s body after she committed suicide. Before that traumatizing event, he had lived 12 years under his father, Grigori Rozanov, and his older brother Alexei, who was determined to emulate his father. These two facts are not only tragic, almost beyond endurance, but are also the foundation for the character of Ilya Rozanov. Not just the character as written, but the character that Ilya chooses to embody.
Ilya has, until Shane, never had a real home, a place of not just physical but emotional safety. Unlike Shane, who came from a home of love and support (with an expectation of excellence), Ilya comes from a background of abuse, of never being good enough- an environment where softness is a sin, and words hurt like a knife. “Heated Rivalry”, both the novel and the show, do not make explicit exactly what abuses Ilya was exposed to, but it is not difficult to infer that, at the very least, Grigori was emotionally abusive- one to withhold praise, even after incredible achievement. In the first episode of the show, we see Ilya standing with his father and a handler from the Boston Raiders. We are confused, and in my case, angry when we hear Grigory say that Ilya, the number one draft pick, can be “lazy”. We see the dissociation on Ilya’s face as he tries to tune out his father’s voice. It is an expression that anyone with a difficult to please parent will recognize. And if Grigori is loath to hand out praise, he is more than willing to dole out criticism. Ilya represents not just himself, but his family, his father, and Russia. When he wins, it is inconsequential, but when he loses, he is an unequivocal failure and a stain on the motherland.
For Grigori to be this hard on his son, one can imagine that he was not any easier on Irina. Ilya would have witnessed the daily mistreatment of his mother, whom he loved dearly and was close to. He would have heard the yelling, seen her crying, and probably felt helpless in the face of his father’s tyranny and violence. As a note, it is never, in HR or The Long Game, explicitly stated that Grigori was physically violent, but given Alexei’s violence toward Ilya at the funeral dinner, I believe that he was.
The effects of this kind of environment are cumulative- they would stack up on each other like a kid building a castle out of Legos. And out of this cumulative trauma comes, possibly, Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. From the Cleveland Clinic: “Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD, C-PTSD or cPTSD) is a mental health condition that can develop if you experience chronic (long-term) trauma.” The Cleveland Clinic defines trauma as the following: long-term child physical or sexual abuse, long-term domestic violence, being a victim of human or sex trafficking, war, and frequent community violence. In Ilya’s case, he is also dealing with being bisexual in a deeply and dangerously homophobic country, as well as growing up in post-Soviet Russia. The trauma does not just exist at home- it is also embedded in his culture.
The only one of these criteria that we can definitively attach to Ilya is long-term domestic violence, which encompasses not just treatment given to Irina and witnessed by her sons, but any abuses that her sons themselves suffered. But it can also be inferred, given the time and place in which Ilya grew up, that there was community violence due to widespread criminality and economic strife. Additionally, his father and brother are police officers, with all that that implies. Not only was the wider environment unsafe, but Ilya was also at risk in his own home, especially as his brother was aware of his bisexuality.
Ilya himself says often in “Heated Rivalry” and “The Long Game” that he is very perceptive. What he doesn’t say, in fact, what he may not know himself, is that his uncommon ability to read people and situations is a survival tactic that he would have picked up early in his life. In an environment that is so rife with anger and the potential for violence, you learn very quickly to school emotions, what to say, what not to say, what this tone of voice means, the sound of angry footsteps, and the cold dread that creeps in when you realize you are the intended target for rage.You are eternally walking on eggshells. Perception is bred by necessity. Ilya’s perception tells him that Shane is interested, and it is used in humorous ways, but it was not earned easily, and it is just as important to acknowledge as other elements of Ilya’s personality.
II,
The symptoms of C-PTSD are overlapped with PTSD- from the Cleveland Clinic: avoidance of potential triggers, flashbacks, hypervigilance, and constant negative thoughts and emotions. C-PTSD, however, also includes excessive emotional reactions, feelings of shame/guilt/worthlessness/failure, and difficulty forming and maintaining close relationships. We see many of these characteristics in Ilya as we watch the show, particularly difficulty forming intimate relationships (hence the womanizing behavior), and feelings of guilt and shame, expressed during the Moscow phone call when he tells Shane (in Russian) that he feels guilty about not being there to care for his father. In “The Long Game”, Ilya also expresses a fear of suicidal ideation when he tells Shlane about his depression. Specifically, he says he is “maybe like his mother”, and that he “could” think about it. Depression also brings its own symptoms, again overlapping with those of C-PTSD. The symptoms that I think have imprinted themselves most deeply on Ilya are feeling like a failure and the feeling of worthlessness.
Touching on the draft scene again, Ilya’s father, when calling him lazy, is really saying that he is unworthy of the chance that he has not been given, but EARNED through his raw talent and ability, not to mention discipline. None of that speaks to any inherent laziness in Ilya. As someone with a similarly impossible to please parent and often similar ways of thinking about myself,..the brain knows that these negative thoughts are untrue. The mind and heart do not. When you have a parent who consistently belittles, degrades, and tears you down, even in the midst of success, it becomes very difficult to maintain any sense of pride or self-esteem. And after the age of 12, Ilya no longer has his mother to offset his father’s constant displeasure. He no longer has her arms, her smiles, her laughter. When Irina passed away, he lost the chance to have any parental, indeed familial, love. It is also likely that he may have blamed himself in some way. Why wasn’t he enough? Why did she not love him enough to stay? What could he have done to make her happier? No failure in the rink will ever compare to the failure of keeping his mother alive.
That constant feeling of failure feeds the feelings of worthlessness, and I think those feelings are foremost when it comes to Ilya’s relationship with Shane. Before he meets Shane, and indeed throughout their relationship until 2017, Ilya channels these feelings into partying, fleeting sexual encounters, rough hockey-the trappings of the Ilya Rozanov Persona. This isn’t Ilya just being an asshole. This is how he copes. He was never given the opportunity for normal emotional development, so he ends up with emotional detachment, suppression of emotions-which he tries to counter by courting attention everywhere, including on the ice. In his mind, any attention that isn’t overtly negative is positive. So he courts it, revels in it, but slowly begins to realize the hollowness of it.
As most of us with traumatic backgrounds know, maintaining any close relationship is difficult because of trust issues and fear of being vulnerable, but romantic relationships present a particular challenge. Instant attraction (or love) aside, Ilya has a long way to travel from his initial meeting with Shane to arrive at the cottage. In the show, the first sign we get of Ilya’s potential emotional investment, and his fear of it, is after their first time having penetrative sex, when Shane kisses him on the forehead and Ilya’s face very briefly does…something. It’s a bit of an “uh oh” look, and then he leaves-but not before giving Shane a very sweet pair of kisses on the stairwell. He’s not fooling us, but he is actively fooling himself. That’s why he ghosts Shane for six months after Vegas. He is in it, he knows he’s in it, and he is terrified. What do traumatized people do when confronted with big feelings? We run, we avoid, and we continue to tell ourselves that we are not worthy of the object of those feelings.
In spite of everything, in spite of his fear of making himself vulnerable, Ilya eventually makes the first overt romantic gesture by asking Shane to stay the night and by making him the tuna melt. Up until this point, Ilya has rebuffed Shane’s attempts at emotional intimacy. In the two years between Vegas and his asking Shane to stay, he has slowly allowed himself to accept that he wants more than sex from Shane, but he has not communicated any of this to Shane, and in fact the audience does not get to see this, either. So, when Shane is overwhelmed and leaves, we hurt for Ilya, but we also understand Shane’s confusion. Ilya does not. All he sees is that he has opened himself up to Shane, and Shane, for whatever reason, picked up his clothes and left. There’s another abandonment/unworthiness imprint to go along with the rest. Another example of why being soft hurts. When they are again in close proximity, after Rose, Ilya is rightfully on guard. As inadvertently as he may have caused Shane pain, he has also been hurt by Shane. When Shane comes out to Ilya and finally says to him that there are real feelings, Ilya tries to deflect, but once Shane apologizes for leaving, that is when Ilya is finally able to let the rest in. That apology was what allowed Ilya to move forward. Finally, someone is acknowledging the pain that they caused him. This is the point that changes their relationship. It’s not agreed upon verbally, but Ilya stops sleeping with other people after this. When his father dies, Shane provides him the space to empty his soul of feelings that have probably been dragging him down since childhood. Now, Ilya has a pair of hands for the soft spots in his heart.
Healing from trauma is not linear. There is no moment where a trauma survivor snaps their fingers and says. “All bet-ter.”. Some never admit to themselves that they are traumatized. But in his journey to accepting Shane, Ilya has accepted that even with all of his broken parts, he is worthy of love. He will never stop grieving his mother. He will always have to battle his depression, and his conflicted feelings about his father won’t die just because Grigori did. But now, Ilya’s battles are Shane’s too. Ilya is being loved like he hasn’t been since Irina, and perhaps she really was there, watching her boy struggle and hurt, until a boy with freckles shook his hand and made the first crack on the stonework of Ilya’s heart.