CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by D-Scholarship@Pitt ENGENDERING BYT: RUSSIAN WOMEN’S WRITING AND EVERYDAY LIFE FROM I. GREKOVA TO LIUDMILA ULITSKAIA by Benjamin Massey Sutcliffe BA, Reed College, 1996 MA, University of Pittsburgh, 1999 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2004 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Benjamin Massey Sutcliffe It was defended on October 21, 2004 and approved by David Birnbaum Nancy Condee Nancy Glazener Helena Goscilo Dissertation Director ii © Benjamin Massey Sutcliffe, 2004 iii ENGENDERING BYT: RUSSIAN WOMEN’S WRITING AND EVERYDAY LIFE FROM I. GREKOVA TO LIUDMILA ULITSKAIA Benjamin Massey Sutcliffe, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2004 Gender and byt (everyday life) in post-Stalinist culture stem from tacit conceptions linking the quotidian to women. During the Thaw and Stagnation the posited egalitarianism of Soviet rhetoric and pre-exiting conceptions of the quotidian caused critics to use byt as shorthand for female experience and its literary expression. Addressing the prose of Natal'ia Baranskaia and I. Grekova, they connected the everyday to banality, reduced scope, ateleological time, private life, and anomaly. The authors, for their part, relied on selective representation of the quotidian and a chronotope of crisis to hesitantly address taboo subjects. During perestroika women’s prose reemerged in the context of social turmoil and changing gender roles. The appearance of six literary anthologies gave women authors and Liudmila Petrushevskaia in particular a new visibility. Female writers employed discourse and a broadened chronotope of crisis, along with the era’s emphasis on exposure, negation, and systematic critique, to challenge gender roles. Both supporters and opponents of women’s literature now directly addressed its relation to gender instead of using byt as a euphemism. From 1991 to 2001 women’s prose solidified its status as a recognized part of Russian high literature. Liudmila Ulitskaia and Svetlana Vasilenko employed a transhistorical temporality that was based on the family and offered an indirect critique of history through representation of women’s byt. Critics debated the relationship between women’s writing, feminism, and the new divide between elite and popular literature. Depictions of byt in the work of Ulitskaia imply that the everyday is an artistic resource in its own right as well as a conduit to higher meaning. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction: Engendering Byt in Soviet Culture…………………………………………..1 1.1 The Gender of Everyday Life in Russian Culture…………………………..............1 1.2 Theorizing the Russian Quotidian: Ambivalence, Apocalypse, or Opportunity?......8 1.3 Gender and Everyday Life in Post-Stalinist Culture………………………………..17 1.4 Byt and Everyday Life in Women's Writing: Building on Connections……………30 1.5 Chapter Summaries…………………………………………………………………32 2. Documenting Women’s Byt during Thaw and Stagnation…………………………………34 2.1 Women's Time and Space: Scale, Crisis, and Memory……………………………..37 2.2 The Vicissitudes of Byt: Defining Women's Issues in Women's Prose……………..48 2.3 Byt as Prism: Documenting Gendered Values and Engendering Representation…...58 2.4 Imagining Byt: Impasse, Obstruction, or Opportunity?..............................................73 3. Perestroika and the Reemergence of Women’s Prose………………………………………80 3.1 Exposing Everyday Life: Theatrics, Gender Roles, State…………………………...82 3.2 Catastrophe and Discourse: Chronotope, Crisis, Conversation…………………….111 3.3 Reinventing Women's Prose: Problems of Definition and Association…………....120 4. Post-Soviet Women’s Prose: The Artistry of Everyday Life……………………………...132 4.1 Transhistorical Time: Family and Woman as Temporality………………………...132 4.2 Gender: Diffuse Description and Diversified Roles………………………………..142 4.3 Locating Women's Prose: Feminism and the New Cultural Divide………………..157 4.4 Redeeming Byt: Everyday Life as Artistic Resource………………………………166 5. Conclusion: Gender, Cultural Divides, and the Future of Women's Prose………………...172 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………179 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people have helped me in researching, formulating, and revising this dissertation. I have benefited from the comments and suggestions of my committee members at the University of Pittsburgh: David Birnbaum, Nancy Condee, and Nancy Glazener. My advisor, the inimitable Helena Goscilo, has supported me both morally and intellectually not only during the dissertation process but throughout my time at the University of Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh Bozenna Goscilo and Christine Metil assisted me with logistic issues and the elusive goal of maintaining perspective. The staff of Hillman Library, in particular Beth Perrier and the Interlibrary Loan personnel, helped this project immeasurably. I am also indebted to Adam Zagelbaum, Robert Nenno, and their colleagues at Ball State University. My fellow students in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures (1997-2004) have provided commiseration and, just as importantly, timely distraction. I thank Gerald McCausland for technical expertise and Seth Graham, Timothy Schlak, Gregory Lazur, Irina Makoveeva, and Ol'ga Karpushina for many long evenings. During my stay in Moscow (2002-2003) Georgii Dragunov, Nadezhda Azhgikhina, Elena Trofimova, Marina Kulakova, Tat'iana Rovenskaia, and Ol'ga Vainshtein aided me with research issues and patiently indulged my linguistic shortcomings. I am grateful to the staff of the INION Library, who showed a high degree of professionalism under difficult circumstances. Suzanne Daly Kupriyanov and Leigh Anderson in numerous ways helped make this year much more pleasant. Colleagues in the Department of German, Russian, and East Asian Languages (Miami University) have been welcoming and understanding in the last months of the dissertation. My thanks are due in particular to Daniel Meyers and Stephen Sauer for computer help and Indian food. Family in Florida (Mary Jo Sutcliffe), Washington (Matthew Sutcliffe and Christine Hatcher), and Hawai’i (Claud Sutcliffe, Leilani and Kukui Sutcliffe, Brigid Mulloy) have been a constant source of strength and humor during the dissertation years and graduate school. In different ways Ed Williams and Massey Sutcliffe have helped me with the rituals of academia. Dissertation research was possible thanks to the support of a Foreign Language Area Studies Award (Title VI) and Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship from the University of Pittsburgh. Portions of the study relating to post-Soviet literature evolved from materials gathered while I was a Research Scholar in 2000 with the American Councils for International Education (Title VIII). Likewise, some of the sources relating to women’s prose were collected in 1998 with the aid of a grant from the Czechoslovak Nationality Room (Stanley Prostrednik Award). The above organizations are in no way responsible for the findings of this dissertation. This dissertation is dedicated to my mother, Mary Jo Sutcliffe, who first interested me in the topic of gender and everyday life. vi 1. Introduction: Engendering Byt in Soviet Culture 1.1. The Gender of Everyday Life in Russian Culture Gender and byt (everyday life) operate as inherited topoi in late Soviet culture, stemming from tacit conceptions shaping these conjoined constructs and their relation within society. Functioning as two halves of an equation, they suggest that women are inclined toward the domesticity, childcare, and endless minutiae needed to support a family and constituting a major portion of the quotidian. Female authors after 1953 responded to the gendered vicissitudes of byt while moving from documentation to systematic critique of women’s daily existence. This study examines how women authors in the 1960s-1990s used everyday life first as an arena for discussing selected problems (1960s-1985), then moved from this tentative description to a more encompassing and damning assessment of how men’s and women’s lives differ (1985-91). In the 1990s female writers depicted the problems of women’s daily life from a more artistic viewpoint. Five authors exemplify this shift from documentation to first broader and harsher criticism and then more stylistically sophisticated treatment: Natal'ia Baranskaia, I. Grekova (pseudonym of Elena Venttsel'), Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Svetlana Vasilenko, and Liudmila Ulitskaia. The ending point of my study is Ulitskaia’s receipt of the prestigious Booker Award (2001). My analysis focuses on how these authors appropriate the cultural space of everyday life as a venue for their commentary on often overlooked “women’s” issues. In the first, introductory chapter, I investigate how Russian culture engenders byt, how Russian conceptions of daily life differ from those in Western Europe, and how post-Stalinist 1 Soviet culture viewed the everyday and women’s problems. At the conclusion of the third section I outline the ways my study differs from previous treatments of the topic, which tend to be less encompassing and do not as extensively examine the problems inherent in the everyday as a prominent theme in women’s writing. The Introduction also contains summaries of the following three chapters and Conclusion. The everyday is a problematic concept that Russian culture consistently links with women.1 Byt is not only povsednevnaia zhizn' (daily life), but also a