Navigating Subjectivity in the Perestroika and Post-Soviet Prose of L
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Controlling the Uncontrollable: Navigating Subjectivity in the perestroika and post-Soviet Prose of L. S. Petrushevskaia and L. E. Ulitskaia by Natalie Jean McCauley A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Slavic Languages and Literatures) in the University of Michigan 2018 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Sofya Khagi, Chair Associate Professor Tatjana Aleksic Associate Professor Herbert J. Eagle Lecturer Jodi Greig Natalie Jean McCauley [email protected] ORCID ID: 0000-0002-8598-1260 © Natalie McCauley 2018 For my mother ii Acknowledgements Thank you to my committee for keeping me on my toes, to my mentors for keeping me optimistic, to my friends for keeping me sane, to my cats for keeping me company, and to alcohol for keeping me kind. iii Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii Abstract vi Introduction: Controlling the Uncontrollable 1 What happened? Writing Women and Women Writers in Russia 2 What is to be done? Additional Insights and Potentials behind Shock Value 10 The Ideal vs. the Real and What Happens to the Rest of Us? 13 The Body, the Social, and the Mad 18 Chapter I: The Sovereignty in Survival 21 Bodies That Matter: Bodies as Scandalous and Productive 22 How the Body Builds, Continues, and Reproduces Selfhood 26 L. Petrushevskaia: Physical, Moral, and Spiritual [De]generation 27 The Time: Night (Vremia: Noch’) 28 “Young Berries” (Nezrelye iagody kryzhovnika) 40 L. Ulitskaia: They May Take Away Our Freedom, but They’ll Never Take Our Bodies 49 “March 1953” (Vtorogo marta togo zhe goda) 51 The Funeral Party (Veselye pokhorony) 59 Tending to the Body’s and the Nation’s Wounds 72 Chapter II: Private Parts and Public Knowledge 75 Morality and Discipline 77 iv “V SSSR seksa net”: Gender in Communist Morality 80 Love and Marriage in the Soviet Union 86 L. Petrushevskaia: All’s Fair in Love and in general 89 “Such a Girl, Conscience of the World (Takaia devochka, sovest’ mira) 91 “Klarissa’s Story” (Istoriia Klarissy) 96 “Immortal Love” (Bessmertnaia liubov’) 101 Our Crowd (Svoi krug) 105 L. Ulitskaia’s Tolerance: The State of the Field 114 “Bronka” (Bron’ka) 118 Sonechka (Sonechka) 121 Medea and Her Children (Medea i ee deti) 127 Working with What You Have 135 Chapter III: Delusional Devushki 137 Whose Suffering Matters? 138 Doctrinal Madness and Mental Health in the Soviet Union 141 Escapism as Resistance 144 L. Petrushevskaia: “Imagination is the Only Weapon in the War against Reality” 147 “There's Someone in the House” (V dome kto-to est') 150 “Waterloo Bridge” (Мост Ватерлоо) 157 L. Ulitskaia: The Perks of Being a Wallflower 167 “Lialia’s House” (Lialin dom) 170 “The Chosen People” (Narod izbranny) 178 “Bukhara’s Daughter” (Doch’ Bukhary) 187 It was a Graveyard Smash: Concluding thoughts on the Monster Mash in the Selected Texts 192 Conclusion: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back 196 Where are they now? Petrushevskaia and Ulitskaia’s Recent Shifts 197 Where are we now? Women and Children in Putin’s Russia 200 Where are we going? Possibilities versus Probabilities 201 Notes 204 Bibliography 232 v Abstract This dissertation deals with the daily, lived experience of women in the late- and post- Soviet Union as depicted in literature written around the time of its collapse. With respect to the specific challenges individuals in disempowered positions faced and the various ways they attempted to overcome them. The dissertation reexamines works by L. S. Petrushevskaia and L. E. Ulitskaia from the introduction of perestroika in 1987 through 2000. Drawing from studies of power in a range of contexts from Michel Foucault in 1970s France to Aleksei Yurchak in 2000s Russia, I focus my analysis on how any perception of control is portrayed as dubious, how individuals worked against traditional patriarchal power structures, and how the narrative structures replicate the environment of uncertainty and fear that came to mark the “Wild 90s” of Russian literature. I find that their protagonists’ constant navigation of subjectivity is particularly clear within the authors’ use of three topoi: corporeality, romantic relationships, and escapism. The first chapter argues that bodies do not only reflect subjective construction, but in fact become a primary vessel through which it takes place: while many texts depict how the regulation of bodies (and [self-]disciplining the body) indoctrinates subjects to codes of dominant (and patriarchal) social order, I find that these works also show the subjects’ reactions to such moments as situated in the physical. The second chapter examines how the binaries between private and public break down as individuals use the realm of interpersonal romantic vi relationships as a venue to challenge, refute, or adapt societal norms propagated by communist morality. The heroines manipulate and reinterpret dominant regulations on social relationships in attempt to lessen their suffering, much of which comes from living under the Soviet totalitarian regime. Their efforts are often not successful and many inevitably continue the cycle of violence that causes their pain in the first place, but their attempts to manipulate or resist regulations on social relationships is an example of testing the limits of subjectivity. Lastly, the third chapter ponders those moments when individuals try to escape psychologically. No longer striving toward the ideal, they attempt to create new spaces in which they are the ideal. These spaces do not fully free them from dominant power, but their search for an alternate understanding of reality – through fantasy, hallucination, delusion, madness, or other – allows them a greater sense of influence than does the society around them. Even when these efforts fail, the attempt itself is a form of resistance to the dominant culture. Petrushevskaia and Ulitskaia’s prose depicts those who feel control slipping rapidly from their hands; my work analyzes how they resist, evade, manipulate, and perpetuate the techniques of power to which they are simultaneously victim. vii Introduction Controlling the Uncontrollable “In what ways did women, living within the constraints of a society that wished them to be powerless, affect the history of that society by responding creatively to its attempts to control them?” -Barbara Evans Clements1 “What does ‘women’s literature’ mean? You can have a women’s sauna, but literature?” - Lidia Chukovskaia2 This project is about power. It is about literature, of course, but it is also about the real, daily, and lived experiences of women in the late- and post- Soviet era and how these experiences are fictionalized in ways that lend insight into the workings of power. While these texts detail burdens of everyday survival (physical, psychological, moral, and other) for average Soviet women, they also paint portraits of various ways individuals perceive and experience subjectivity in the patriarchal post-Stalinist dominant social order and the even more multifarious ways they might respond. Through close textual readings of prose works by two popular perestroika women writers, Liudmila Petrushevskaia and Liudmila Ulitskaia, this project analyzes moments of tension in subjectivity and forwards three tropographical areas as particularly enlightening: first, subjectivity takes place in corporeality, constantly shaping individual’s understanding of selfhood via influence on the body; secondly, coercive regulations of social interactions, particularly romantic relationships, continue these messages of disciplinary 1 power and one’s place within it; and lastly, escapism into alternative psychological spaces become venues for possible resistance and liberation, but also at times of continuance and appropriation. In each sphere, this project takes note not only of efforts to resist, knowingly or not, but also those instances when individuals inevitably end up perpetuating, reinforcing, and adopting dominant ideology’s codes of behavior that oppress them.3 Petrushevskaia and Ulitskaia’s perestroika-era prose works document the struggles of some of the most vulnerable parts of society – women, children, orphans, single mothers, and the impoverished – and depict chilling scenes of their extreme efforts to survive national and personal traumas. Written during the socially and politically unstable eras of perestroika and the immediate post-Soviet 1990s, these works reflect the atmosphere of uncertainty and fear that for many continued from the end of Stalinism through the end of the century. This project reads these works as recordings of a version of history long denied by official state rhetoric and as brief glimpses into individual experiences of navigating subjectivity by those on the margins of society. What happened? Writing Women and Women Writers in Russia Women writers have had a troubled past in Russian literary history. While the Russian literary tradition has long been dominated by men, several insightful projects have shown the undeniable presence and influence of women writers long before those read in this project.4 Among the first women’s writings to receive any attention were memoirs, autobiographies, and other forms of life writing.5 But as more recent scholars have argued, artistic portrayals of women’s experiences continued to occupy only the margins of the cultural sphere in large part due to their writings’ assumed lower priority in comparison to more political issues addressed in men’s writing.6 This hierarchization of literature’s content has continued well into