Female Voices in Russian Literature in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
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Challenging the Barriers of Expectation: Female Voices in Russian Literature in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century Valeria Provotorova Charlottesville, Virginia B.A. Mass Communications and Russian Studies, University of Delaware, 2015 MA. Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Virginia, 2017 A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures University of Virginia May 2021 2 © 2021 Valeria Provotorova All Rights Reserved 3 Вам – Всем женщинам, которые были и есть в моей жизни, которые меня растили и воспитывали и своим примером научили, как быть сильной, стойкой и независимой, одной из них. 4 I would like to thank the faculty and staff at the Department of Slavic Languages Literatures at the University of Virginia for allowing me the opportunity to study, teach, and pursue my academic interests. I will be forever grateful for everything I have learned from each and every Professor. I would especially like to thank Professor Julian Connolly for introducing me to nineteenth century women writers and carefully aiding me with this monumental project. I would also like to thank my loving relatives, who live in different parts of the world and whom I get to see so rarely, but who have always showed me their love and support. I would like to thank my wonderful friends, who provided me with comfort, laughter, and advice when I needed it most. Above all, I would like to thank my mom, who never allowed me to forget my language, culture, and heritage. 5 Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 6 Chapter 1: A Historical Perspective .............................................................................................. 14 Chapter 2: Biographical Background............................................................................................ 38 Chapter 3: Love and Marriage ...................................................................................................... 90 Chapter 4: Womanhood .............................................................................................................. 167 Chapter 5: Writer and Woman .................................................................................................... 245 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 322 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 330 6 Introduction In the last thirty years scholars have been rediscovering women writers and reintegrating them into the history of Russian literature. Twentieth century writers like Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) and Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1841) have been accepted into the literary canon but the predecessors who came a century before them have yet to be recognized by more than a few specialists in an already small field. Western scholars like Catriona Kelly, Wendy Rosslyn, and Diana Greene have been essential to the growing interest in the women writers who lived and published in the nineteenth century. Much of the existing scholarship features individual writers, like Susanne Fusso’s and Alexander Lehrman’s Essays on Karolina Pavlova or Wendy Rosslyn’s Anna Bunina (1774-1829) and the Origins of Women’s Poetry, but there are few comparative studies, particularly of work by women in the first half of the nineteenth century. For example, Olga Peters Hasty recently published How Women Must Write: Inventing the Russian Woman Poet in 2019, but her study has a much broader focus than this dissertation, and it analyzes only two of the five women I will be discussing here. The five writers I will be commenting on are Anna Bunina (1774-1829), Nadezhda Teplova (1814-1848), Elena Gan (1814-1842), Evdokiia Rostopchina (1811-1853), and Karolina Pavlova (1807-1893). The work of these five writers has never been studied in a comparative manner. My analysis will focus on the views these women express on love and marriage, on the state of being a woman writer, and on their sense of their identity as a woman. As this study will show, while there are common themes and concerns to be found in all of the writers under review, there gradually emerged a consistent perspective in their work that became increasingly socially aware and critical of society. As the women found their own voices in literature, their 7 thoughts came together to create a single woman’s voice that could speak for the majority of women writers in Russia during this time period. At a time when women were expected to be gentle, docile, and submissive, Bunina, Gan, Teplova, Rostopchina, and Pavlova wrote and acted explicitly against set gender norms by publishing original Russian works, participating in literary groups, and becoming highly esteemed for their writing. They wrote within fifty years of each other and gained the same positive reception from contemporaries, so their literary experiences are very similar despite their differences in class, education, and personal lives. Through their literary works the writers provide very intimate and genuine glimpses of their ideas regarding their own place in society, while also purposefully inserting a message and a particular point of view for the reading public, thus forming their literary voice. As Barbara Heldt emphasizes, “all of the most memorable heroines of Russian literature appear in works by men” and “the most famous feminist novels in Russian literature have all been written by men.”1 The problem with literature written by men, as expressed by feminist literary scholar Judith Fetterly, is that it “insists on universality at the same time that it defines that universality in specifically male terms,” shaping the image of how women are portrayed and giving women a voice from their male perspective.2 Even today, the literary canon includes very few women. Thus, it is essential to rediscover and examine the works written specifically by women. This dissertation does not focus on the evaluation of the literary value of works by Bunina, Teplova, Gan, Rostopchina, and Pavlova, but rather highlights and assesses the 1 Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 3. 2 Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), xii. 8 messages, ideas, and feelings their works convey on three important aspects of their lives and identities: ideas on love and marriage, their identities as women writer, and their identities as women per se. Choice of Authors and Works These specific five writers were chosen for a multitude of reasons. They were generally widely respected for their works and were esteemed as much as their more famous contemporaries, like Vasily Zhukovsky (1783-1852) and Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837). In part due to their popularity at that time, these women have sufficient biographical information and published collections of works to allow serious scholarship today, unlike many of their contemporaries who have very few materials that remain. The fifty years spanning the publications of their works covers a range of literary and social movements and literary conventions, creating a fascinating foundation for comparative study. Bunina was chosen as the earliest professional writer, Nadezhda Teplova was chosen as the last representative of Romantic elegiac poetry, and Elena Gan was chosen as the first Russian feminist in prose. Rostopchina and Pavlova are arguably the best writers of their generation and therefore the most studied, so they were naturally chosen as the last representatives of the late Romantic movement. Most significantly all five writers incorporate powerful ideas on the state of women in Russian nineteenth century society, decades before the social and political movements allowed conversation around women and their place in society to take shape. 9 As Catriona Kelly writes, everyone creating scholarly work must “negotiate the explosive area of personal choice.”3 There were many notable women who wrote in the studied time period who are all deserving of further research. The writer and salon hostess Zinaida Volkonskaia (1789-1862), the poet Aleksandra Fuks (1805-1853), and the prose writer Mariia Zhukova (1804-1855) are just a few of important names from the first half of the nineteenth century who published important original works. Zinaida Volkonskaia, and others like her, were not ultimately chosen for the project because most of her prose was originally published in French. Aleksandra Fuks, while important, did not receive nearly the same level or recognition as other poets in her time. Mariia Zhukova does not have substantial biographical information and, as Catriona Kelly suggests, saw writing as a lucrative vocation so she “shape[d] and direct[ed] her material in order to ensure its appeal.”4 In contrast, the five chosen, writers wrote works “as a one-way process of emotional communication” and imbued their writings with genuine messages.5 Barbara Engel asserts that “fiction provides an unreliable means of ascertaining an author’s ideas,” but I do not think this is the case when evaluating a wide range of the author’s full collection of works because some ideas