Reading Revolution in Russian Women’s Writing: Radical Theories, Practical Action, and Bodies at Work

By Erin Katherine Krafft B.A. University of California, Berkeley, 2007 M.A. University of East Anglia, 2009 M.A. Brown University, 2011

Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Slavic Studies at Brown University

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND May 2015 © 2015 by Erin Katherine Krafft This dissertation by Erin Katherine Krafft is accepted in its present form by the Department of Slavic Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Date ______Svetlana Evdokimova, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date ______Linda Cook, Reader

Date ______Vladimir Golstein, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date ______Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

iii CURRICULUM VITAE

Erin Katherine Krafft, b. 1979, Seattle, WA (née Mohney, formerly Kahle)

Education B.A. Russian Literature, University of California, Berkeley, 2007 M.A. Literary Translation, University of East Anglia, 2009 M.A. Russian Literature, Brown University, 2011

Teaching Experience Brown University undergraduate courses Introductory Russian Language, First Semester, Fall 2010 Introductory Russian Language, Second Semester, Spring 2011/Spring 2012 Intermediate Russian Language, First Semester, Fall 2012 Reading Revolution in Russian Women's Writing, Fall 2014 I was able to develop and teach this course through a departmental nomination for a teaching fellowship, awarded by Brown University's Graduate School.

Publications “OBERIU and the Pitfalls of Translating Russian Absurdism,” Norwich Papers 18 (2010): 1-18.

Fellowships and Grants 2013-2014 Graduate Fellow, Pembroke Center Seminar, Brown University “Socialism and Post-Socialism,” Seminar Leader: Linda Cook 2010 Graduate International Colloquium Grant, Office of International Affairs, Brown University

iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sincere thanks to my dissertation advisor, Professor Svetlana Evdokimova, and my dissertation readers, Vladimir Golstein and Linda Cook; their expertise and insight has been invaluable to the development of my project. Thanks also to Alexander Levitsky, whose support, depth of knowledge, and thoughtful challenges have constantly focused my work, and Lynne deBenedette, whose mentorship has extended far beyond the practice of teaching. Thanks also to Gisela Belton, administrative manager of the Slavic

Studies department, for her tireless work and support in all things logistical and personal.

Special thanks to Christopher Carr and Diana Dukhanova, for years of hashing out ideas and commisseration. And finally, thanks to Luke Krafft, for absolutely everything.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1 The Russian Tradition of Women Writing Women

Chapter One 11 Forging the Frontier: Women Writers Questioning the Woman Question

Chapter Two 54 The New Woman, Boulevard Symbolism, and Many Turns of the Century: The Silver Age and Revolution

Chapter Three 121 The Years Under Stalin: Women’s Writing and Voice Against Silence

Chapter Four 186 Not from Gogol’s Overcoat: New Genealogies from the Thaw Past the End of the Century

Conclusion 258 Or, Instead of a Conclusion

Bibliography 271

vi INTRODUCTION

The Russian Tradition of Women Writing Women

When Soviet feminist Tat’iana Mamonova, exiled from the Soviet Union in 1980 for producing a samizdat publication titled Zhenshchina i Rossiia: Almanakh Zhenshchinam o zhenshchinakh (Woman and Russia: An Almanac for Women about Women), arrived in the West as a citizen of no nation with aspirations to develop a truly international feminist movement, her experience was, to say the least, disheartening. In her account of these years, she describes the now-figurative wall that she came up against; she felt that she was treated more like a curiosity meant to deliver horror stories of Soviet society than a true and potential collaborator, and she determined that she was caught in a specific version of a familiar nightmare, a situation in which many women (and men, in this case) find themselves: leaving their economically depressed homelands due to persecution or for greater opportunity, their unfamiliarity with the economic and social systems in their destination countries menializes and marginalizes their work and identity, and they find that their experience and education means nothing. This mirrors Mamonova’s own (often failed) attempts to attend women’s studies conferences or obtain support from international institutions, being that she was left with an unfortunate lack of valid citizenship. The tied hands that had formerly offered promises pointed to the extent to which these organizations were embedded in the very institutions that they claim to defy,

1 and Mamonova concluded from these experience that there were striking similarities in the structures of social and political power inherent both in Soviet rule and in Western forms of capitalism and what she saw as an unsettlingly vague notion of “democracy.”1

Despite – or, perhaps, because of – these similarities, there have been sizable obstacles preventing open discourse on the development of feminist consciousness in Russia and the West. Beth Holmgren, in writing of her own experience as a Slavic scholar with an interest in incorporating gender studies into her work, writes that there has been and continues to be a “mutual misunderstanding” between Western and Russian feminists that infiltrates both popular opinion and scholarship, one that requires “complicated acts of translation and adaptation” to negotiate carefully, as both scholar and subject,2 and my own experience aligns with this perception. Political philosopher Nanette Funk has written extensively on the lack of understanding between East and West, and particularly on the inapplicability of feminist critiques of liberalism to a Russian context, noting that concepts of dependence and interdependence, private and public, and the place of the gendered body in society are different enough to prevent mutual intelligibility.3 This chasm between contexts, however, rather than standing as a deterrent to continued attempts at understanding, calls for a new approach; these failures of communication indicate the need to trouble and disrupt long-held assumptions.

1 Mamonova, Tatyana. Russian Women’s Studies: Essays on Sexism in Soviet Culture. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989. 169-70.

2 Holmgren, Beth. “Bug Inspectors and Beauty Queens: The Problems of Translating Feminism into Russian.” Postcommunism and the Body Politic. Ed. Ellen E. Berry. New York: New York University Press, 1995. 16-17.

3 See Funk, Nanette. “Feminist Critiques of Liberalism: Can They Travel East? Their Relevance in Eastern and Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union.” Signs 29.3 (2004): 695-726.

2 I argue that it is within literature, particularly fiction, that we may begin to locate and properly contextualize perspectives on what has been known in Russia as the zhenskii vopros, or the woman question, defined by historian Barbara Engel as simply the discussion about woman’s place in society,4 since the mid-nineteenth century. My project, to be clear, is not to suggest that there is a direct correlation or dialogue occurring between Russian women’s writing and international feminisms, nor is it to insist on fitting the tradition of Russian women’s writing into an alien mold. Rather, I examine those works of the Russian women’s literary tradition that insist on creating their own contexts and provide a developing language with which to name and describe them. In short, Russian women’s writings merit a reading that does not limit their meanings by accepting presuppositions offered by Western audiences’ vague assumptions about

Russian exceptionalism, by Western feminists with doctrinaire visions of progress, by the resistance to feminist theory in Russia, or by the Russian literary canon itself, from which women writers have generally been excluded. To follow the developing tradition of

Russian women’s writing from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day is to approach the woman question from the inside, and to find perspectives on both the literary tradition and the woman question that are legible in larger contexts, but on their own terms.

Even a very brief and entirely inexhaustive attention to certain harmonies between

Russian women’s writing and international approaches to feminist writing and theory illuminates the presence of clear discussions of the Russian woman question that resonate

4 Engel, Barbara Alpern. Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth- Century Russia. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1983. 46.

3 with feminist explorations in other contexts, but that arise in response to a distinct

Russian context. Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 treatise A Vindication of the Rights of

Woman and the 1869 essay The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill, for example, are foundational Western texts which approach the problem of gendered inequalities within education and the subjugation of women both in the home and in public, and these issues are clearly addressed by Russian women writers of the nineteenth century, such as

Elena Gan, Maria Zhukova, and Karolina Pavlova; Marko Vovchok, pen name of Mariia

Aleksandrovna Vilinskaia, in fact translated Mill’s text for a Russian audience in 1870.5

Further: depictions of mental and physical restrictions placed on women and literary imaginings of escape from these restrictions were a hallmark of the English Gothic

Romance of the late eighteenth century,6 and these themes are taken up by Russian women writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, perhaps most notably by symbolist writer Lidiia Zinov’eva-Annibal. Further: Simone de Beauvoir writes in her seminal 1949 work Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex) that “one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one”, referring to the body as “a situation,”7 and we see strong correlations between this concept and understandings and formulations of gender in early twentieth-century Russian women’s work, for instance in the life and self-stylings of

Zinaida Gippius or in mass-marketed boulevard literature, so named because of its fashionable place in the growing market; particularly relevant is Evdokia Nagrodskaia’s

5 Podchinennost’ zhenshchiny. Vovchok’s fellow fiction writer Mariia Tsebrikova provided the introduction.

6 Particularly see DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of the Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

7 Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. 1949. Trans. H.M. Parshley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971. 301, 38.

4 1911 novel Gnev Dionisa (The Wrath of Dionysus), which portrays a protagonist at odds with conventionally “feminine” modes of behavior whose romantic relationships invert feminine and masculine modes of being in order to illustrate the difficulty inherent in imposed social codes. Further: the ideas developed by prominent Bolshevik feminist

Aleksandra Kollontai during the revolutionary period, particularly those relating to the interaction between domestic labor and capitalist production, sexual relations, and the effects of the so-called second shift on women’s interactions with society, resound strongly with later Western works, such as the 1972 Marxist tract The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, or

Arlie Hochschild’s 1989 study The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at

Home; anthropologist Karen Field points out that Kollontai’s ideas were resurrected in the West in the mid-century, and that her writings may in fact have assisted in laying the groundwork for these later studies.8 The second shift, or double burden, appears elsewhere in Russian women’s writing, most notably in Natal’ia Baranskaia’s Brezhnev- era novella Nedelia kak nedelia (A Week Like Any Other). And, finally, further: Hélène

Cixous, in her essay “The Laugh of the Medusa”, declares that writing will return to the woman her body, her pleasure, and that this act of writing

will tear her away from the superegoized structure in which she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty (guilty of everything, guilty at every turn: for having desires, for not having any; for being frigid, for being ‘too hot’; for not being both at once; for being too motherly and not enough; for having children and for not having any; for nursing and for not nursing…) - tear her away by means of this research, this job of analysis and illumination, this emancipation of the marvelous text of her self that she must urgently learn to speak. A woman without a

8 Field, Karen L. “Communications. Alexandra Kollontai: Precursor of Eurofeminism.” Dialectical Anthropology 6:3 (1982): 229-30.

5 body, dumb, blind, can’t possibly be a good fighter. She is reduced to being the servant of the militant male, his shadow. We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing. Inscribe the breath of the whole woman.9

Russian women’s writing in the final decades of Soviet rule enact in dark detail this action of bringing their bodies to the forefront. From graphic descriptions of rape in Iuliia

Voznesenskaia’s Damskiii Dekameron (Women’s Decameron), to the rotting and toothless maws of the desperate, man-hungry women that populate Tat’iana Tolstaia’s short stories, to the torn-open bodies in Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s Vremia: Noch’ (The Time:

Night), Russian women reclaim their voices in late Soviet and post-Soviet times by also reclaiming their bodies.

Again, however, I reiterate: I am not attempting to align Russian women’s writing with feminist theories or literature in other contexts. These harmonies are offered because they indicate that, despite any apparent lack of theoretical agreement or, in fact, the presence of sometimes contemptuous disagreement, even vastly differing cultural circumstances have given rise to similar problems and similar expressions in response.

Russian women’s writing has generally been seen as peripheral, a reactive “side-current” to larger currents determined by the male canon,10 but it is clear that some of these writings are highly attuned to gendered inequalities and that they comment on these inequalities from a subjective position, and this reveals the necessity to read Russian women’s writing in such a way that we are allowing the writing itself to direct our gaze to

9 Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1.4 (1976): 880.

10 Heldt, Barbara. Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. 3.

6 the circumstances and difficulties that give rise to the writing itself. The works that I have chosen to examine are those works which cast an especially bright light on surrounding circumstances. From largely descriptive works of fiction that portray early struggles for education and self-determination, to autobiographical writings that underline their right to subjectivity, to fragmented and experimental fictions that tear open the body, Russian women’s writing shows itself to be a discrete and dynamic tradition, one with its own trajectory and genealogy.

This is not a survey of Russian women’s writing; rather, it is a guided tour through discussions of the woman question and everyday experiences of life in Russian women’s writing, and as such, the literary examinations are paralleled by contemporaneous historical and political developments, particularly those events and policies that affected women most directly and those in which they were visible and active participants. By looking at women’s literature chronologically and in tandem with its changing historical contexts, I hope to find the thread of the tradition as it progresses by using a sort of echo- location, fictional worlds bouncing into the real and then back into worlds of fiction, thereby allowing the tradition to display itself as much as possible when a third party – me – is describing it. The subjectivity of the scholar is, after all, present in any scholarly study. As historian Joan W. Scott writes:

For historians, echo provides yet another take on the process of establishing identity by raising the issues of the distinction between the original sound and its resonances and the role of time in the distortions heard. Where does an identity originate? Does the sound issue forth from past to present, or do answering calls echo to the present to the past? If we are not the source of the sound, how can we locate that source? If all we have is the echo, can we ever discern the original? Is there any point in trying, or can we be content with thinking about identity as a series of

7 repeated transformations?11

Furthermore, Scott reminds us that the word “woman” is especially broken in the echo, fragmented, only becoming intelligible when it is listened for carefully, and given significance.12 “Woman”, after all, is the name given to a normative category as well as a real subject, and the category is often more powerful than the subject, superimposing symbolic and constructed meanings that are meant to bring the subject in line with a larger narrative. In investigating the creation of the subject of woman in Russian women’s writing, we see a concerted effort to shuffle off the tight bindings of the category of woman, allowing us to see not only the emerging subject but the powers that bestow such rigid restrictions. It is, after all, in the interests of the powerful to place restrictions on those who fall into subordinate categories, to control the meaning and use of these categories economically, politically, sexually, and discursively.13 And it is not only history, but the writing of history, that creates and maintains these often ill-fitting categories. The task that I have set myself, once again following Scott, is to question

“how, under what conditions, and with what fantasies the identities of men and women - which so many historians take to be self-evident - are articulated and recognized. The categories will then no longer precede the analysis but emerge in the course of it.”14 As

Barbara Heldt notes, the great heroines and most notable women in the pages of Russian

11 Scott, Joan Wallach. The Fantasy of Feminist History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. 53.

12 ibid.

13 Scott, Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. 5.

14 Scott, Fantasy, 21.

8 literature have, for the most part, been created by men,15 but it is not these heroines whose voices disrupt normative categories; instead, it is the articulations of female writers that I am listening to, allowing them to create their own categories and narratives of development.

The study of Russian women’s writing in context is a growing field, and I have here leaned on those scholars that have highlighted the development of consciousness in

Russian women’s political, cultural and literary endeavors. The literary studies of Beth

Holmgren, Jane Costlow, Helena Goscilo, Catriona Kelly, and Rosalind Marsh, among others, have been indispensable, as have the political and historical works of Mary

Buckley, Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, Beatrice Farnsworth, and

Richard Stites. Their careful studies have greatly informed my own approaches to both substance and structure, as they have provided the clearest channels through which the words of Russian women’s writings may echo.

I have arranged my study into four sections. The first chapter examines the nineteenth-century beginnings of the tradition of Russian women’s writing, in which basic questions of social mandates, opportunities in education and employment, and equality and autonomy in both the domestic and public spheres are opened. The second chapter, on the first decades of the twentieth century, concerns the move to interiorize the woman question, and here we will see a new struggle for subjectivity growing during the revolutionary era, one which responded both to formulations of the feminine within avant-garde literary and artistic movements and to new political constructions of the perfect female citizen. The third chapter concerns only the decades under Stalin, and the

15 Heldt, 3.

9 peculiarities of this era necessitate a slightly different approach, for both myself and the writers of this period; the absolute stifling of free thought and expression during these years of political persecution and war created a yet more radical subjectivity in the tradition of women’s writing, within which the concerted search for an authorial and authoritative voice represents a determination to survive, and questions of equality and autonomy recede. Though my study as a whole generally looks at prose writings, such as fiction and autobiography, during this era, the search for a voice, and through voice, existence, is often carried out through verse, rather than prosaic portrayals of the everyday, hence the third chapter occasionally offers close readings of verse. And, as in the trajectory of Russian women’s writing itself, the final chapter picks up again the familiar issues of the woman question, once again an available topic after Stalin’s death.

The literary treatment of this regrowth of the woman question, as we will see, benefits from both the move to interiority of the pre-Stalin years and the search for voice during the muffled years under Stalin, and the writings of this era burrow into bodies, exploding out of them again with protest and anger and a painful awareness of the self. Taken together, these chapters follow the genealogy of the tradition of Russian women’s writing and demonstrate not only the fact of its growth, but the myriad directions in which it stretches, reaching into those small corners in which there there is light enough to continue growing.

10 CHAPTER ONE

Forging the Frontier: Women Writers Questioning the Woman Question

Though historical memory tends to remember the so-called “Short Twentieth Century” as the age of revolutions in Russia and elsewhere,1 Russia's long nineteenth century hurried to lay the groundwork. From political uprisings to the birth of the intelligentsia to the meteoric rise of literature and the arts, the nation and her citizens began to rapidly define themselves, and then to seek redefinition. Among the many ideological, political, and social debates that arose stood the woman question. This woman question, broadly defined by Barbara Engel as simply “discussions about family life and the role of women,” ran in three separate but related veins: liberalism, which sought to level the balance of power between the sexes in family and public life to a vaguely-defined acceptable limit; nihilism, which hoped to abolish patriarchal relations in the family and society, essentially seeking an overhaul of government and social structures; and a third, generally political stance, which assumed that social relations would naturally and inherently become equal under a new socialist system of government.2 Though all three of these approaches relied on institutional powers to grant rights to women from the top

1 Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991. London: Abacus, 1994. 3.

2 Engel, Barbara Alpern. Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth- Century Russia. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1983. 46.

11 down, at stake in each of them was a woman's ability to determine her own position in private and in public.

Two central factors came together to allow for the rapid development of the woman question. During the Crimean War, a battle over control of the Black Sea that lasted from 1853 until 1856, Russia suffered defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, the British, and the French, and this was a massive turning point in Russian consciousness in many ways – all of a sudden the seemingly all-powerful Russian empire was no longer above criticism. A unit of female nurses was trained and deployed during the war, and their contributions and capabilities led many to begin to question the limits on women in matters of education, employment, and family life.3 The abolition of serfdom – a system of indentured servitude – in 1861 under Tsar Aleksandr II was the second major factor. Historian Marc Raeff reminds us that the extremely controversial liberation of the serfs was in fact carried out via “autocratic authority” and “the weapons of a bureaucratic, if enlightened, police state”, resulting in a chaotic mix of liberation and paternalistic power.4 This earth-shaking change nevertheless meant that women of the upper and middle classes saw their restrictive but relatively comfortable positions in society threatened, and they were faced with both fears and greater possibilities; if the poor and largely uneducated serfs could be emancipated and ostensibly given new opportunities for both physical and economic mobility, after all, why couldn't women?5

3 Stites, Richard. The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. 29-31.

4 Raeff, Marc. Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. 169.

5 ibid., 49.

12 As social structures were shaken and both the family and the economy underwent rapid and unprecedented change, women as well as men were forced to enter the new and quickly growing workforce, and the need to compete in the new economy forced women to recognize that their lack of educational opportunities put them at a disadvantage.

Slightly greater access to education for urban women began in the 1860s, but the nihilist- leaning women who took advantage of the new opportunities hoped for universal emancipation; the woman question and the peasant question were to them indelibly related.6 So began the rising generations' dynamic and arduous fight for collective liberation, which paralleled the more exclusively feminist-minded movement.

So-called “thick journals” – so named because of their physical length and their philosophical breadth – became the locus for the discussion of the woman question.

Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes from the Fatherland), Russkii vestnik (The Russian

Herald), Biblioteka dlia chteniia (Library for Reading), and Sovremennik (The

Contemporary) were the central and most influential of these. Though men wrote extensively on the woman question, contributing numerous essays and polemics, women's writing on the topic from this era offers an indispensable and intimate view of the ways in which the woman question touched real women's lives. Jane Costlow discusses the “naming” of the woman question – whose right is it to define the parameters of the discussion, and who decides which issues are important and central?7

It is crucial that women are allowed to name the question, as it were, and from the late

6 ibid., 116.

7 Costlow, Jane. “Love, Work, and the Woman Question in Mid Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing.” Women Writers in Russian Literature. Eds. Toby W. Clyman and Diana Greene. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. 62.

13 1830s on, the names that they offered were numerous, and sometimes they were their own. They gave the question a radical subjectivity, and both the questions they formulate and the answers they offer illuminate corners of the debate which are often and unfortunately unexplored.8

The tradition of women’s writing began during the reign of Catherine II in the last decades of the eighteenth century, during which time memoirs were the common genre.

Though Catherine herself, along with her attendant Princess Dashkova, Nadezhda Durova

(likely Russia’s first female military officer), and several others produced memoirs and writings of their own, they were not yet engaging with the tradition of women’s writing that sought to consciously and directly address the woman question. When

Sentimentalism began to rise, however, the channel opened for women to begin publishing poetry and prose in greater numbers, as Sentimentalism and its attention to sensibility coincided with the perception of women as wellsprings of emotion, and it was then that concerted explorations began. When Aleksandr Pushkin pulled the Romantic era to its apex in the 1820s, female writers moved into the landscapes of the society and provincial tales, and while their settings became more varied as Romanticism gave way to realism in approximately the 1840s, began, as Catriona Kelly explains, women’s writing, originating as it did from below, did not respond as much to the distinctions between Romanticism and realism as it did to the changing debate over the woman question.9 And it is this changing debate that we will follow, from the inchoate realization

8 Here I will echo Costlow's recommendation of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteeth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) as a primary text in the history of feminist re-readings of nineteenth- century women's writing.

9 Kelly, Catriona. A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 1820-1992. Oxford: Clarendon Press,

14 of the woman question, to the concentrated and intricate unwinding of the ties that suspended women in place, to the full-throated calls for autonomy in education, employment, and marriage.

Before the Beginning: Early Foundations in Fiction

Though it was only in the late 1850s that the woman question began to rapidly gain currency in both public discourse and literature, aspects of the emerging explorations of a woman's place in society were a clear concern in women's writing prior to that time. The society tale and the provincial tale offered templates for experimentation with the escape plot, but the experiments often met with little success in one crucial way: escape was not achieved. Two notable writers offer early examples of these attempts: Elena Gan (1814-

1842) and Mariia Zhukova (1804-1855). Gan's 1837 story Ideal (The Ideal) and

Zhukova's “Baron Reikhman”, a story-within-a-story contained in her Vechera na

Karpovke (Evenings on the Karpovka), also published in 1837, parallel each other in many ways, and in their separate foils, problems central to the coming woman question are revealed.

Published under the pseudonym Zenaida R-va in the early and influential thick journal, Biblioteka dlia chtenia, Gan’s story centers around the young wife of a Colonel

Gol'tsberg, Ol'ga, and her would-be affair with her favorite poet, Anatolii Borisovich T.

Ol’ga’s penchant for reading books and for eschewing adornments to her natural beauty makes her a target for the chattering society ladies, a dynamic that arises again in

Zhukova’s story, as well, and Ol’ga’s position as outsider is explored in discussions with 1994. 23.

15 her close friend, Vera. Their two methods for negotiating the bland life of provincial balls representative the tentative first utterances of the woman question. Vera, a harsh critic of marriage and the superficial machinations of social relations, has an approach to survival and self-sufficiency that entails shutting herself off from others: “Я хочу сделаться

недоступной для всех умственных, духовных ощущений и жить, подобно устрице,

одним телом,”10 she says, indicating an extreme cynicism. Ol'ga, though faced with the same realities as Vera, has chosen a different remedy: she has retreated as well, but into the world of dreams and ideas; after all, with her education and upbringing, she asks:

“как могла она принять удел свой так, как приняли бы его тысячи женщин?”11

Married to a man twice her age with whom she has no connection, who has only the most superficial and impersonal ideas of what a woman is like and what a woman likes, she feels that she can only survive by escaping into illusions. “Знаете ли вы, что такое

жизнь называемой военной дамы?”12 asks the narrator. The form of the question repeats throughout the story, as if to draw the reader into the conversation; this conversation and these questions, perhaps, anticipate the larger discussions that are to come.

Meanwhile, who are the women that enjoy gossiping cruelly about our protagonist? “Исчадие ли они демонов или насмешка природы над человечеством,

гнев божий, ниспосылаемый на землю вместе с голодом и язвою?”13 In highlighting

10 Gan, Elena. “Ideal.” Russkaia romanticheskaia povest’ pisatelei 20-40 godov XIX veka. Ed. V.I. Sakharov. Moskva: Izd. “Pressa”, 1992. 222. [I want to close the door against all mental and spiritual sensations and live like an oyster, a self-contained body. - my trans.]

11 ibid., 222. [with her upbringing, with the form of her life and thoughts until her fifteenth year, how could she accept her lot the way that thousands of women did? - my trans.]

12 ibid., 223. [Do you know what the life of an army wife is like? - my trans.]

13 ibid., 228. [The spawn of demons or a joke of nature, the wrath of God, sent to earth with

16 the capability for intellectual freedom in the heroine, the effects of restrictions on freedom are illustrated in peripheral characters, the manifestation of which is an unfortunate tendency to paint all the women but the female protagonist and her confidantes as shallow gossip-mongers in the provincial tales of this age. As Kelly writes,

“effective propaganda for the emancipation of women demanded that they be represented as unfree, yet capable of freedom”,14 and these unfree women exhibit their externally- imposed limits via villainy. Though clumsy, this attempt to unravel particulary ugly bits of the fabric of society is expressive of the painful growing pains of the development of the woman question. The woman question, after all, is not purely academic. For many, it was constantly and deeply felt, and marked by alienation from societal standards and behaviors, and Ol’ga so clearly expresses: “Но какой злой гений так исказил

предназначение женщин? Теперь она родится для того, чтобы нравиться,

прельщать, увеселять досуги мужчин, рядиться, плясать, владычествовать в

обществе.”15 The tension between the demands placed on women by society and the lack of both material support and support for the development of their minds and spirits are highlighted here, and it is marked as inescapable.

Though dramatic, the action of the story is little more than a brief background for this continuing discussion. Ol'ga, meeting her favorite poet, Anatolii Borisovich T., falls quickly but quietly in love with him, feeling that she has at last met a man who revels in famine and plague?- my trans.]

14 Kelly, 62.

15 ibid., 231-32. [What evil genius has so distorted the purpose of women? She is born to please, to seduce, to entertain idle men, to dress up, to dance, to hold sway over society. - my trans.]

17 the life of the spirit as she does. Resembling a type of Byronic hero that Peter Thorslev calls the Gloomy Egoist, a type that trades on “exploitation of feeling for its own sake,” and performs a sort of “fashionable melancholy”,16 the shrewd poet tries his best to convince Ol'ga to give in to his charms, but she cannot allow herself to betray her husband. Significantly, it is when Ol'ga steps into the poet's home, a space that embodies

Romantic fashions and male heroism, that she sees the great distance between herself and the poet. His Romantic world is one which is not accommodating to women; Gan herself was painfully aware of the antipathy toward female writers, and this alienation amidst the trappings of Romanticism was shared by author and protagonist.17 Ultimately, Ol'ga determines that a woman cursed with intellect and a poetic soul may only find fulfillment in God; Gan seems to suggest there is no other recourse – this salvation in an unknowable deity is the only salvation available. The woman question is far from being answered.

Though Mariia Zhukova’s “Baron Reikhman” takes place in a somewhat more highbrow setting – much more French is spoken, for example, and references are made to

French, German, Italian, and even Greek literature and culture – the central motif remains the same: a young woman, constrained by society's rigid hierarchies, falls in love with a dashing hero who is not her husband. The story is one of several told by the circle of the elderly Natal'ia Dmitrievna as they spend their evenings on the Karpovka, and though

Zhukova, like Gan, does not engage in a deep exploration of the interior life of her heroine, the Baroness, the examinations of the structure of marriage and its place in

16 Thorslev, Peter. Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962. 44.

17 Stroganova, Evgeniia. “The Writing Experience as Emotional Trauma: The Case of Elena Andreevna Gan.” Mapping Experience in Russian and Polish Women’s Writing. Ed. Marja Rytkönen. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. 60.

18 society are sharp and well-developed, and offer an alternative to the resolution given by

Gan. The problems, however, are entirely congruent. The world exists for men, Zhukova suggests, and women exist for men as well: “Женщина создана единственно для

семейства; круг действий вне его уже чужд ей … она принадлежит обществу как

ангел-утешитель земных бедствий”18 Joe Andrew notes that Zhukova’s observations on these gendered social structures offer “no protest, implicit or otherwise, nor even any questioning of these assertions,”19 but it seems that Zhukova has set herself a different task: she means to examine societal understandings of behavior and emotion, rather than behaviors and emotions themselves. In other words, she attempts to show what is, rather than offer variations on what may be, and trusts that, given a cruel enough subject, description alone may be scathing enough.

Zhukova's Baroness, unlike Gan’s, is bold with her desires, but her fate is no better. She is in love with her husband's adjutant Levin, but hierarchy and propriety, to him, are more important than love. As Kelly writes, love here is “a fiction which men are prepared to entertain so long as it does not threaten ‘honour’, the hierarchical network of relations cementing male society”,20 and when the Baroness’s husband finds a bracelet that he has given her among Levin's possessions, it is the two men who quietly decide her fate. As Andrew writes, these men close ranks against her, as they together inhabit a world that they value more highly than they value her separate, feminine world; her

18 Zhukova, Mariia. Vechera na Karpovke. Moskva: “Sovetskaia Rossiia”, 1986. 60. [Woman exists only for the family; the world outside of it is alien to her … She belongs to society as a poor earthly angel of comfort. - my trans.]

19 Andrew, Joe. Narrative and Desire in Russian Literature, 1822-49: The Feminine and the Masculine. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. 151.

20 Kelly, 85.

19 bracelet is a metonym for her, thrown down as something to be wagered, while she is not allowed a seat at the table.21 Even the story does not bear her name, though she is its central character. The Baroness ultimately ends up abroad, alone, though we are not told the specifics of the circumstances which led to this conclusion. The exact circumstances, however, are unimportant; the impossibility of the Baroness – or any woman in her position – determining her own path is the centerpiece of the story.

Over the next two decades, as Romanticism gave way to realism and shades of the coming woman question grew brighter, peasant protagonists were also commonly featured in women's fiction, and though the storylines differ from those found in society and provincial tales, the constrictions are familiar. Avdotia Panaeva’s “Stepnaia

Baryshnia” (“Young Lady of the Steppe”), for example, first published in 1855 in the thick journal Sovremennik, has as its ostensible heroine a young unmarried woman named

Feklusha, with whom the narrator, Nikolai Nikolaevich, falls in love. Though he loves her for her simple beauty and the depth of feeling with which she plays her guitar, when he imagines these qualities, in a wife, he is scandalized: "Ну, а если она не оставит

свою гитару?" -- задавал я себе неожиданно вопрос и краснел, воображая Феклушу,

свою жену, играющую в нашем салоне на гитаре”22, he muses to himself, wondering how he will take her in hand. Feklusha seems in some ways to hide just out of sight in this story, and though she eventually refuses Nikolai Nikolaevich, we learn in the end that

21 Andrew, 142-44.

22 Panaeva, A.Ia. “Stepnaia Baryshnia.” Dacha na Petergofskoi doroge: Proza russkikh pisatel’nits pervoi polovinoi XIX veka. Ed. V.V. Uchenova. Moskva: Sovremennik, 1986, 343-414. Web. 19 May 2014. [And what if she doesn’t give up the guitar? He asked himself this question and suddenly blushed, imagining his wife Feklusha playing guitar in their salon. - my trans.]

20 she has gotten married, despite her vow to remain unmarried for the rest of her life. News of her union, however, is received as third-hand information, further highlighting the absence of Feklusha from her own story. Just as the title of “Baron Reikhman” underscores the limited powers of the Baroness, the title of Panaeva's story achieves the same effect.

Marko Vovchok's 1961 story “Lemerivna” offers a very different treatment of the peasant protagonist. Though Russian by birth, Vovchok (1833-1907), born Mariia

Aleksandrovna Vilinskaia, began her writing career in Ukrainian, but she wrote in both

Ukrainian and Russian. As a writer and translator, she was known in small circles, but socially, her popularity through the 1860s bordered on infamy, and she became finally and unfortunately infamous when in 1872, an accusation of plagiarism all but put an end to her career;23 one wonders if such an accusation would have caused such irreparable damage were it leveled against a man, as women writers and the originality of their content were will suspect. Vovchok was a consistent and devoted feminist; she translated

John Stuart Mills’ 1869 The Subjection of Women (Podchinennost’ zhenshchiny) into

Russian in 1870, with fellow fiction writer and self-identified feminist Mariia Tsebrikova

(1835-1917) providing the introduction. Vovchok’s Lemerivna, like Panaeva’s Feklusha, is the object of affection of a young man who is charmed by her wild beauty, but the fates of the two protagonists could not be more different. Eventually given forcibly in marriage to her suitor, Lemerivna opts for death, rather than a stifled life. In front of her hated husband, she simply stabs herself in the heart: “Вот теперь, Шкандыбенко, я твоя! Бери

23 Pavlychko, Solomea. “Marko Vovchok.” Russian Women Writers, Volume 1. Ed. Christine D. Tomei. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999. 460-64.

21 меня, мое сердце, да веди домой!”24 she tells him with her dying breath, and though they are her last words, they are finally her words, and the final choice to die is her own.

It is by no means a happy ending, but it heralds two new and incredibly significant possibilities: self-determination and escape, however fatal this escape may prove to be.

These two concepts will go on to be the pillars of the woman question in women's writing until the end of the nineteenth century, and beyond.

Articulation: Karolina Pavlova and Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia

Karolina Pavlova (1807-1893) published her cross-genre work Dvoinaia zhizn' (A

Double Life) in 1848, a full decade before the woman question would become de rigueur, but along with her 1859 story “Za chainym stolom” (“At the Tea-Table”), it stands as one of the most eloquent, nuanced treatments of the woman question before or after the radical movements of the 1860s began, and they deserve careful examination. Dvoinaia zhizn' is split into ten chapters, each beginning with the prose of everyday life and ending with verse – these are the deeply buried thoughts of the protagonist, Cecilia, thoughts which her careful society life and dutifully strict and regimented mother, Vera

Vladimirovna, would never allow. Cecilia's shallow best friend, Olga, has perhaps an even more strict and shallow mother, Valitskaia, and the prose narrative follows the shady dealings of the mothers and the youthful flirtations of the daughters as all four set their sights on two young men, Viktor and Dmitrii.

Pavlova presents in no uncertain terms the structure of this life. Cecilia's mother

24 Vovchok, Marko. Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh. Vol. 2. Kiev: Izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury “Dnipro”, 1983. 17. [Now, Shkandybenko, I am yours! Carry me home! - my trans.]

22 has raised her according to exacting specifications: “мои старания не пропали. Cécile

совершенно то, что я хотела из нея сделать. Ей всякая мечтательность вовсе чужда,

я умела дать большой перевес ея разуму, и она никогда ни будет заниматься

пустыми бреднями.”25 It is this upbringing which has chased the verse into the darkest recesses of Cecilia's mind, corners which are accessible not even to her.

When Vera Vladimirovna invites a poet to do a reading for her guests one night,

Pavlova takes the opportunity to comment that women are becoming so interested in literature that it is difficult to see that “они не в самом деле принимают в ней живое

участие”,26 a wry statement no doubt informed by Pavlova's own tense relationship with the literary community. The poet's reading is appreciated by some and only tolerated by others, and Cecilia finds herself dwelling on it, contemplating poetry and one’s interior life, a new sensation for the sheltered young woman. Pavlova's description of Cecilia's frustrated interior highlights the tension between the prosaic and the poetic: “И ныне

она, осмьнадцатилетняя, так привыкла к своему умственному корсету, что не

чувствовала его на себе более своего шелковаго, которын снимала только на

ночь.”27 Though we are shown Cecilia in brief moments of wanting more, of galloping on her horse or of vaguely wondering about happiness and love, two things that she has not been taught, there is no clearly no real possibility that she will free herself somehow.

25 Pavlova, Karolina. Sobranie sochinenii. Tom 2. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo K.F. Nekrasova, 1915. 22. [my efforts have not failed. Cécile is exactly what I wanted to make of her. Every kind of daydreaming is foreign to her. I knew how to make reason important to her and she will never occupy herself with empty infatuations. - Trans. Monter, Barbara Heldt. A Double Life. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978. 14.]

26 ibid., 33. [in fact they play no living role in it. - Trans. Monter, 21.]

27 ibid., 39. [Now, at eighteen, she was so used to wearing her mind in a corset that she felt it no more than the silk undergarment that she took off only at night. - Trans. Monter, 26.]

23 We are also shown, after all, the subtle rivalries between Cecilia and Ol'ga, between their mothers, and we are shown the odds that they are all up against:

Вместо духа они им дают букву, вместо живого чувства, мертвое правило, вместо святой истины, нелепый обман ... Еслиб так поступали дурныe матери, можно бы утешиться: дурных матерей не много. Но это делают самыe добрыe матери, и будут делать безконечно.28

These mothers abandon their daughters to strange husbands and cold, isolated lives, when once they protected them so fervently, and it is all the more tragic because they know the coldness of this life, because it is their life, too. It is an inescapable cycle, and as the story rolls on, everyone plays their parts. Maternal manipulations, Cecilia’s joy and uncertainty, and Dmitrii’s mercurial and eager performances of love, debauchery, and confidence finally culminate in a wedding day. Formerly excited, Cecilia’s nights have increasingly been haunting her days, and on this day, this wedding day, two lines rise into her waking life: “Так иди ж, по приговору, / Беззащитна и одна!...”.29 This is, perhaps, the last that Cecilia will hear of her own verse in her life, and the farewell is symbolic on a number of levels. Diana Greene suggests that halving Cecilia's life into two generically different forms creates a structure in which the inaccessible is made accessible, a structure in which Cecilia is able to unconsciously negotiate the gendered structure of her social milieu and also the gendered aspects of genre, sneaking into the male-dominated realms of Romantic poetry,30 and though for Cecilia these negotiations are now over,

28 ibid., 82. [In place of the spirit they give them the letter, in place of live feeling a dead rule, in place of holy truth a preposterous lie … One could be consoled if it were only bad mothers that acted like this. There are not many bad mothers. But it is the very best of mothers who do it and will go on doing it forever. - Trans. Monter, 58.]

29 ibid., 148. [So go as agreed, Defenseless and alone... - Trans. Monter, 108.] 30 Greene, Diana. “Gender and Genre in Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life.” Essays on Karolina

24 Dvoinaia zhizn' marks the beginning of focused commentary on social and literary inequalities in the tradition of women’s writing.

Published a decade later, in Russkii vestnik, “At the Tea-Table” approaches similar themes much more sharply. Like Zhukova's “Baron Reikhman,” it is a story in frame, this time occurring during a conversation at a tea-table. An older man, Aleksei Petrovich, is arguing that women are naturally morally and intellectually inferior to men, while his companions – a young man named Bulanin, a Countess, and the woman of the house – are openly critical of his stance. The Countess offers the most direct challenge and clearly polemical challenge, commenting on failures of education and upbringing, social double standards, and impossible and unnecessary sexual mores. “Можно ли полагать, что

почти каждая женщина воспитана своим злейшим врагом, так странно о ней

заботятся,”31 she says, articulating even more clearly the phenomenon presented in

Dvoinaia zhizn'. Aleksei Petrovich attributes the necessity of this pattern to woman’s inability to resist negative influence, an inability which, he claims, men do not share.

When pressed by Bulanin to give evidence for a latent weakness in heart of woman, or for an example of a woman corrupted and removed from emotion and compassion, the story within the story begins, and both the inner story and the unreliability of Aleksei

Petrovich’s telling of it tease out new and more challenging dimensions of the woman

Pavlova. Eds. Susanne Fusso and Alexander Lehrman. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001. 103.

31 Pavlova, Karolina. “Za chainym stolom”. Serdtsa chutkogo prozren’em…: Povesti i rasskazy russkikh pisatel’nits XIX v. Ed. N.I. Iakushin. Moskva: “Sovetskaia Rossia”, 1991. 295-96. [One might suppose that women, or most of them, were brought up by their worst enemies, when the conduct of those who take care of them is so strange. - Trans. Diana Greene and Mary Zirin. “At the Tea Table.” An Anthology of Russian Writing, 1777-1992. Ed. Catriona Kelly. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. 31-32.]

25 question. The narrative centers around a certain Princess Alina and the would-be love triangle in which she is the pivot point. Khozrevskii, on the one hand, is a non- threatening simpleton that women adore and men mock, while Vismer on the other is presented as intelligent and shrewd, but despised by the Princess. The Princess, we learn from the start, is a commanding presence, described by her aunt as sometimes

“безчеловечна” (“inhuman”),32 and her initial interaction with Vismer is a sparring match between skilled antagonists. Though Aleksei Petrovich means to describe a woman who does not embody positive femininity, it is at least clear that we are witness to the emergence of a female protagonist with much more nuance and texture than her predecessors.

Though at an unknown remove from his story, Aleksei Petrovich seems to have a very intimate view of the relations between Alina and the two men. His view of their story is, however, clearly biased. With regard to Alina's relations with Khozrevskii, for example, he claims: “Гениальность княгини перед умственными способностями

наивного молодого человека находилась в приятном положении красавицы перед

зеркалом; княгиня видела в нем только свое собственное отражение.”33 His perspective on her interactions with Vismer is similarly very intimate – he describes conversations between closed doors and exchanges that are certainly meant to be private.

We learn of the history between Alina and Vismer, of a romance in Rome, and it is clear that the fault for their separation is still disputed. They aim for each other's weak spots.

32 ibid., 298.

33 ibid., 306. [In the presence of the naive young man’s limited intellectual abilities, the Princess’s genius was in the happy position of a beauty at the looking-glass; she saw in Khozrevsky only her own reflection. - Trans. Greene and Zirin, 41-42.]

26 Vismer directs his barbs at Alina's superficial social milieu: “'наглая ложь, лицемерие и

двуязычие, бессовестная игра всеми чувствами, гнусное предательство,

хладнокровное преступление - вот что делается в хорошем обществе - не правда

ли?'”34 , while she hits back at his superficial character: “'Оставим байронизм и

напыщенность - я терпеть не могу патетических фраз - будемте говорить и

действовать просто.'”35 This version of the Byronic hero is somewhat more malicious than the Gloomy Egoist; he is instead perhaps the Gothic villain, a type of character who acknowledges his own transgressions in the face of social codes and feels neither remorse nor sympathy.36 Though the same may be said for Alina, the codes that she may be transgressing are of a different variety; simply speaking her mind is transgressive.

After Vismer has left, Alina painfully exposes her predicament and her understanding of her position in society to Khozrevsky: “Разве вы не знаете, что

прославлять ум женщины значит бранить ее? Разве они все не уверены, что где ум,

там нет сердя?”37 Though this show of vulnerability and honesty inspires compassion in

Khozrevsky, he cannot understand how she can feel so constricted when she has, seemingly, all the freedom that society can offer; he does not understand the limitations on her freedom. His lack of comprehension has a parallel, however; when Alina decides

34 ibid., 313. [‘barefaced lies, hypocrisy, and innuendoes, shameless manipulation of others’ emotions, vile treachery, cold-blooded crime - that is how things are done in good society, is that not so?’ - Trans. Greene and Zirin, 48.]

35 ibid. [‘Let us put aside Byronism and high-flown rhetoric. I cannot bear phrase-mongering. Let us speak and act simply.’ - Trans. Greene and Zirin, 48.]

36 Thorslev, 52-53.

37 Pavlova, “Za chainym stolom,” 319. [ Do you really not know that to praise a woman’s mind is to abuse her? Is everyone not convinced that where there’s cleverness there’s no heart? - Trans. Greene and Zirin, 54.]

27 that she will marry Khozrevskii, he finally reveals to her his secret: he is not so simple, after all. In order to be able to support himself and his widowed mother, he was forced to dim his above-average intelligence, lest he inspire feelings of inferiority or resentment in others. It was a brief misunderstanding which allowed him to secure a good job as a tutor for a Count, and he maintained the appearance of a dim-witted but jovial character ever since. This charade, however, comes at a cost. As he explains it: “Условие было:

отказаться от человеческого права высказывать свои мысли; я должен был лишить

себя разумного сообщения с людьми; я должен был скрывать, как срам, все, что

было лучшего во мне...”38 We see that Khozrevskii's experience is quite similar to

Alina's, but while he is frustrated that this human right, the right to speak and think freely, is only available to some, he cannot see those to whom it is available are almost solely men, and that women in every station are denied this right. Shocked by this confession,

Alina calls off their engagement. Aleksei Petrovich assumes that she rejects him because his intellect suggests a coldness of heart, but the reason that she gives for the rejection is her inability to accept his lie, his charade, not his intellect; to assume that she is disingenuous in this, as Aleksei Petrovich does, simply repeats the cycle of suspicion.

And, in the end, he admits that he is not quite sure what he is trying to prove with this story. Leaving the reader with questions instead of answers is no doubt intentional on

Pavlova's part, and the questions are many: is this a parable about the coldness of women, or of men? Is it an exploration of the double standards applied to women and men, or of the same standards being applied to them for different reasons? Is it drawing a connection 38 ibid., 331. [ The condition was to renounce an essential right of humanity, the right to the expression of my thoughts; I would have to deny myself intelligent communication with other people; I would have to hide, as if it were something disgraceful, all that was best in me... - Trans. Greene and Zirin, 67.]

28 between feminist and populist concerns? And is the presence of such an unreliable narrator meant to show that even questions themselves cannot be impartial, as long as their contexts are already biased? Pavlova textures the woman question by leaving her readers uncertain.

Clearly, this story is rife with questions and purposefully offers no answers.

Greene points out that the story is contrary to trends of the time, in which fictional depictions of relations between upper-class women and lower-class men generally served to ridicule the superficiality of the woman, or relations between lower-class women and upper-class men showed the woman as a pitiful victim; instead, the upper-class woman is afforded intelligence and dignity, and her relations with a lower-class man show the parallels between the different hierarchies of class and gender.39 Additionally and unfortunately, however, the lack of identification between Alina and Khozrevskii perhaps parallels a lack of critical recognition between the woman question and what may be called the serf question, and the similarities between the obstacles faced by both of these newly-aspirational groups. Greene also sees the bias of the narrator as a significant aspect of the story, and she sees another crucial question: “Who has the power to name or interpret texts?”40 This story emerged during a tipping point – women were beginning to demand, in literature and in public life, the right to name their own circumstances.

Pavlova’s unwillingness to allow Aleksei Petrovich to have the final word on the meaning of Alina’s story indicates a rejection on her part of the male naming of female

39 Greene, Diana. “Karolina Pavlova’s ‘At the Tea Table’ and the Politics of Class and Gender.” Russian Review 53.2 (1994): 272-73.

40 ibid., 283.

29 experiences.

These new demands are given even louder voice by Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia

(1824-1889), whose “Pansionerka” (“The Boarding School Girl”), published in 1861 in

Otechestvennye zapiski, centers around Lelen’ka, an active and positive heroine whose drive for autonomy prefigures even the revolutionary spirit of the turn of the century.

Hers is an escape story, but she does not hope for escape from a particular circumstance, but rather from a whole way of living and thinking. A conversation between Lelen’ka and her former friend and mentor Veretitsyn heralds a new and active engagement with not only the woman question, but with larger questions of individual autonomy in the State and society. While Veretitsyn talks of time gone by, wistful for a different life, in

Lelen'ka's response, one may see how the armchair philosophizing of his generation has given way to the desire for action and change in hers: “О, ваши старые правила! … От

них все наше зло, все несчастье нашего поколения! … зачем вы не отказались от

ваших предрассудков, не победили вашей слабости, не трудились энергичнее?”41

She cannot abide by his ideals any longer, or by the rules in which he believes.

Commitment to work and to struggle is crucial to Lelen'ka's vision, and shades of nihilism emerge in her conviction.

Her thoughts on the position of women in society are similarly militant.

Veretitsyn, formerly in love with a stereotypically feminine and self-sacrificing woman,

Sof'ia, reveres the idea of the angel in the home, the wife who subordinates her needs to the needs of the family, and Lelen'ka rejects not just this woman but the role itself and the 41 Khvoshchinskaia, N.D. Povesti i rasskazy. Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1963. 180. [Oh, your old rules! All of our evil comes from them, all the unhappiness of our generation!... Why have you not given up your prejudices, not overcomes your weaknesses, not labored energetically? - my trans.]

30 values inherent in it. “Рабство, семья!”42 she proclaims, explaining that in her view, a mother who sacrifices herself for children does them no favors, but rather shows them how to subordinate themselves to powers that have not earned their authority. To avoid this fate, again prefiguring the almost ascetic approach to romantic attachment that will arise at the turn of the century, Lelen’ka declares that she will never fall in love; it is too disruptive, too demanding, and she will gladly take work, knowledge, and freedom in its place. Though Veretitsyn attempts to argue that she is creating in herself a different kind of martyr than the she sees in the sacrificial mother, Lelen'ka stands firm in her belief, and she sits down to work again as soon as he leaves. We will do well to remember

Lelen'ka when we encounter the writings of Bolshevik revolutionary Aleksandra

Kollontai in the 1920s; she is a prototype of the coming new woman.

Richard Stites and Jane Costlow have both pointed to this story as exemplifying the revolutionary mood of the moment, laying the groundwork for revolutions to come, and Costlow makes the fantastic point that though love in “Pansionerka” is conceived as purely romantic, the financial and personal support given to Lelen'ka by her aunt anticipates a growing awareness in women's writing of the bonds between women.43 As

Costlow writes, “inherited plots of love acted as cultural texts, ascribing to women particular capacities for feeling,”44 and these capacities take on new breadth and strength in the women's writing of during these years. The escape plot no longer has its eyes fixed on the distance; instead, it scrutinizes home and all that is familiar, and it is in the home

42 ibid., 185. [Slavery, the family! - my trans.]

43 Stites, 48; Costlow, 65-71.

44 Costlow, 72.

31 where the woman question finds resonance in literature.

The 1860s saw the rise of the novel in Russian literature, and as Kelly has shown, this was an unfortunate turn for women's writing. Despite the advances, the limited number of settings and themes that were available to female writers, and the scarcity of complex psychological, sexual, and emotional profiles of their female protagonists put the scope of the novel out of reach in many cases. A further obstacle was sexism itself.

Psychological portraits, explorations of interiors, and the body began to figure more prominently in fiction, but women’s emotions were seen as too frivolous, too feminine, while their bodies were seen as weak and deficient, carrying only negative value in the areas of literature and intellect.45 Women, fictional and non-, had to find new ways to define themselves, and this they did in the non-fictional world. In cities and the countryside, in schools and terrorist cells, the woman question grew in intensity and urgency, soon to return to the page with new energy.

The New Generation: Nihilism, Populism, Terrorism

The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 coincided with and offered labor-power to the quickening of the industrial revolution in Russia, and the effects of these developments were wide-ranging; migration from rural areas to urban centers rose rapidly, and the social and ideological foundations of both rural and urban life were shaken mightily. For those that moved to the cities, traditional approaches to family and village life were chaotically replaced by new orders, and those that remained behind were by no means untouched by the shifts in values and populations. 45 Kelly, 70-75.

32 Village life was patriarchal in nature in many ways, with sexual mores operating with distinct double standards for men and women – premarital sex was accepted for men, but not for women, for example – and the structure of marriage favored men as well, economically and socially.46 Various abuses of power in the family and community were common and either condoned or overlooked by the law and the Orthodox Church – these abuses included corporal punishment, forced marriage, and instances of public shaming of women who transgressed social sexual norms, and there was generally no recourse for the women who had to deal with this.47 These circumstances, though very unpleasant, made the durability of village life quite strong, but it also meant that the city was an attractive destination for those young women who hoped to escape this terrible, albeit comfortably predictable, existence.

Though many women, of course, remained in the villages, in some cases finding their positions more comfortable due to an exodus of young men and a resulting shift in the balance of power, women moved to the city in great numbers; in the late 1860s and early 1870s, women were between thirty to forty percent of immigrants to the two major cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, but by the turn of the century they made up approximately sixty-five percent.48 The women who relocated to the city were, for the most part, precarious workers, taking whatever sort of work was available to them. Many became domestic help, day laborers, or factory workers, with a small minority entering into prostitution; this latter group was likely to have come from particularly

46 Engel, Barbara Alpern. Between the Fields and the City: Women, work, and family in Russia, 1861-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 8-10.

47 ibid., 21-24.

48 ibid., 62-67.

33 disadvantaged backgrounds, but Barbara Engel is careful to point out that even with the very incomplete records of this profession, only perhaps half of these women could be classified as “victims”, either of the economy or coercion, while the other half saw it as an honest and stable career that simply paid better than many of the other jobs available to women at the time.49 It is estimated that in the first decade of the twentieth century, up to seventy percent of urban men visited prostitutes at some point, so it was surely a dependable line of work.50

Engel reminds us that this rapid growth of city life created a new family order, one separate from the communal life of the village in which the husband and wife were very dependent on one another, with wives, less viable in the workplace, often economically dependent on their husbands, all of which also means that history has tended to see the laboring class as primarily or exclusively male and erases the experiences of their wives; in fact, though domestic chores were almost solely a wife's responsibility, even if both husband and wife worked full-time, because of economic and geographic factors, only a very small percentage of people lived as married couples in the sense that we would now recognize it, so this view of the new urban family is hardly accurate.51 There were certainly imbalances in married domestic that will be familiar to a contemporary audience, – lack of control over fertility and economic security meant that, if possible, women left the workforce when they had children, for instance, and even though laws were created in 1885 that supposedly offered protections to mothers and

49 ibid., 179-85.

50 Stites, 183.

51 Engel, Between the Fields and the City, 199-211.

34 children, they were often laws that small employers could easily manipulate – but these common problems do not tell the whole story of domestic, social, and legal imbalances.52

Through the 1860s and 1870s, discussions of these imbalances and more were occurring in many arenas, but the debate over women's rights was a touchpoint for larger issues of autonomy under imperialism. Women under imperial civil law were required to submit fully to their fathers or husbands, with the men in control of their daughters’ and wives’ education, employment, finances, and mobility, and divorce a virtual impossibility.53 Jurists' attempts to reform these laws represented attempts to dismantle imperial and patriarchal control over the lives of individual citizens, female or not. As

Wagner writes writes: “reform of women’s rights became the Trojan Mare through which

Russian civil law, and thence Russian society, would be transformed in accordance with the values, ideals, and professional aspirations of the progressive jurists,” and both men and women would be protected from arbitrary and authoritarian treatment at the hands of the imperial government.54 True reform was yet a long way off, but the debates raged in courts, in journals, and increasingly, among circles of agitators and activists. Many women chose to stay out of the fray, focusing instead of subsistence and survival, but those that worked for revolution worked tirelessly, creatively, even violently for change.

If we take the word revolution to mean both political revolution and revolutions in spirit and thought, between the mid-1860s and the dawn of the twentieth century, female

52 Engel, Between the Fields and the City, 217-18; Stites, 163.

53 Wagner, William G. “The Trojan Mare: Women’s Rights and Civil Rights in Late Imperial Russia.” Civil Rights in Imperial Russia. Eds. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. 66-68.

54 ibid., 78.

35 activists in Russia enacted both of these types of revolution. They saw in education and activism a chance to escape the domestic fates that awaited them, and a growing minority of young women in the 1860s struggled to redefine the role of women in the home and in society. Their outward appearances were an indication of their struggle to buck convention, with their short hair, dark glasses, cigarettes, and non-feminine dress, but their choice of clothing was not just a matter of fashion; leaving the house in such a state constituted a blatant flouting of societal norms.55 These young women were nigilistki – female nihilists – and as they visibly removed themselves from the rigid and domestic lives that awaited them, often finding themselves disowned by their families, they were forced to negotiate a world that they had never related to independently, a world of economic, sexual, and emotional insecurity and, in some cases, political persecution.56

A large number of the nigilistki came from the middle classes, and once the decision was made to defy the norm, there was often no return. The break with the family, either to pursue an education against their families' wishes or to join their fellow revolutionaries in political activity, meant that the nigilistki had to enter fully into new and unfamiliar settings. Though some wealthier, older women – feminists and widows, mainly, who had inherited land and felt compelled to share their small bit of freedom – offered the young nigilistki shelter or some other form of help, the younger women felt that accepting these offers would still trap them in a bourgeois hierarchy, and many opted to enter into paper marriages with men sympathetic to their cause.57 Additionally, there

55 Engel, Barbara Alpern. “The Emergence of Women Revolutionaries in Russia.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 2.1 (1977): 93.

56 Engel, Mothers and Daughters, 62. 57 Engel, “Emergence,” 93.

36 was a small women's movement that attempted to help secure housing for these arcane daughters, but many of the young nigilistki were uncomfortable with feminism, feeling that women's emancipation was too narrow a focus; every citizen of Russia, they reasoned, was being equally exploited, so universal emancipation was a much more worth and relevant goal.58 Though women in Moscow and St. Petersburg began to develop work and housing collectives, in which women worked together to provide a service and lived communally on their earnings, many of these early experiments with collectivity were foiled by inexperience and frustration.59

In the late 1860's, meeting groups for women began forming around St.

Petersburg, where women convened to discuss revolutionary ideas and action. The young women discussed whether or not it would be wise to include men in their meetings, a debate which was somewhat revolutionary in itself, and though at first, the participants rejected inclusion of men, thinking that men would naturally dominate the meetings, they became convinced that solidarity between the sexes was necessary for truly radical action. Problematically, however, populist ideals were leading young men to the countryside, where they felt they could foment revolution, and this removal from the city was often anachronistic to the nigilistki; many of them had, after all, had to make the difficult decision to leave their families in favor of education, and now they were faced with the difficult decision to leave their studies in order to pursue their even more radical goals.60 Opportunities for higher education had been growing for women since 1858,

58 McDermid, Jane and Anna Hillyar. Women and Work in Russia 1880-1930: A Study in Continuity Through Change. London: Longman, 1998. 101.

59 Engel, Mothers and Daughters, 78. 60 Engel, “Emergence,” 97-98.

37 when secondary schools for girls began to open, and in 1872, midwives courses opened in St. Petersburg; when in 1876 another year was added, it became the first general medical course for women in the country.61 This new program, known as the Bestuzhev

Courses, brought huge numbers of women to Petersburg, but one of them is of particular interest: Sofia Perovskaia (1853-1881), a middle-class young woman who avoided romantic relations in favor of devoting her whole focus to revolutionary activism and supported cooperation between the sexes; separatism, she felt, was self-defeating.62

Perovskaia, in 1881, would be one of the primary orchestrators of the assassination of

Aleksandr II.

Though opportunities in St. Petersburg were growing, over a hundred young women chose to study in Zurich, where university study was not restricted by gender and women received formal degrees; the social and political awareness of St. Petersburg women's groups was matched and perhaps exceeded by those in Zurich, and more than sixty percent of the women who studied in Zurich would go on to become enemies of the state.63 The young women who made it to Zurich were particularly dedicated to women's emancipation and radical ideals in general, studying socialist and anarchist writings and theorists; favorites were Petr Lavrov, whose journal Vpered! (Forward!) was being printed in Zurich at the time, and Mikhail Bakunin, who, in the same year that the students arrived in Zurich, published his Gosudarstvennost' i anarkhiia (Statism and

61 Engel, Barbara Alpern. Breaking the Ties That Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. 31.

62 Engel, Mothers and Daughters, 119.

63 ibid., 127-28.

38 Anarchy), in which he details his anti-state ideologies and discusses the ways in which the communal character of Russian village life both lends itself to and threatens revolution. In a particularly salient passage in which he is discussing a Russian tendency to paternalism and the subordination of the individual to the group, Bakunin writes: “Оно

исказило всю русскую жизнь, наложив на нее тот характер тупоумной

неподвижности, той непроходимой грязи родной, той коренной лжи, алчного

лицемерия и, наконец, того холопского рабства, которые делают ее нестерпимой.”64

In this statement, Bakunin both acknowledges the patriarchal nature of the family and

Russian social and private life in general, and points to the ways in which this hierarchical structure negatively affects men as well; this view is in line with the Zurich students' understanding of gendered oppression and their simultaneous desires for universal emancipation. A participant in the Fritsche group, a circle that was known for its militant revolutionary stance, Vera Figner (1852-1942), describes the majority of discussion clubs as lofty, enthusiastic, and often stormy, often to the point of being counterproductive, with the Fritsche group being dedicated, methodical, and studious, tirelessly working to educate themselves and develop plans for real action.65 Their dedication, in fact, attracted the attention of the tsarist authorities, and the women of the

Fritsche group were issued a decree from their government in the summer of 1873, in which they were informed that they would have to remove themselves from Zurich by

64 Bakunin, M.A. Filosofiia. Sotsiologiia. Politika. Moskva: “Pravda”, 1989. 516. [This evil deforms all Russian life, and indeed paralyzes it, with its crass family sluggishness, the chronic lying, the avid hypocrisy, and finally, the servility which renders life insupportable. - Trans. Dolgoff, Sam. Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the Activist-Founder of World Anarchism. Ed. Sam Dolgoff. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. 346.]

65 Figner, Vera. Zapechatlennyi trud. 2 vols. Moskva: “Zadruga”, 1922. 68-69.

39 January of the following year due to “subversive activities,” “practicing ‘communist theories of free love,’” and studying obstetrics for the purpose of performing abortions.66

The charges of free love were, in the women’s minds, unthinkable, but the political charges were true. Figner herself would go on to be a close conspirator of Perovskaia's, and together they would lead Narodnaia Volia (The People's Will), the most violent and active of the revolutionary groups of the era.

Khachig Tölölyan, a prominent voice in the development of the field of diaspora studies, offers a poignant description of the interaction between the nation and her distant citizens: “nations, real yet imagined communities, are fabulated, brought into being, made and unmade, in culture and politics, both on land people call their own and in exile.”67 These students in Zurich, frustrated with autocracy and imperialism, imagined their nation from abroad, determined its course, and acted. Their distance from their homeland allowed them to formulate these ideas with perhaps more clarity than those who developed their ideas from home, because they were able to inhabit more fully what cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai describes as an “ideoscape”;68 removed from the real nation that they dreamed of transforming, they built their ideas from the ground up.

The environment to which the women returned was slightly different than the one they had left, and certainly different from what they imagined. Throughout the 1870s, women had been incredibly active in the populist movement, struggling to both learn

66 Stites, 136.

67 Tölölyan, Khachig. “The Nation-State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface.” Diasporas: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1.1 (1991): 3.

68 Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Eds. Braziel, Jana Evans and Anita Mannur. London: Blackwell, 2003. 34.

40 from and teach the peasants, with varying degrees of success. Populism was a good fit for the radical women, as populists tended to be scrupulous and egalitarian and intent on treating everyone - peasants, women, one another - as equals. It was, however, a movement abhorrent to the tsarist authorities, and arrests began to occur in the middle of the decade. Between 1873 and 1878, arrests, imprisonments, and executions were ordered on a massive scale, with hundreds of arrests and many executions.69 Though sympathy for those arrested was high, by the end of this time, the populist movement had been all but squelched, and in the following year, the radical revolutionaries urgently needed a new direction.

Female medical students were a group ripe for revolution; they suffered from bad living conditions, poor treatment in their courses and at the hand of a strict and suspicious government, and they recognized themselves in the female defendants, understanding well the sacrifices that they had made.70 The revolutionaries needed a way to galvanize this dormant unrest, and they found a hero in the person of Vera Zasulich, who in 1878 shot the governor-general of St. Petersburg and whose trial drew the attention of thousands. Their numbers slowly rising, the People's Will became the central radical coalition, with a large but generally undocumented minority of women taking part, and their acceptance of terrorist acts began to grow.71 The People's Will saw themselves as populist-socialist, and they believed that the tsarist autocracy exploited their subjects, with the growth of capitalism after the abolition of serfdom standing as evidence of the

69 Broido, Vera. Apostles into Terrorists: Women and the Revolutionary Movement in the Russia of Alexander II. London: Maurice Temple Smith Ltd: 1977. 155.

70 Engel, Mothers and Daughters, 165.

71 ibid., 107.

41 innate selfishness of the tsar and his government; Figner writes that this move towards capitalism demonstrated the extent to which the government took advantage of the people, rather than the other way around, and that the bourgeoisie was a class intentionally created because they could more effectively line the pockets of the tsar.72

When Figner joined People's Will in the summer of 1879, she was ready to devote herself to the revolutionary cause, writing that “с 24 лет моя жизнь связана

исключительно с судьбами русской революционной партии”,73 but she was as yet made uncomfortable by the idea of terrorism; Perovskaia also joined in 1879, and she too was reluctant to commit acts of violence.74 But two years after joining the People's Will, on March 1, 1881, Perovskaia, Figner, and a handful of others organized the successful assassination attempt on Aleksandr II, an act which served as their crowning jewel and their ultimate downfall. They believed initially that they had sounded the final death knell of the autocracy when they succeeded in their plan against Aleksandr II,75 and though

Aleksandr III immediately took his place and several years of even heavier repression began, the foundations of imperialism were shaken. Despite heightened censorship, the literature of the following decades shows that life under imperialism had been exposed as fragile, and that new experiments and visions of liberation continued to emerge.

Figner, Perovskaia, and several others were of course arrested and imprisoned, and concerted revolutionary activity was all but driven out of existence. Among tsarist

72 Figner, 139-42.

73 ibid., 83. [From the time that I was twenty-four years old, my life was indelibly connected to the fate of the Russian revolutionary movement. - my trans.]

74 Engel, Mothers and Daughters, 176-78.

75 Figner, 210.

42 reactions to the assassination, of special irony was the treatment of the women's medical programs, which were scaled back immediately upon the tsar's assassination and cut entirely in 1887; though some female medical students had taken part in revolutionary activity, the vast majority of them had chosen to preserve their chance for an education, not to mention the chance for further generations of women to study, but their silence was for naught.76

There are not reliable records of how many women exactly participated in revolutionary movements throughout the last four decades of the nineteenth century, but for all the Vera Figners, Sofia Perovskaias, and Vera Zasuliches, there are undoubtedly exponentially more women whose names and revolutionary activities have not been recorded.

After 1881: Steps Forward after Stepping Back

In this vacuum of radical activity, literary works offer a glimpse of the continuing development of the woman question and questions of autonomy and sexuality as the twentieth century grew nearer. Though the revolutionary activity of the previous two decades had not always had the woman question at its core, focusing rather on populist issues, the prominence of women in these movements and the attention that they paid to equality between the sexes in all matters private and public made its way into the mainstream, and when in the 1880s several women’s journals began to appear, such as

Zhenskii vestnik, Zhenskoe delo, and Drug zhenshchin, education and employment, suffrage, and greater autonomy in the home and in society became matters of frequent

76 Engel, Mothers and Daughters, 171-72.

43 debate, in these journals and elsewhere.77

Explicit discussions of romantic love and sexuality began to occur in fiction and in life. Leo Tolstoy’s “Kreitserova sonata” (“The Kreutzer Sonata”) appeared as a manuscript in 1889 and was published in 1891, and its frank discussion of romantic obsession, infidelity, and sexuality spurred on public debate about sexual mores, desire, double standards, and marriage. Enlightenment ideals of love as a cause for marriage had entered Russia in the late eighteenth century, but a concerted examination of the tension between romantic love and patriarchal structures and the power dynamics inherent in class and gender was only just beginning.78 This created a steady rise in divorce appeals; between 1884 and 1914, 30 to 40 thousand women, generally from a hazily-defined

“middle” class, petitioned for separation, but unfortunately the treatment of these appeals was highly unregulated and unscientific and the women were in large part denied.79 Many of these women appealed for divorce from within the confines of arranged, or involuntary, marriages, and as Engel so eloquently writes, for these women,

romantic ideals offered a way to speak of themselves that not only underscored their victimization and passivity at the hands of powerful others but also, and at the same time, invoked the fundamental rights that involuntary marriages violated - the freedom to act on their feelings, the right to dispose of themselves as they chose.80

Domestic violence outranked involuntary marriage as the reason given for petition for divorce, and though domestic violence was also indicative to reformists of a culture of

77 Kelly, 123.

78 Engel, Breaking the Ties, 54-56.

79 ibid., 6-7, 40.

80 ibid., 79.

44 abuse of power at the hands of authorities, it was quite difficult for women to be granted divorce rights on this basis; maintaining stability was more important to officials, by and large, than protecting individual women from physical harm.81 It is no wonder that the escape plot remained a mainstay in women's writing through the end of the nineteenth century, and even those stories that do not engage with reform per se illustrate what Kelly describes as “the importance of a sophisticated and ramified tradition of political feminism as a background, if not necessarily an inspiration, to a positive sense of women’s writing as gender-explicit, but not necessarily limited by gender.”82 The new forms of escape seen in the writings of the 1890s, for example, leave little doubt that the radical movements of the 1870s lent their ideologies to literature.

Though more graphic depictions of anti-tsarist action and violence would emerge in autobiographies of revolutionaries after 1917, literature of the late nineteenth-century certainly offered barely fictionalized visions of radical movement. Sof'ia Kovalevskaia

(1850-1891), also a prominent mathematician, published her novel Nigilistka in 1891; as the title might indicate, the trajectory of a young female nihilist is at the center of the story. Vera, we learn, hails from an aristocratic family; eight years old when the serfs were emancipated, her memories of the decree and the response of her household are marked by chaos, confusion, and embarrassment. Her parents, resentful of the change and unable to live thriftily, and her sisters, embittered by the belief that their destinies had been snatched from them, offered no guidance to Vera, and she instead found her own direction in books about Christian martyrs, sacrifice, and holy missions, and she dreamt

81 ibid., 129-30.

82 Kelly, 180.

45 of some future sacrifice of her own. And, when Stepan Mikhalovich Vasil’tsev, an educated man whose reputation as a liberal forced him to leave St. Petersburg, arrives at a neighboring estate, Vera finds a new context for her beloved martyrs. One day, out for a stroll, Vasil’tsev finds himself lost, and when Vera comes to his aid, he cannot help but comment on the book in her hands: “Мученики есть и теперь … Разве вы никогда не

слыхали, что и у нас в России сажают людей в тюрьмы, ссылают в Сибирь, подчас

даже вешают? Как же вы спрашиваете, есть ли мученики?”83 Vera’s new course is set in motion.

Vera begins to fall in love with Vasil’tsev, but in a turn that illuminates how far sensibilities have come since the literature of the 1830s, when our protagonists were married to me twice their age, Vasil'tsev reminds Vera that the difference in their ages is far too great, and that his love and respect for her must be only as a friend. Unfortunately, however, after three years of this friendship and education, Vasil’tsev, for reasons of suspected political activity, is sent to live somewhere else. Despite their lack of romantic involvement, Vera mourns his departure as she would a lover, and after a long period of silence punctuated by only a handful of letters, Vera learns of Vasil'tsev's death. When she receives a final letter from him, along with news that he has left her part of his fortune, it becomes clear to Vera that she must take up his political struggles where he has left off.

Remaining in the country for another three years until her father's death and her mother's entrance into a monastery, Vera sets off to St. Petersburg.

Kovalevskaia's description of Vera’s arrival in Petersburg is a fictional telling of 83 Kovalevskaia, Sof’ia. Vospominaniia detstva. Nigilistka. Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennoi Literatury, 1960. 165. [There are still martyrs ... Haven’t you heard that in Russia we put people in prison, exile them to Siberia, and sometimes even hang them? Can you still be asking if there are still martyrs? - my trans.]

46 what the innocent and idealistic young nigilistki must have encountered when they widened their worlds by striking out on their own:

Ее незнание действительных условий жизни было так велико, что в ее воображении нигилисты являлись чем-то вроде правильно организованного тайного общества, работающего по определенному плану и стремящегося к достижению ясно обозначенных целей.84 Though our narrator suggests that Vera pursue and education, Vera is uninterested in this regimented learning; it is only when there is news of increased revolutionary activity and a rash of arrests that result in a large trial of what becomes known as the

Group of Seventy-Five that Vera finally comes to life. Attending the trial every day, rapt,

Vera finds the martyrs that she has always been seeking, and when one young man, a Jew by the name of Pavlenkov, is handed down a particularly harsh sentence and exile to

Siberia, Vera finds her own path to sacrifice. Disappearing for several weeks, she finally appears again at our protagonist's, announcing that she has just married Pavlenkov, in hopes that as his wife, she can appeal his sentence or lessen its severity by accompanying him; perhaps if she plays on the pity of the officials, she can save him.

She describes their ceremony, during which she was visited by a vision of

Vasil'tsev, and as Vera gets on the train to meet Pavlenkov in Siberia, our narrator crying at Vera’s departure, it is clear that Vera is satisfied with the decision that she has made:

“— Ты обо мне так плачешь? ... Ах, если бы ты знала, как мне, напротив того,

жалко вас всех, вас, которые остаетесь!”85 A present-day martyr, she has found her cause, and her exuberance contains all the headiness of the era.

84 ibid., 195. [Her ignorance of the real conditions of life was so immense that in her imagination, nihilists were a sort of properly organized secret society, operating with a definite plan and putting their efforts towards achieving clearly defined goals. - my trans.]

85 ibid., 222. [You’re crying over me? … Oh, if only you knew how I, on the contrary, feel sorry for all of you who have to stay behind! - my trans.]

47 This story, a story within a story, is itself wrapped in a larger narrative, one in which Kovalevskaia herself was an active young woman with great dreams. Her 1890 memoirs, Vospominaniia detstva (Memories of Childhood), are quite intimate – she writes of her childhood fears and insecurities, her belief that her parents, hoping for a boy, did not love her as they loved her siblings – but it is in her descriptions of her sister

Anyuta that we may find the groundwork for Nigilistka. Anyuta, a very smart young woman who found solace in books and received praise from Fedor Dostoevsky himself for a story she submitted to the journal Эпоха (The Epoch), was the source of

Kovalevskaia's early education on the idea and practice of nihilism. Here in non-fictional form, one may see her own innocent, idealistic visions of mythical communes and revolutionary heroism, as she describes “какая-то мифическая коммуна, которая, по

слухам, завелась где-то в Петербурге”,86 in which a mythical community of people live and work side-by-side across lines of class and gender, scrubbing the floors together and working for revolution.

It is clear, then, that even for those young women who were far removed from agitation and activism were reached by news and tales of the radical young generation.

Women and men, living and working together across class-lines, existing undetected – these images are idealistic, but they do contain truths, and Kovalevskaia's memoirs and fiction indicate that these revolutionary principles found purchase in regular society.

Finally, “Avdot'iny dochki” (“Avdotia's Daughters”) by Ol'ga Shapir (1850-1916), published in 1898, reinforces the idea that radical approaches to autonomy, romance, and

86 ibid., 82. [some kind of mythical commune which, according to rumors, had popped up somewhere in St. Petersburg. - my trans.]

48 self-sufficiency reached into high-society households and the workers in their lower depths, and the new woman of the type already seen in Khvoshchinskaia's “Boarding-

School Girl” here reemerges. A member of the Russian Women’s Mutual Philanthropic

Society and a popular writer during her lifetime, Shapir is in many ways an exemplar of women’s writing in this era. Particularly in “Avdotia’s Daughters”, one may see the traits of the “aspirant heroine” and the “upstart narrative”, as Kelly calls them,87 both of which herald the rise of a new female type primed for a new century, but there are deeper issues explored as well; the intersecting issues of class and gender are comically but sharply appreciated, and the similarities between the circumstances of women of the working classes and of the bourgeoisie are both underlined and undermined. Marriage, for example, is shown as little more than a necessity for both.

Avdotia and her daughters, Arina and Sasha, are workers in the household of an absent general, his wife, and their grown children: Viktor Nikolaevich, who constantly paws at Arina and whose advances only worsen, and Ekaterina Nikolaevna, with whom

Arina used to be close, but who has grown distant as the chasm between their separate stations has become more defined. Sasha, due to scholarships and benefactors, is often away at a midwifery course, and Arina, a dressmaker, feels the confines of her existence tighten as the years move on. Katia's coldness she can tolerate, but Viktor Nikolaevich's increasingly aggressive treatment becomes too much to bear; when Arina concocts a lie in a desperate moment and tells him that she is soon to be married, his response makes the dynamic between them quite clear: “Сделай милость, выходи замуж, да только

поскорее! Будешь, стало быть, свободная д-д-дама?! Он засмеялся и вдруг схватил

87 Kelly, 189-91.

49 ее в охапку -- начал так обнимать, целовать так…”88 We are shown what a woman in her position is forced to put up with, and that her freedom is little more than a joke to him.

Sasha, despite her opportunities, must also work hard at school, and has no illusions about the difficulties that she and her sister must face or the limits on the potential for autonomy, but when Arina tells Sasha of her hardships, and of her dreams of renting a flat, setting up a workshop with one or two others, and escaping her life of service, Sasha devises a plan; she convinces a suitor, Afanasii Ivanovich, to marry Arina, in this way giving Arina a way out of the general's house, a clear reflection of the revolutionary approach to family. She is at first shocked by the plan, but Arina eventually begins to see its merits, and though we ultimately learn that she and Viktor Nikolaevich both feel a frustrated and long-dormant love for one another, only one thing rises to the surface when she thinks of her future: “Прямо людям в глаза глядеть – гордиться

своей жизнью – вот чего она хотела.”89 She will marry Afanasii Ivanovich; she will set the terms of her own happily ever after.

It is notable that Shapir parallels Arina's journey with Katia's, whose position is limited by different factors but limited nonetheless. In her description of Katia's listless days, we may see how far women’s writing and consciousness have come from the society tales of the 1830s: “Катя читает. Ничего больше нельзя сказать об ее жизни …

88 Shapir, Ol’ga. “Avdot’iny dochki.” Tol’ko chas: Proza russkikh pisatel’nits kontsa XIX - nachala XX veka. Moskva: Sovremennik, 1988. 43-44. [Do a favor, get married, and as soon as possible! You will be a free la-a-dy?! He laughted and suddenly took her in his arms, began hugging and kissing her... - my trans.]

89 ibid., 95. [To look people straight in the eye, to be proud of her life – that was what she wanted. - my trans.]

50 Она не замечает, что в ее уме не родилось еще ни одной самостоятельной мысли.”90

Katia, approximately thirty years old and unmarried, is prey to different structural circumstances than Arina and Sasha, but they are similarly non-negotiable, and where books and imaginary worlds could be a solace for Gan's Ol'ga, they can no longer suffice as a substitute for living. Where Katia once would have been at the center of a society tale, she – and her society – are receding into shadows.

Sasha's romantic life, though not central to the story, exemplifies one type of new relation and closes the story, a signal that the turning century is joined by transformations in social relations. A fellow student, Andrei Mikhailovich, with whom she has intense and challenging discussions, declares to Sasha that he wants to marry her, and in the feelings that she weighs as she considers her answer, there is no financial necessity, no blinding passion and no wholesale rejection of romance. Instead, there is simply joy, clarity and calm: “Ее любовь не тепличный роскошный цветок -- это простой акт жизни, как и

все ее чувства … Если б он не полюбил -- они оставались бы друзьями, и Саша не

была бы несчастна.”91 Sasha, like Arina, can live happily ever after in a fashion of her own design. The new woman is coming into view in both literature and life, and with her, new examinations of romantic love, sexuality, and women's autonomy in the home and at work. There are yet limits, however. As Kelly points out, though Shapir is able to address the simultaneously “variable and inflexible” problems encountered by women of different classes, and Arina and Sasha are shown engaging in the own liberatory connections,

90 ibid., 60. [Katia read. Nothing more can be said about her life … It didn’t occur to her than her mind had not borne even a single independent thought. - my trans.]

91 ibid., 115. [Her love is not a hothouse flower – it is the simple act of living, of feeling … If he did not like her, they could remain friends, and Sasha would not be unhappy. - my trans.]

51 Avdotia herself is left alone in the general's kitchen.92 It is only the daughters' generation for whom change is possible.

The development of the woman question in women's writing in the second half of the nineteenth century built on foundations laid by earlier female writers, with their unhappy marriages, attempts at escape, and dreams of something better, and the works of

Pavlova, Khvoshchinskaia, Kovalevskaia, and Shapir articulated the woman question yet more clearly as the age of realism began to ask for glimpses into the uglier corners of society. Mary Zirin makes a clear case for reexamining the women’s fiction of this era, and for questioning its place in our view of both the literature and the social history of its age:

In our own contentious times, we seem to have forgotten that the literature considered important to read and inscribe in history – the “canon” – has never been a fixed and immutable body, but rather a rich and shifting dialog between past and present. To review the prose of Russian Realism from a feminist perspective that reintegrates the lost voices of women is not to challenge the established ‘great men’ but to recover other interesting authors who speak to women’s experience in a way their male peers could not, to see the works and lives of authors of both sexes against a broader understanding of the tensions and pulls of Russian society, and to gain both a more nuanced picture of the culture of their time and a clearer perspective on our own.93

Works by women in this era offer a view of the development of Russian consciousness that is often overlooked because it is the male consciousness, not the female, which is generally understood as universal, and as such, these works have found little to no footing in either popular or academic landscapes of the twenty-first century. It is not, however,

92 Kelly, 192.

93 Zirin, Mary F. “Women’s Prose Fiction in the Age of Realism.” Women Writers in Russian Literature. Eds. Toby W. Clyman and Diana Greene. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. 91.

52 entrance to the canon that these works are calling for – it is, simply, to follow their lead, and to engage in deeper readings and continuously more critical examinations of accepted norms.

53 CHAPTER TWO

The New Woman, Boulevard Symbolism, and Many Turns of the Century: The Silver Age and Revolution

When Aleksandra Kollontai (1872-1952) wrote the essay “Novaia zhenshchina” (“New

Woman”) in 1913,1 it is likely that she did not know that the type of new woman that she envisioned, a woman who had first appeared in the radical movements of the 1860s and

70s and who was gaining steam and definition in the new century, would not survive past the first decades of Bolshevik rule. As Kollontai saw it, this new woman - independent, strong-willed, economical, passionate, intelligent, and defined more by herself than by her gender - was increasingly visible in the 1910s, and yet she was only barely beginning to appear in literature; these multitudes of “обманутых, покинутых, страдающих,

слабых созданий, мстительных жен, очаровательных женщин, безвольных

'непонятых натур', чистых, бесцветных, милых девушек” continued to populate fiction even as their numbers dwindled in real life.2 At the turn of the century, these long-suffering fictional heroines began to undergo a transformation, and while still often

1 The essay was first published in Sovremennyi Mir 9 (1913): 151-185, and was subsequently included as a chapter in Novaia moral’ i rabochii klass. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Vserossiiskogo Tsentral’nogo Ispolnitel’nogo Sovetov, 1918.

2 Kollontai, Novaia moral' i rabochii klass, 4. [betrayed, abandoned, suffering creatures, revengeful wives, bewitching predators, will-less ‘misunderstood natures,’ pure, colorless, charming girls. - Trans. Attanasio, Salvator. The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman. New York: Herder and Herder, 1971, 52.]

54 plagued by variations of helplessness and heartache, they inhabited these states with a deepening critical awareness and a resistance that their nineteenth-century counterparts had not quite achieved, one that contained new visions of political and social equality and a self-aware subjectivity. In the new voices that began to emerge, Kollontai saw women of every nationality and every social and economic class, and in the new woman's determined examination and undoing of all those restrictions and judgments put in place by family, society, and the State, there existed the potential to radically reform gender relations in revolutionary Russia.3 The new woman would participate in private and public life on her own terms and in her own words, and her activities would redefine both herself and the nation. Kollontai is careful to note that the new woman, however, would not be devoid of feeling, but rather would allow her feelings to guide her focus, and though the works of this era were born from wildly different sensibilities both stylistically and philosophically, her description of this dynamic will serve as a useful framework in examining several emblematic works of women's prose during these rapidly shifting and chaotic years:

...по мере того, как женщина все чаще и чаще вовлекается в круговорот социальной жизни, как и она является действующей пружинкой в механизме народного хозяйства, горизонт ее раздвигается, стенки ее дома, заменявшего для нее мир падают, и она сама бессознательно впитывает, усваивает ранее совершенно чуждые и непонятные ей интересы. Любовь перестает составлять содержание ее жизни, любви начинает отводиться то подчиненное место, какое она играет у большинства мужчин...современная женщина может переживать острые драмы, может радоваться или страдать не меньше женщин прошлого. Но влюбление, страсть, любовь, - это лишь полосы жизни.4

3 ibid., 8.

4 ibid., 24. [...to the same degree as the woman is being increasingly drawn into the vortex of

55 Romantic passion, then, is still allowed by Kollontai to be the proverbial wrench in the works, provided that the “works” in question remain firmly grounded in the independent will and desires of the new woman and their applications to self and to society, to which she may return when momentary passions run their course. The balance between work and love (both of others and of the self) proves to be a central theme in women’s fiction of this period, which reflects trends in the new assessments of public life, private life, and the interactions between the two that were a regular topic of discussion in the first decades of the century, in both literature and politics. In the formulations of love, work, and self-identity that were set forth by female fiction writers of the period, and in the fate of the new woman, we may see intimately the aspirations and applications of feminist ideas of the revolutionary era and their eventual realizations or defeats after the

Bolshevik rise to power; resultingly, we may also develop new views on changing states and the changing State.

As the balance of power and the structure of the nation grew more complicated, so too did the woman question, after all. It was a time of unparalleled upheaval. The Russo-

Japanese war of 1904 and 1905, the Revolution of 1905, World War I, the Revolutions of

1917, and the civil war, which lasted from 1917 until 1922, all occurred against a backdrop of increasing public involvement in State affairs, rapid fluctuations in consumption and the market, the creation and growth of new social movements and social life, as she proves herself as an active tiny wheel in the mechanism of the economy, so her own horizon, the walls of her own home, which separated her from the world, collapse, and unconsciously she internalizes its interests which, formerly, were alien and incomprehensible, and she makes them her own. Love ceases to form the only substance of her life; furthermore, it is allotted the subordinate role it plays with most men... the new woman can experience the crassest dramas, she can enjoy and suffer like the woman of the past. But the state of being in love, passion, love are but transient periods in her life. - Trans. Attanasio, 86.]

56 political parties, and continual debate over every aspect of politics, society, and private life. These processes, in turn, occurred amidst the trauma of years of military campaigns, the difficulties of everyday life during wartime, and millions of lives lost.

In addition to the extreme irruption of cataclysmic events, there were a variety of different forces at play during this era that allowed for a swift creation of a civil society that was conversant with issues that had previously been considered the domain of the intelligentsia. Constitutional reforms enacted after 1905 created a parliament, allowing political parties to form, and also eased censorship laws, which meant that all of a sudden, public opinion became a matter of great concern at all levels, and this public concern was both directed and expressed by the rapid growth of the press.5 Within the first few years of these new reforms, the reach of the multitudes of new papers and journals grew exponentially, with over one-third of the rural and over one-half of the urban population having access to a variety of periodicals, and as the ruling classes and growing political factions used the press as a mouthpiece and a method to both spread information and gain support, the public was exposed to viewpoints that ran the gamut from conservative to radical.6 For all of these reasons, the press became a dynamic and powerful locus of public discourse, both for the intelligentsia and for the new markets and audiences whose very existence owed much to the growing availability of printed material.

The increased public activity meant an increase in attention to the woman

5 Ferenczi, Caspar. “Freedom of the Press under the Old Regime, 1905-1914.” Civil Rights in Imperial Russia. Eds. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. 191.

6 ibid., 192-193.

57 question and activities around feminist concerns, particularly in the immediate wake of the 1905 revolution, when real legislative appeared possible. There were two distinct strains of feminist work occurring simultaneously: the socially-minded, generally non- political feminist movement that had its roots in the work of the 1860s and 70s, and the newer socialist feminist movement, which had begun to develop only in the 1890s.

Though neither group may have labeled their work as “feminist,” historian Richard Stites reminds us that “we must not permit ourselves to violate the useful conventions of comparative history by stressing only the unique”;7 the fact remains that both groups explicitly worked toward better conditions for women in legal, political, and social matters, and it is their work, rather than their designation, that deserves attention.

Women of these movements were visible in the growing society; their work was often outward-facing, and they convened publicly for a variety of reasons. An early group founded by seasoned feminist Anna Filosofova (1837-1912), the Russian Women's

Mutual Philanthropic Society, was active in creating and sustaining charity organizations, and they maintained a system of nurseries, dormitories, and kitchens for women in need, and they campaigned for temperance, for women’s rights in various professional arenas and scholarship funds for women’s advancements, and for health and dress reform, though Russian women had already moved ahead of the western European feminists when it came to bucking aesthetic norms during the time of the nigilistki in the 1860s and

70s.8 The All-Russian Union for Women’s Equality, a more radical and politically-

7 Stites, Richard. The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. 191.

8 ibid., 195-97.

58 focused group that grew to more than 25 chapters, called for suffrage and equality before the law, petitioning the city Duma of Moscow and the local zemstvo for voting rights in early 1905. Their program demanded:

immediate convocation of a constituent assembly elected by the so-called seven-tailed suffrage (equal, direct, secret, and universal, without distinction of nationality, religion, or sex); national autonomy; equality of the sexes before the law; equal rights of peasant women in any land reforms; laws for the welfare, insurance, and protection of women workers; equal opportunity for women; co-education at every level; reform of laws relating to prostitution; [and] abolition of the death penalty.9

The Union, in short, called for an overhaul of social functioning that extended far beyond the woman question, but they foregrounded their feminist concerns. Add to these groups the Women's Progressive Party, whose program was more radical than the Society's and not radical enough for the Union, and the socialist feminists, who were not formed into a discrete body, and it becomes clear that there was no single version of feminism or approach to the woman question that would satisfy everyone, least of all the Duma; any and all demands were repeatedly rejected. Continual disappointments led to further discord between the different groups, and particularly between those bourgeois feminists who focused on social concerns and the politically- and economically-minded feminists whose interests were as tied to class as they were to gender. The class gulf is largely seen as an unbridgeable gap in this era, but Stites has shown that privileging gender over class in calls for equality was not an outright rejection of attention to class; as he clearly explains, “the ‘bourgeois feminist’ tendencies owed much more to the feminist than to the bourgeois impulse. The Russian suffragists may have been indifferent to universal

9 ibid., 199-200.

59 suffrage; but few of them opposed it on principle, as did many of their American and

British counterparts.”10 Vera Figner, for instance, had no interest in working with the

British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst when she traveled to England in 1909, due to the rejection of socialist and class-conscious leadership in the group that Pankhurst had founded, the Women's Social and Political Union.11

Aspects of the woman question were being addressed outside of explicitly female- focused campaigns and groups; one crucial matter for public debate was that of abortion, which became central in 1905 and remained so for the next two decades. Between 1910 and 1914, there were various gatherings in major cities of physicians, gynecologists, obstetricians, and lawmakers to discuss the issue of abortion, but as Laura Engelstein writes, this debate actually came to represent the professions’ struggles for autonomy against the laws and whims of the imperial government, with the call to decriminalize abortion perhaps more closely tied to the rights of medical and legal professionals than it was to female autonomy.12 Abortion had risen in occurrence in 1905, and with more women seeking abortions, physicians believed that decriminalizing it would mean that less women would be forced to undergo illegal and sometimes dangerous procedures, and while some supported the individuals’ right to choose, only a very few framed it is a feminist call for self-determination; there were voices, as well, that openly opposed abortion and saw it as a criminal and amoral act that was on the rise because of a failing

10 ibid., 228.

11 Grant, Kevin. “British Suffragettes and the Russian Method of Hunger Strike.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53.1 (2011): 128.

12 Engelstein, Laura. The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de- Siecle Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. 334-41.

60 society plagued by corruption and sensationalism.13 Again, however, there was much more at stake than simply abortion rights; the relationship between the State and its subjects was at the heart of the debate.

We must remember, though, that most Russian women were not explicitly engaging with these questions, nor were they involving themselves in the activities of the different groups that were active at the time. Many women saw participation in politics as unladylike and distasteful, and many simply saw the efforts as futile.14 The quickly growing readership of women’s writing during these years, however, indicates that the debates that were raging in public were reaching readers in private, and as we shall see, between the turn of the century and the mid-1920s, the fiction that became widely available to mass audiences addressed the woman question in a variety of ways, some more overt than others. It is not enough to look at revolution on a nationwide scale and deduce from above what was happening on the ground; instead, we must look at what transpired on the ground, and cast our gaze outward and upward from there. From satire to symbolist writing to mass-marketed bodice-rippers, women's fiction in this era presents a parallel but extraordinarily illuminating view of the revolutionary aims of intellectuals, politicians, workers, and others whose energies came together to remake the nation.

Slavic scholar Gregory Carleton, in his book Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik

Russia, issues a call for a new approach to understanding the trajectory of the revolutionary era, writing that if we insist on seeing the Soviet past through the lens of

13ibid., 342-44

14 Stites, 231.

61 power gained and power lost, we need at least to see the textures of power, which requires looking beyond regime changes and toward the real experiences of the public; this stance, Carleton writes, arises “not out of inherent rejection of the discourse-power vector but from the natural hesitation that arises in the face of any theory that has become for all intents and purposes a canon of interpretation.”15 Moving away from this canon, we see the ways that the developing tradition of women’s writing interacted with both avant-garde formulations of the feminine principle and political constructions of the ideal female citizen, and the literary works of this period show us nuances and fluctuations of power in the making and unmaking of a whole host of revolutions.

Teffi, Decadent Satire, and the Woman Question Within the “Woman Question”

Satire is particularly well-suited to the task of addressing sensitive and controversial issues, and in the stories and plays of Teffi (née Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Lokhvitskaia,

1872-1952), satire provides a ground upon which the complicated questions of gender equality and social relations in fin-de-siècle Russia may be flayed and examined.

Between the loosening of censorship in 1905 and her eventual emigration to Paris in

1920, Teffi, also an accomplished poet, published numerous stories in journals and collections, and her popularity during these years is evidenced by the multiple reprints of her stories and by the fact that her plays were performed nearly as soon as they were written; clearly, she was a writer in step with public preferences, and so her works may give us a glimpse into public sensibilities.

15 Carleton, Gregory. Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 17.

62 Though Teffi's short stories were not solely centered around relations between the sexes or gendered stereotypes, her attentions turned often to these matters. From her initial collections, the two-volume Iumoristicheskie rasskazy (Humorous Stories), published in St. Petersburg in 1910 and 1911, to one of her final collections, Vse o liubvi

(All About Love), which was published by the émigré press in Paris in 1946, her focus remained tightly on comedically exposing those small misunderstandings, white lies, desires, confusions, heartaches, failures of communication, infidelities, and truths that quietly determine the course of lives. The short piece “K teorii flirta” (“On the Theory of

Flirting”) from her first collection, for example, offers a humorous list of tips for successfully making a romantic connection, with such pragmatic ʽdirectives as “ʽОна’

никогда не должна приходить на rendez-vous первая. Если же это и случится по

оплошности, то нужно поскорее уйти или куда-нибудь спрятаться”,16 while “Soroka”

(“The Magpie”), from the latter collection, presents a parable of sorts, with the long loneliness of a magpie causing her human witnesses to muse on the simple needs of a bird, in contrast to the futility of finding true fulfillment amidst the chaos and superficialities of modern life.

It is, however, in her 1907 one-act play “Zhenskii vopros” (“The Woman

Question”), where Teffi's pointed statements about the woman question are most eloquently examined. It stands as an excellent example of the ways in which the ambiguity of her message, hidden beneath a farcical facade, shows a deep engagement with the difficulties of framing the woman question in a thoughtful, rather than

16 Teffi. Iumoristicheskie rasskazy; Iz “Vseobshchei istorii, obrabotannoi “Satirikonom”. Moskva: “Khudozhestvennaia literatura”, 1990. 145. [ʽShe’ must never arrive first to the rendez-vous. If this happens accidentally, it is necessary either to leave or to hide somewhere. - my trans.]

63 reactionary way. The play, in which the middle of the three acts is a satirical reversal with women taking on the position of power in public and in the family, was produced immediately, showing at the Maly Theatre in St. Petersburg in 1907, later to be published in 1913 in her collection Vosem’ miniatiur (Eight miniatures), which suggests that the audience was readily attentive to the questions at hand.

In the first scene, Katia, a young woman regularly teased by her brothers for her feminist ideals, declares her devotion to women’s emancipation, framed by her own discontent with domestic life and the prospect of being a housewife with no livelihood of her own. In Katia’s frustrated words, deep ideological underpinnings of the woman question are subtly exposed: “Теперь я равноправия не хочу. Этого с меня мало! Нет!

Вот пусть они посидят в нашей шкуре, а мы, женщины, повертим ими, как они

нами вертят. Вот тогда посмотрим, что они запоют.”17 Katia, it seems, may be more focused on turning the tables than on opening the table up to everyone as equal participants. Additionally, the very meaning of equal rights is here thrown into new light

– equal rights, in Katia's understanding, may not necessarily mean equal standing in both public and private life. If Katia is a representative of early twentieth-century feminist ideas, we may surmise that reactionary resentment may guide the discussion of the woman question as much as critical engagement.

Teffi goes on to show that Katia’s own understanding of power relations is somewhat unexamined; when her brothers wonder aloud if everything would be just the

17 Teffi, 374. [I don’t want equal rights anymore. What good would they do me? No! I’d like to see the men in our shoes for a while, then we women would boss them around like they boss us. Then we’d see what kind of tune they’d sing. - Trans. Neatrour, Elizabeth. “The Woman Question.” An Anthology of Russian Women’s Writing, 1777-1992. Ed. Catriona Kelly. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. 177.]

64 same if roles were exactly reversed, she responds: “Да все наоборот. А вы все

выродились. От продолжительной власти совсем одурели ... Разве женщина могла

бы себя так вести?”18 Here it is in Teffi’s unheard voice, rather than Katia’s loud one, that the suggestion arises that it is the very position of power, not gender, that determines inequality. Katia is saying at once that women and men are fundamentally opposite, and also that men have become what they are because of the power they have been given; she has not stopped to see the contradictions in her statement, but by foregrounding this failure in logic, Teffi allows the audience to spot this subtle discrepancy themselves.

Katia at the end of the first scene falls asleep, and her dream becomes the setting for the second scene; the domestic scape is the same, but gender roles have been exactly reversed. Katia is now in the place of power, and her brother Vania has been watching a discussion at Parliament, a debate “о мужском вопросе” (“about the man question”).19

Women now are lascivious drunkards with authority over all affairs, both public and private. For this, Teffi employs rare words and neologisms, such as “профессорша,”

(“female professor”) and “денщиха” (“female orderly”), she trades the cropped locks of the young nigilistki for young men growing their hair out, and she equips the women with complaints about emancipation-minded men neglecting children and destabilizing women's working wages. The reversal is complete, but for some moments whose very lack of explication actually point to inequalities that might be biologically explained:

“Все вы так (плачет), а потом бросите с ребенком”20 a servant complains, and in the

18 ibid., 375. [Everything about us is exactly the opposite. You’re all lunatics. You’ve gone insane from all that power...Could a woman get away with it? - Trans. Neatrour, 178.]

19 ibid., 376.

20 ibid., 381. [first this lovey-dovey stuff, then you leave us holding the baby! - Trans. Neatrour,

65 quiet passing over of the aspects of pregnancy and childbirth that have historically served to sequester women in the domestic sphere, one unavoidable difference between the circumstances of women and men is highlighted. The culmination of the scene, a discussion between Katia and her fiance, Andrei Nikolaevich, is a neat reversal of their dynamic in the first scene; Andrei Nikolaevich declares that he cannot marry her unless he can support her, and that he cannot simply live like a slave, dependent and isolated.21

The position of power, not the gender of the powerful, is the key here, but it is disguised; it is easy to laugh at young men in frilly aprons and foul-mouthed, heavily decorated war heroines, but the laughter is partially dependent on Teffi's subtle critiques of both power and misunderstandings of power.

Temira Pachmuss writes that Teffi's stories “present the emptiness of man’s earthly existence and his unsuccessful attempt to escape it through beautiful dreams and illusions”,22 and Katia's attempt to escape her dissatisfying circumstances are both a failure and a great success, for in the final scene, Katia wakes up, realizing that everyone is a good-for-nothing, regardless of sex, and this provides her with relief. She witnessed a world in which it was no longer necessary to be the hapless heroine that Kollontai so acidly maligned, but she saw that that world was not to be created by simply imbuing women with those characteristics of the powerful that are historically associated with masculine behaviors. Though Teffi does not offer these conclusions explicitly, they are present, given to the audience wrapped up in lightness. Catriona Kelly sums up the action

184.]

21 ibid., 388.

22 Pachmuss, Temira. “Women Writers in Russian Decadence.” Journal of Contemporary History 17.1 (1982): 127.

66 tidily, writing that Teffi shows clearly that “women’s role as the arbiters of morality depends on their subjugation,” and also suggests that Teffi, playing with language to get at the deeper implications of discourse and its effects, was on the precipice between realism and modernism,23 an aspect of both her fiction and theatrical works that may be hidden by her satirical tone.

We must beware, however, of attributing too much gravity to the work of Teffi.

She was, after all, a satirist, and if her play interacts explicitly with the confusions and comedic conflicts brought about by naïve discussion of the woman question, she is certainly intentionally highlighting the confusions rather than the question itself, and

Katia and other young feminists of the time are as much a target of her satire as the uncritical context in which they find themselves. It is failures of communication, not just between individuals, but on a society-wide level that fascinates the satirist in Teffi, and all of the participants in these failures are equally at fault. This assessment, though perhaps unkind to the character of Katia, calls for each person to identify their own part in this damaged structure, and the work of other female writers of this era bring to life characters that are embroiled in the process of removing themselves from these common constructs and envisioning new forms of interaction and existence. In their work, we see the growing pains of both new woman and nation.

The Sophia Principle and Zinov'eva-Annibal, Denying and Defining the Divine

The Decadent and then symbolist movements that emerged around the turn of the

23 Kelly, Catriona. A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 1820-1992. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. 204-05.

67 century, conjoined but fraternal twins, together were marked by death, rebirth, and dreams of utopianism. John Bowlt refers to the avant-garde literary and artistic experiments of this era as having a “crepuscular mood,”24 and certainly the writers and artists of the time were trying to tease out a dawn even as they were reveling in and exploring the twilight. Decadence, with its focus on the decay of the old both physically and spiritually, gave way to the symbolist urge for creation, and the mystical underpinnings of symbolist aspirations to the divine were often related to gender. The writings and teachings of Vladimir Solov'ev (1853-1900) were incredibly influential to the symbolists, providing them with a mystical basis for their lived and artistic projects.

Solov'ev's particular vision of Sophia, the embodiment of wisdom and the Divine

Feminine, led many prominent male symbolist writers to idolize and seek out their own

Sophia, or at least her earthly counterpart. Sophia, a figure embodying wisdom in early

Christian writing and iconography, was not an invention of Solov'ev's, but her new uses in this era, known as the Silver Age, were largely due to Solov'ev's formulation. In his five-part essay “Smysl liubvi” (“The Meaning of Love”), published between 1892 and

1893, Solov'ev presents the idea that real love is realized on two levels: the divine, “в

смысле принадлежности к другой, высшей сфере бытия,” and the earthly, “которое

дает живой личный материал для этой реализации”.25 This relationship between the divine and the material planes was explored further by Solov'ev in his unfinished 1877 manuscript Filosofskie nachala tselnogo znaniia (Philosophical bases of integral

24 Bowlt, John E. Moscow and St. Petersburg 1900-1920: Art, Life & Culture of the Russian Silver Age. New York: Vendome Press, 2008. 94.

25 Solov'ev, Vladimir. Sobranie Sochinenii, Tom 7. Brussels: Zhizn' s bogom, 1966-1970. 46. [in the sense that it belongs to another, higher sphere of existence / which offers living, personal material for that realization. - my trans.]

68 knowledge), in which he pseudo-scientifically divides man's existence into three levels: the material, the formal, and the absolute, with the latter being the highest, and therefore closest to divinity.26 In his framework, actions on the material level may correspond to actions on the absolute level, and through conscious actions in the material world, the absolute may be realized.27 As Olga Matich explains, this effort to express the divine in the material sphere ironically results in the fetishization of artifice and the devaluation of nature,28 which pairs in an unfortunate way with the vision that the symbolists held of woman as the natural and powerful embodiment of Sophia and the Divine Feminine – the reality of woman is secondary to the vision of her. It is significant that this incarnation of

Sophia was developed by and found the vast majority of its adherents in men. As we shall see, the male fetishization of an imaginary and embodied Sophia created an uncomfortable role for women, and in both symbolist and popular writings, the tradition of women’s fiction in this era was one which attempted to negotiate and often reject the imposition of this image, of any idealized image that does not originate from the woman herself.

Matich characterizes this avant-garde theoretical approach to art and life as a

“decadent utopianism,” in which destruction is positioned as the key to creation and both destruction and creation could be cataclysmically brought about by a divine carnal union

26 Solov'ev, Vladimir. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Tom 2. Moskva: Nauka, 2000-2001. 196.

27 There is, of course, much more that may be said about the work of Solov'ev. For an excellent and concise discussion of particularly his work on the eternal feminine and the relationship between the earthly and divine spheres, see Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch. Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2009.

28 Matich, Olga. Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia's Fin de Siècle. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. 19.

69 between a man and woman that results in one perfect androgyne; this process necessarily entailed creating new formulations for sex, love, gender, and human connection overall, and the symbolists' belief that they could bring about a utopia by acting prefiguratively meant that their ideas were contained not just on the page, but in their lives, each writer trying to create and become their own Gesamtkunstwerk, or zhiznetvorchestvo.29

Problematically, however, they supported both celibacy/asceticism and coitus/liberation; this would store and also harness their sexual energy and power. There were, of course, serious problems with this approach; Matich writes concisely that this contradictory project “enlisted the body to perform its own repression, to police itself.”30 This reverence for asceticism, resistance against temptations of the flesh, and rejection of the biological and material was seen by the symbolists as noble and even natural, but one can only ascertain that they did not give much thought to the way that living women might figure into this formulation; women, after all, were no strangers to having their sexuality policed, and further and perhaps more crucially, the possibility of pregnancy made it difficult to impossible for women to reject the biological and material outright. And, as the symbolists envisioned an androgynous state of being as a release from societal strictures, one must wonder who may consciously enter this sphere, and by what mechanism. How were women, locked into their gender roles by the image of the divine and the desire of men to commune with them, not to mention their biological ability to reproduce, to make themselves androgynous?

In place of the real, living, biological being of woman stood instead the dueling

29 ibid., 3-6.

30 ibid., 8.

70 images of Sophia (purity) and Salomé (unbridled carnal desire and temptation). In what

Matich calls the “antiprocreative utopia” of the symbolist program, women became a metonym for both creation and destruction, which, Matich reminds us, should not be seen as some sort of historical rupture, but as a part of some historical continuity that is often overlooked.31 I agree with this approach, and I would add that there is also continuity here in elements that remained unseen in symbolist exploration: the prosaic, the quotidian, the domestic; in short, the material realm in which women found themselves in spite of the symbolist attempt to elevate women to the status of icon, symbol, soul. In the women’s writing of this era, we find a strong response to this symbolist treatment of the feminine, one which indicates that no highbrow utopian project could excise the social and political restrictions placed on women as mothers, lovers, and wives.

Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945) was on the balance between the two movements, and in Avril Pyman’s estimation, was both a transitional figure and solidly within the symbolist school;32 her excitement for the decline of old beliefs and mores was partnered with a diverse and passionate artistic project that had creation at its core. Gippius is known for many aspects of this project – her poetry, her partnership with writer and religious philosopher Dmitrii Merezhkovsky and their eventual chaste ménage à trois with writer Dmitrii Filosofov (son of Anna Filosofova), her work with the Religious-

Philosophical Society, and her very public personal preference for androgyny – but her literary work itself sits outside of the developing tradition of women’s writing, and as

31 ibid., 25.

32 Pyman, Avril. A History of Russian Symbolism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 38.

71 such, is inappropriate to examine in this study. Her importance here lies in the fact that she regularly wrote in the male voice in both a grammatical and narrative sense, and the space between the expression of symbolist principles in her life and the absence of the feminine voice in her literature, in illuminating the distance between these two forms of creation, shows the impossibility of true embodiment of Sophia, an impossibility to which Gippius was no doubt attuned.

Gippius met Merezhkovsky in 1888 and the two were married the following year, living together in a devoted but celibate marriage for fifty-two years, until

Merezhkovsky's death; their union was part of what Matich refers to as a “Solov'evian project of transfiguring the body by means of erotic fusion with God in divine love,” and together, the two began to promote the idea of the ménage à trois as a yet more elevated version of divine love.33 Gippius in her self-stylings found a way to mold herself into the images of both Sophia and Salomé; she styled herself as a dandy and smoked tobacco, which in those years was a sign of lesbianism or at least masculinity, and her androgynous dress and rejection of standard feminine aesthetics allowed her male admirers to see her as a sort of ethereal and sexless “fetish substitute,” rather than a real woman, allowing her to embody both purity and desire.34 Though there were rumors that

Gippius used her private quarters in their family home for sexual encounters and speculation on her true sexuality continues, the truth, in many ways, is less important than the intentions with which Gippius created such an asexual image. In 1906, after a courtship that lasted for several years, Filosofov, a prominent member of the Mir

33 Matich, 163-64.

34 ibid., 177-78.

72 iskusstva (World of Art) circle, joined Gippius and Merezhkovsky in a triangular union that lasted for 15 years. The union was nonsexual – Filosofov, uncomfortably homosexual, was most likely attracted to the opportunity to partake in a relationship which did not require grappling with his sexuality.35 Gippius eventually developed her own physical and metaphysical reasoning for avoidance of sex, namely that chastity harnessed vital life energy, and even mused on the possibility that this would ultimately transform the body itself, with the sex organs being made evolutionarily redundant and eventually disappearing altogether.36 After Filosofov’s departure from the union, Gippius began an epistolary relationship with a young student named Vladimir Zlobin; Zlobin relocated with Gippius and Merezhkovsky to Paris in 1920, ultimately remaining with them until Gippius’s death in 1944.37

Though Gippius’s life, loves, and self-consciously styled androgyny may appear to suggest that she found a way to both embody a sort of ethereal ideal and maintain her autonomy, the fact that her writings are almost exclusively grammatically gendered masculine and primarily position women as peripheral objects, rather than central subjects, indicates an awareness on her part of the danger of embodying a distinctly female ideal, rather than an androgynous one. Were she to write with a woman’s voice and consciously enter into the tradition of struggling to find a distinctly female subjectivity, she would run the risk of relegating herself to the subordinate position of token. She would be the created, rather than the creator, and by adopting a masculine

35 ibid., 195.

36 Pachmuss, Temira. Intellect and Ideas in Action: Selected Correspondence of Zinaida Hippius. Munich: Fink Verlag, 1972. 67.

37 Matich, 205.

73 voice, she hoped to avoid this fate. This illuminates the depth of the struggle; for women in the Decadent and symbolist movements, in order to avoid being seen and not heard, the balance between the eternal feminine and natural woman had to be struck carefully.

Lidiia Zinov'eva-Annibal (1866-1907), a prominent figure in the Decadence and symbolist movements and married to Viacheslav Ivanov, an even more prominent figure, took a much different approach, and her work, unlike that of Gippius, is boldly subjective and unflinchingly feminine in its subjectivity. While most female Russian writers at the turn of the century would not have called themselves feminists, Zinov’eva-

Annibal was one exception, and though the symbolist movement was far from feminist, it was partially her connection to the movement that allowed her to address questions of gender and sexuality in a layered and explicit way; symbolism did not engage with the woman question as such, but their attempts to address sexuality and self-expression, though non-political, were perhaps even more “feminist” to a modern understanding than their explicitly political contemporaries.38 The philosophers and writers of the symbolist movement meant, after all, to transform social relations in a spiritual and psychological manner, and an exploration of the effects of gender on the individual was a natural outgrowth of these investigations.

Pachmuss stresses the diversity of approaches in both philosophical and literary experiments of the Decadent and symbolist movements, and as we shall soon see,

Zinov’eva-Annibal’s work reaches out to all of these extremes:

like the reflection of opposing symmetrical patterns in the mirrors of a kaleidoscope – heathenism and neo-Christianity; a state beyond good and evil and mystical searchings; apolitical attitudes and active political

38 Kelly, 152-53.

74 preoccupations; pornography and the nobility of the lonely, pensive, melancholic spirit; utter hopelessness and sensation of triumph; cosmopolitanism and nationalism; aristocratic alienation from the crowd and a ‘prophetic’ tendency combined with a desire to ‘teach’, as well as many other characteristic antinomies - all of these find their expression within it.39

In Zinov'eva-Annibal's fiction, particularly in her novel Tragicheskii zverinets (The

Tragic Menagerie), nearly all of these dueling phenomena are given voice through the experiences of a young protagonist, Vera, and I will add another opposing symmetrical pattern to the list: the erasure and growing prominence of the sexed body and gender.

Though Zinov'eva-Annibal was a figurehead of the symbolist circle, her writings indicate that she saw the frailties in the utopian visions of her cohort.

Zinov’eva-Annibal’s seminal works Tragicheskii zverinets and Tridtsat’-tri uroda

(Thirty-Three Abominations) both came out in 1907, and while both explore these issues at length, the latter gives inordinate ground to the male gaze, as the thirty-three abominations of the title represent thirty-three paintings of the lust between two women as depicted by thirty-three male painters, thereby somewhat subordinating the lesbian relationship to the male's view of it. Tragicheskii zverinets, on the other hand, focuses exclusively on the life and sensations of its protagonist, Vera. The work, made up of a series of loosely-connected episodes (perhaps modeled after the Romantic tendency toward fragmentation40), portrays several defining moments in the life of Vera, a self- oriented young girl constantly embroiled in her own conflicts over morality, sin, death,

39 Pachmuss, “Women Writers,” 120.

40 Symbolism was greatly influenced by the nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetic; the fragment was a popular literary device that hinted at greater verisimilitude because of the very fact of being unfinished, unpolished. For an excellent discussion of the Romantic fragment in the Russian tradition, see Greenleaf, Monika. Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.

75 and salvation. Critical of biblical and standard societal virtues, it is to her own moral code that Vera looks in determining the righteousness of her actions, and the reader is privy to all of Vera's interior swings and roundabouts. Externally, Vera engages aggressively with the order of the natural world (again a Romantic impulse), the imposed orders of religion and secular society and their enforcers, and a predominantly female cast of characters with and against whom Vera defines herself. Clearly, Zinov’eva-Annibal means to imbue

Vera’s story with a depth of perspective that makes her a subject, rather than a symbol. As

Jane Costlow points out, Zinov’eva-Annibal, as the wife of Ivanov and proprietress of the

Tower, the weekly symbolist meeting of which they were the hosts, “appears in memoirs of the period as an intense figure in a crimson caftan, as the ‘earth’ of his soaring abstractions, fin-de-siècle variant of the Wife of the Great Poet, her life an appendage and echo of his,”41 casting her as symbol, and it is clear in Tragicheskii zverinets that, while

Zinov’eva-Annibal may have embodied for others a Sophia-esque figure, she chose a different fate for Vera.

Many of the stories in the book have similar themes, and together, they form a trajectory in which the young girl engaged in the process of becoming finally becomes.

Vera is at first an inchoate wild being developing and testing her relationship with the natural world, as in the story “Medvezhata” (“The Bear Cub”), in which she befriends two bear cubs that she must watch die at the hand of human fear, or “Zhurya”, in which she becomes the caretaker of a small crane that dies when her duties distract her from its

41 Costlow, Jane. “The Gallop, the Wolf, the Caress: Eros and Nature in the Tragic Menagerie.” Russian Review 56.2 (1997): 192.

76 care, leading her to determine that “проклята я за то, что надоело любить.”42 As she grows older, however, she slowly and sometimes unwillingly moves deeper into society and all its attendant religious, social, and educational demands, ultimately leading her to conclude that she, like the natural world, cannot be constrained by societal constructs. At the same time, however, she begins to find solace in the inventions of the human spirit; in the story “Volki” (“Wolves”), for instance, Vera must reconcile the logic of nature's unforgiving food chain with her own fear of death, and she is comforted in part by wise words from her ailing mother: “Да разве это важно - умереть? Или жить? Живешь

ведь только, чтобы понять. Если что понял, так и довольно. Вспыхнула искорка и

промчалась... Откуда? Куда? Как это радостно не знать и доверяться. Так любить

Бога...”43 The tension between her reverence for the purity of the natural world and her impulse to protect herself from the thought of her own inevitable return to it in death is expressed in several of the stories; even as a young girl, Vera is haunted by dualities and contradictions.

In “Glukhaia Dasha” (“Deaf Dasha”), shades of Vera's later life begin to appear; part of the story takes place in the city, away from the formative rural landscape, and darker tones of imprisonment and calculated cruelty begin to creep in. The story begins in the country, but the death of Vera's donkey Ruslan and the disgusting figure of Deaf

Dasha, with her terrible smell and her dripping ears, taints the pastoral landscape, causing

42 Zinov’eva-Annibal, Lidiia. Tridtsat' tri uroda: Roman, rasskazy, esse, p'esy. Moskva: Agraf, 1999. 59. [I was damned, because I’d grown tired of loving. - Trans. Jane Costlow. The Tragic Menagerie. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999. 18.]

43 ibid., 72. [‘Is it really so important that we die? Or live? We only live in order to understand. If you’ve understood something, then that’s enough. The spark has caught and rushed on . . . Where does it come from? Where is it going? How joyful not to know and to have faith. To love God so much.’ - Trans. Costlow, 36.]

77 Vera to long for the city. Characteristically, however, the city, with its lack of earth and trees and air, makes her long for the country; Vera is again trapped by opposing forces.

The layout of the family's city dwelling is delivered coldly, and Vera's description of the corridor in which both her schoolroom and Deaf Dasha's sleeping quarters are located shows her unease: “Две ступеньки вели из полусветлой шкафной вниз в темный наш

коридор. Я ступала по нему не иначе, как на носках, боясь раздавить тараканов.”44

Though the cockroaches inspire fear in Vera, they are, significantly, symbols of life and nature in an otherwise lifeless home; even more significant, however, is the other sign of life: “От Даши невыносимо дурно пахло рыбьим жиром и кисленьким потом.”45 The cockroaches and Dasha, though Vera's tormentors, paradoxically and yet predictably become her saviours. The rest of her existence in the city house is comprised of lying, resisting lessons of all types, stealing, boredom, and discontent, and it is only when she begins to seriously contemplate and interact with Deaf Dasha that Vera finds any meaningful experience. Deaf Dasha, after all, in her unpolished and unpracticed behavior, is an escape for Vera from the disingenuous behavior of her family.

It is the recognition of being caught between two opposing forces that finally gives Vera clarity. Having been caught stealing candy and resenting the scolding that she is given, Vera finds herself scolding Dasha for the same crime, in the same words and with the same voice: “помню, он был не мой голос. Я его слушала и размышляла о

словах, таких глупых, неверных, лживых.”46 Vera realizes in this moment that she

44 ibid., 77. [Two steps led down from the dusky storeroom into our dark corridor. I never walked through except on tiptoe, afraid of crushing cockroaches. - Trans. Costlow, 44.]

45 ibid., 77 [Dasha smelled unbearably badly of fish oil and sour sweat. - Trans. Costlow, 45.]

46 ibid., 84. [I remember it wasn't my voice. I listened to it and thought about the words, so

78 cannot allow herself to be on the wrong side of the opposing forces. Seeking out Dasha to ask her forgiveness, rejecting the social binaries of rich and poor, superior and inferior, and asking Dasha to recite the Lord's Prayer with her, Vera realizes that the Kingdom of the prayer is within their reach, if only they desire it. The story closes with Vera's thoughts, a little revolution of her own:

...теперь я другая. Я вся, каждою кровинкой, совсем, совсем другая. Я, как в первый раз, взглянула. В первый раз взглянула на людей и их устройство и увидела, я так просто увидела и так просто поняла, каждою человеческою кровинкой поняла, что все это совсем не настоящее, что люди устроили. И так не будет, потому что так я не хочу.47

The opposing force that she here rejects arises again, however; Vera’s behavior and thought-process in the story “Tsaverna-kentavr” (“The Centaur-Princess”) pushes away from these egalitarian ideals and radical imaginings of social relations. Realizing that her family stands as the symbol and agent of enforced poverty for the subjects on their land, Vera escapes into a reverie that allows her to shuffle off the weight of being the cause of another’s misfortune; as a defensive response to a tirade leveled at her by the father of a girl who would perhaps, in different circumstances, have been a friend, Vera retreats into fantasy:

Проклятия и брань ее отца связали меня с ними неразрывно. Но мне не жалко Тани и не страшно связи с моими. Я же не совсем девушка. Я, конечно, и девушка по возрасту и по рождению, но ведь я тоже и кентавр ... Кентавры не умеют любить отцовских домов с балконами и кухнями и stupid, disloyal, and false. - Trans. Costlow, 55.]

47 ibid., 87. [...now I am different. All of me, every last drop of me, is completely, completely different. I looked, as if for the first time, I looked at people and at the order of things for the first time and I saw, I saw simply, and I understood simply, understood with every last drop of me that all of it - how people have set things up - isn’t the real thing. And so it will not be that way, because I do not wish it. - Trans. Costlow, 60.]

79 мертвыми лосиными головами, не умеют помнить матерей и братьев, не умеют мерить землю и нанимать косарей. Кентаврам нужно то, что им нужно, не больше: свободы и луга. Кентаврам никого не жалко. Если встретят милого, то его любят и счастливы, но по нем не плачут, потому что кентавры плакать не умеют и потому что много милого на большой, нескупой земле, равно любимой кочевыми свободными кентаврами, равно своей и равно всех.48

It is significant that the movement is not only away from the purely pragmatic and economic nature of the conflict, but that Vera also moves into a natural world that is made of pure fantasy; the uncontrolled, powerful, and pure natural world as she has known it recedes, no longer a haven.

Having moved farther from the Eden-like nature of her youth, Vera is still no closer to playing nicely by society's rules, and the longest story in the novel, “Chert”

(“The Devil”) is a sustained exploration of her tenacious refusal to conform. As in “Deaf

Dasha,” she is a thief and a liar, but this time she is also a sado-masochist who allows her friend Volodia to whip her naked body, and she has discovered (or decided) that she is a friend to the Devil: a punishment that sends her away from the dinner-table and into the closet leads to her proclamation that “свет страшнее темноты ... Б чулане скрипит

черт, но мне любо ... Черт сам все такое делает, как и я. И черта тоже Бог прогнал

вроде как из-за стола. И мы с ним, значит, товарищи. Оба не хотим быть хорошими,

48 ibid., 120. [Her father’s curses and abuse me bound me to them, irrevocably. But I didn’t feel sorry for Tanya or horror at my own family. After all, I wasn’t quite a girl. Of course, I was a girl by age and birth, but then I was a centaur, too [...] Centaurs don’t know how to love their fathers’ houses, with their balconies and kitchens and heads of dead moose; they don’t remember their mothers and brothers, don’t know how to measure land and hire men at haying time. Centaurs need what is necessary, nothing more: freedom and a meadow. Centaurs feel sorry for no one. If they meet someone dear, they love them and are happy, but they don’t cry over them, because centaurs don’t know how to cry, and then too, there’s much that is dear on the great, unstinting earth. All of it is loved by the centaurs, wandering and free; it belongs both to them and to others. - Trans. Costlow. 108.]

80 и оба прогнаны.”49 Her understanding of her actions and her new friendship with the

Devil, however, is complicated by a new and profound rejection of God. A brief exchange with her instructor seals her off from faith:

Зимою читали что-то... о каких-то народах, их верованиях. Я спросила Александру ИвановуЬ - Все верят в своего бога. Почему наш настоящий? - Я обещала твоей маме не говорить с тобою о религии. Иди спроси ее. Тогда я поняла и ее тайну, и что Бога не было.50

She has not only rejected God; she has rejected the possibility of God’s existence. Again, however, opposing forces continue to act within Vera; when she is (rightly) accused by her teacher of stealing money, Vera’s understanding of her own angry response response again points to a still-blinkered rejection of faith and divinity: “Потому и взбунтовалась,

что впервые посприняла гнев как гнев праведный. Против праведного

взбунтовалась, потому что, когда Праведное вызывает, то есть два пути: путь

покорности и осанны или путь бунта и проклятия.”51 Her rejection of God has not yet become rejection of the Christian formulations of submission and damnation, or of sin and righteousness. She has rejected God, but she has not rejected the Devil, and so the existence of God is still implied.

In the final section of “Chert,” however, Vera is forced to confront the

49 ibid., 131. [the light is more frightening than the darkness … The Devil creaks in the closet, but I like it … The Devil himself does everything like me. And God drove the Devil out, too, like from under the table. That means that he and I are comrades. We both don't want to be good; we've both been driven out. - Trans. Costlow, 123.]

50 ibid., 137. [In the winter we were reading something . . . about some people or other and their beliefs. I asked Aleksandra Ivanovna: ‘Everyone believes in their own God. Why is ours the real one?’ ‘I promised your mama not to talk with you about religion. Go ask her.’ Then I understood her secret, and that there was no God. – Trans. Costlow, 132.]

51 ibid., 147. [I rebelled because, for the first time, I perceived anger as righteous anger. I rebelled against what was righteous, for when Righteousness summons, there are two paths: the path of submission and hosannas or the path of rebellion and damnation. - Trans. Costlow, 146.]

81 discrepancy. Having been sent to boarding school, she entertains herself by causing trouble in class and having romantic relations with a female classmate, and again she is punished, locked away: “Сажали под арест в третьем, пустом этаже... Там было

страшно. И пауки.”52 As it was with the cockroaches in “Glukhaia Dasha”, small traces of life stand out to Vera even when she is arrested, imprisoned, out of screaming ear-shot from her captors, but a resolution still does not come. The repeated confinement of Vera in the novel, and the solitude that she shares with small pests that frighten her, reflect some themes common to a school of literature that ran parallel to Romanticism in

England: the Gothic. Parallels with tropes of the Gothic point to a strong connection with the tradition of women’s writing in an international context, and the deep similarities between Zinov’eva-Annibal’s novel and the Gothic mood represent not only similar literary tools, but a shared condition which calls for artistic expression. Literary critic

Ellen Moers has suggested that the Gothic, as opposed to its more masculine counterpart, the Romantic, was a mode in which women were allowed to travel, both in the pastoral landscape and in the dwelling; both, after all, may still comprise the domestic sphere, provided the protagonist has the means, and within the domestic sphere, she is able to move about as she pleases.53 Crucially, however, the opposite is often true: the protagonist is frequently somehow trapped or imprisoned. Eugenia DeLamotte sees a combination of both Gothic terror and Gothic romance in this confinement; terror arises from an awareness of and fear of boundaries, while romance offers a mode in which the

52 ibid., 156. [They put me under arrest in the empty third floor. It was terrible there. And there were spiders. Trans. Costlow, 159.]

53 Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. New York: Doubleday and Co., 1976. 126-27.

82 self’s boundaries may be explored in psychological, social, and spiritual ways.54

Dramatic encounters and excavations of the protagonist's interior life are closely related to their uneasy excursions toward – and sometimes past – external boundaries. The limits that Vera is testing are as much within her as they are outside.

DeLamotte's discussion of the infrastructure of imprisonment and its relation to the pastoral and the outdoors may help to illuminate the complexity of Vera's seemingly- simple childhood punishments:

As the repository of mystery, the architecture contains the past in the form of what has been deliberately ‘lost’ by the villain in an act symbolic of repression and must be retrieved by the hero or heroine in order to remedy another form of loss of which this place is also a symbol: the loss of an Edenic world associated with an innocent childhood past, of which the architectural place is a nightmarish obverse. In some cases, the physical loss of the pastoral world threatens to be also a psychological and spiritual loss through the discovery that the mystery of the Gothic place may well have some sinister bearing on, or even for a time be identical with, another mystery connected with that pastoral world itself. The potential for this psychological and spiritual loss is in some sense a potential for self-loss, represented emblematically in the fact that the hero or heroine tends to become lost in this place of mystery. The architecture, in turn - by virtue of the threat it represents that she will never get out - stands also for the danger that she herself, and the virtues she stands for, will be lost to history, just as the secret of this place has been lost.55

The “villain” in this case is not one specific person – rather, it is all those who ask Vera to conform to rules that do not seem sensible to her, rules that take her further away from the freedom with which she associates nature. She rebelliously wants to reclaim this freedom, but the fact that she is closed up, first with cockroaches and then with spiders, indicates that even the innocence of the pastoral world is no longer accessible; it, too, has

54 DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of the Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. 13-14.

55 ibid., 15.

83 been somehow taken from her. Without that Eden, Vera lacks an anchor; she is adrift on a sea whose power she can no longer appreciate.

Further, Vera displays a trait in her dealings with Dasha and the girls at boarding school that Moers may refer to as “the Gothic vice of sadism”, in which childhood may be made of nature and freedom, but not necessarily innocence; instead, there is a cruelty and eroticism within the frustrated boundaries of deceptively expansive stretches of land.56 According to DeLamotte, it is perhaps precisely the expansiveness that compels the protagonist to exercise her own will; when the nature of the world is not yet known, fear of both being separated from it and irreparably joining it creates a tension that results in an aggressive assertion of the self's wholeness and righteousness; the protagonist, unsure of the boundary between her self and the outer world, defensively draws the boundary herself, lest it be drawn for her in an undesirable configuration.57 This dynamic may be plainly seen in Vera; the relative freedom from her family that she attains at boarding school leads her to be repeatedly compelled to embody both good and evil.

It is not until she intentionally drives her admirer and classmate, Gertrude, to the brink of jealous insanity and realizes that the punishment will be given to Gertrude instead of to herself that the consequences of Vera's particular brand of rebellion begins to dawn on her. Kicked out of boarding school and moved against her will to her brother’s house in Italy, Vera realizes that if she believes in damnation, she believes in the Devil, and that if she believes that those who punished her for her devilish behavior are saintly,

56 Moers, 100, 106.

57 DeLamotte, 22-23.

84 then she must also believe in God.58 She has skirted the edge of nihilism, but returns to a state in which she once again takes her place as a miniscule being in the grand order of things, in nature:

Сама я камушек влажный и прегретый, тихий и под гулкой волной ... И я краб черный, боком, боком тороплюсь ... Целую камушки и снова языком лижу: соленые. Слезы ли мои? Или вода морская? Она тоже соленая ... Или оно все слезы, все слезы камней, и паучков, и крабов, и мои, слезы, земли?59

Vera has come full-circle; the wholeness of nature and the cyclical movement of life and death no longer terrify her; in fact, they offer comfort. Zinov'eva-Annibal has squared the circle, sealed the gap between the opposing forces that have been pushing on Vera from either side, and the forces are now a part of something larger, no longer a duality, but a complicated unity. Vera's revelation may be understood in terms similar to those presented by early twentieth-century philosopher and sometimes-Christian mystic

Simone Weil, who wrote in her essay “Lathéisme purificateur” (“Atheism as a

Purification”): “La religion en tant que source de consolation est un obstacle à la véritable foi : en ce sens l’athéisme est une purification. Je dois être athée avec la partie de moi- même qui n’est pas faite pour Dieu.”60 It was necessary for Vera to come to God on her own time, and in order to do that, she had to define and embody both saint and sinner for

58 Zinov'eva-Annibal, 167.

59 ibid., 170. [I am myself a wet, warmed stone, quiet beneath the resonating wave … And I am the black crab, sideways, speeding sideways … I kiss the stones and lick them with my tongue again: they're salty. Is it my tears? Or the sea water? It's salty, too … Or is the sea all tears, the tears of rocks and spiders, and of crabs, and mine, the tears of the earth? - Trans. Costlow, 178.].

60 Weil, Simone. La pesanteur et la grâce. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1988, 132. [Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. - Trans. Wills, Arthur, Gravity and Grace. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1952. 168.]

85 herself.

In the final story of the novel, “Volia” (“Will”), Vera at eighteen is on her way to marry a man who has vowed to commit suicide; she will be freed from dependence on her family by marriage, and his death will free her from marriage as well. This is a type of arrangement that, as we have seen, had been common in the 1870s and 80s, and so it seems that Vera’s revelation that she is a rightful component of the natural order of things has also given her the will to determine what exactly that natural order should be, and the

Kingdom that she was determined to create with Dasha has returned. In this Kingdom, the struggle is not purely internal or spiritual, it is political as well, and the walls that

Kollontai wrote of, the walls that kept Vera separate from the world, have collapsed. Vera has become the new woman.

The new woman had a number of other women with whom she had to contend in the autonomous creation of herself; aside from Sophia, there are a variety of female figures and deities that have inhabited the Russian imagination and folkloric beliefs for centuries. Joanna Hubbs’ expansive study Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian

Culture gives an overview of the feminine deities in folk and religious beliefs from pre- modern times to the contemporary era, and the three main categories of superwoman that she discusses are helpful in thinking about twentieth-century formulations of the feminine:

In reconstruction the figure of the Russian Great Goddess as the rusalka, the witch Baba Yaga, and Mother Earth, we will follow her through each of her traditional and ancient roles: She is the Mistress of animals; the clan mother of the hearth, the source and center of the social group; the ruler of earth, of water, and of vegetation, expressed as the Tree of Life; the queen of the underworld and of the heavens with all their spheres; and the

86 controller of the weather. In each of her functions, woman is her priestess.61

The rusalka, with her position as a spinner, a controller of fertility, a sirin, had many different appearances, names, and locations throughout the Slavic lands, but she generally lived without men and was not to be disturbed or angered, and for the most part, she represented uncontrolled nature and the feminine power contained in the generative and reproductive creation inherent in motherhood.62 Baby Yaga is a much more lifelike figure, in some ways; Hubbs describes her as “the expression of realized potential, the fulfillment of the cycle of life associated with woman”, and so she simultaneously contains virginity, motherhood, and old age, in both their natural and social incarnations.63 This image is larger than life, a feminine figure that contains all the power of the earth and its mothers, and for that reason she is feared and respected. She is the

“protective but possessive mother”, the “genetrix and cannibal witch”, at once a savior, destroyer, and damsel in distress;64 in short, she is everywhere all at once, a constant possibility.Yet is the idea of Mother Earth, the crucial third element in this powerful triad, that holds the most sway and against whom the new woman had to define herself. Mother

Earth, being as she is the cradle of life, contains both the rusalka and Baba Yaga, and she carries all their characteristics and more. The rusalka and Yaga are spinners, but as Hubbs so evocatively describes, Mother Earth “was the loom itself in all its solidity; she was

61 Hubbs, Joanna. Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. 27.

62 ibid., 27-35.

63 ibid., 37.

64 ibid., 46-47.

87 also the maternal breast and womb: the black and fruitful soil”,65 and for this reason,

Mother Earth is the one of the three that has been deployed most often by different forces in determining the direction of the nation, along with a newer but no less powerful figure:

Mary, Mother of God.

When the Orthodox church attempted to bring Russian people into the fold and to move them further away from their pre-Christian folk beliefs, they had to offer a figure that could stand in for these powerful three, and that figure was Mary. Mary in her

Russian context was not marked as much by her status as a Virgin as she was in the West; as G.P. Fedotov has noted, she was more Mother than Virgin in the Russian church.66

Churches in honor of the Mother of God were built across Russia, and Mary and Sophia became partnered images that represented justice, wisdom, protection, and victory.67 She became not only a national figure, but a nationalizing symbol of a developing empire.

Hubbs writes that Mary, from the tenth century onward, “became the principal vehicle for the conversion of the population to an alien and essentially masculine faith, rooted not in the fertility of the soil or the forest but in the principles of paternal authority, punishment, and filial love”, and further estrangement occurred during the reign of Peter the Great, when Mother Russia and her connotations of soil and narod were cleaved from the upper classes, who were in turn given the right to define the motherland with new and more modern ways of speaking and behaving.68 Though this fissure would change, it would

65 ibid., 55.

66 Fedotov, G.P. The Russian Religious Mind. Vol II. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966. 103.

67 Fedotov, G.P. The Russian Religious Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946. 295- 96. 68 Hubbs, 87, 206.

88 never disappear entirely, and in the women's writing of this era, it is clear to see that all of these extremely powerful images of woman and their different uses for both nation and

State came together to create a system of quadruple masters, a bind that gave women both incredible power and a nearly unnavigable set of restrictions within which to use it.

Gippius and Zinov'eva-Annibal were in some ways able to free themselves from these multiple fetters by exchanging them for a symbolist vision of the eternal feminine, but as we have seen, the image of Sophia was perhaps no less problematic; Sophia, after all, was seen as an ethereal figure that could, given the right circumstances, be embodied, rather than simply emulated. And as mass-marketed literature began to rise in the 1910s, female novelists protested against all of these impossible formulations, and their protests gathered quite an audience.

Sex, Symbolism, and Sophia on the Street: Popular Literature

Boulevard literature, though stylistically different from the works of Gippius or

Zinov’eva-Annibal, contains many of the lofty themes found in Decadent and symbolist literature, but it was not necessarily style through which boulevard literature defined itself. The mass readership of the novels and the context in which they were produced gave the novels and their writers special access to a public over which the intelligentsia had formerly held sway, much to the chagrin of the intellectual and upper classes.69 The boulevard novel's particular power lay, however, in the fact that it brought these heady issues and ideals to the public in ways that were not only available and intelligible to a mass audience, but often steamy and provocative. Anastasia Verbitskaia (1861-1928) and

69 Kelly, 151.

89 Evdokia Nagrodskaia (1866-1930) were two writers strongly associated with the boulevard, not only for their reach, but for their dramatic plots and characters, and their works epitomized the threat seen by the intellectual class, those arbiters of morality and good taste. In their stories one may find all that was worrying to the intelligentsia: their heroines are not hampered by guilt or judgment when engaged with issues of romance, sexuality, or non-traditional approaches to motherhood, and in their fictional lives, they engage with questions of liberation psychologically and spiritually. A dangerous combination, and their detractors feared that they would convince their dedicated readers to follow suit.

The novels of the boulevard engage with the impossibilities of living up to the standards of both the image of woman put forth by the nation and the ideal of the divine feminine imposed by symbolist principles, and they also comment strongly on the position of women as artists. Louise McReynolds points out that it was not just the themes and popularity of the books that provoked anxiety within the intelligentsia, but the entire social arena in which the novels grew in popularity. In this milieu, McReynolds writes, readers who were generally unsophisticated consumers of literature and art came into contact with an unfamiliar and incredibly persuasive capitalist and patriarchal market, a position which made readers incredibly impressionable.70 Further, with the growth of the market and the opportunities presented by the rapid spread of consumer culture, readers were in a position to do something with the new ideas that they were encountering. Engelstein describes the conflict and the climate quite well: the anonymity

70 McReynolds, Louise. “Reading the Russian Romance: What Did the Keys to Happiness Unlock?” Journal of Popular Culture 31.4 (1998): 95.

90 and market of the boulevard meant that alternatives to customary behaviors and mores and a new arrangement of wealth and status became possible, and this was a threat to the established social order.71 The boulevard became a locus of subjectivity, desire, and pleasure, and it was not discerning; instead, it offered technicolor opportunities for types of fulfillment that were either entirely new or had formely been the domain of only the upper classes, such as material opulence; additionally, women were finding new employment opportunities and seeing themselves represented in contexts both tantalizing and independent.72 These were dangerous developments. Hedonism and explorations of metaphysical and carnal desires as an expression of the individual self became the zeitgeist in boulevard literature as it had for the avant-garde, but as Engelstein shrewdly points out, “the paradox of exaggerated individualism, this preoccupation with the self, was that it was not a private affair.”73 These conversations about individuality and sexuality were being had publicly and were being debated as matters of public interest and concern, and on the boulevard, anyone was welcome to join. And, in this different world made accessible by a new market and new modes of self-definition, the imposition of the Sophia principle could be even more strongly undermined.

Verbitskaia’s Kliuchi schast’ia (The Keys to Happiness), published in six installments between 1909 and 1913, embodied the chaos of the boulevard, and its popularity cannot be disputed; it spawned many imitations, and a stageplay, a film, and even a waltz were based on the novel.74 The novel centers around Mania Eltsova, an

71 Engelstein, 359.

72 ibid., 369.

73 ibid., 376. 74 McReynolds, 99.

91 orphan and innately talented dancer, and in Mania’s romantic and artistic exploits,

Verbitskaia engages in explorations of gender, sexuality, and changing cultural norms; add to this the explicit nature of the sex scenes in the book, and all the ingredients are right for a literary sensation. Verbitskaia, a self-proclaimed feminist, explores gendered cultural mandates in direct and challenging ways, but even a cursory reading of the novel will indicate that Mania is no role model for women who have collective emancipation as their end goal; her strong will and intelligence are countered by her ultimately self- defeating vanity and egotism. The novel itself is sprawling, and a close reading of its trajectory and events is both impossible in the scope of this study and unnecessary, as the novel is comprised, for the most part, of those unrequited loves, dramatic speeches, political intrigues, and interpersonal conflicts that are the hallmark of potboilers and romance novels, and these sensationalistic elements only serve to provide a backdrop for the personal journey of the protagonist. Additionally, the thrust of the novel is not disguised in parables or euphemisms, but presented plainly, preventing any misreading of the writer’s message. For instance, when Mania first shows herself to be brilliant at the craft of dancing, her brother exalts in her talent, thinking to himself, “'Есть куда уйти от

любви... И найти свое счастье вне шаблонных форм. Пусть идет своей дорогой!

Искусство сделает ее свободной...'”.75 These clear declarations form the central thread of the novel’s philosophy. For example, the words spoken to Mania by her doomed first love, in which he gives her the proverbial keys to happiness, stands as the blueprint on

75 Verbitskaia, Anastasia. Kliuchi schast'ia, Vol I. SPb: Izdatel'stvo “Severo-zapad,” 1993. 20. [‘She has somewhere to escape from love. And to find her happiness outside the stereotype. Let her go her own way! Art will set her free'! - Trans. Holmgren, Beth and Helena Goscilo. The Keys to Happiness. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. 13.]

92 which Mania bases all her subsequent decisions, up to and including her choice to commit suicide:

Я дам вам ключи счастья […] Самое ценное в нас — наши страсти, наши мечты. Жалок тот, кто отрекается от них! Из страха общественного мнения, то есть мнения людей, далеких и чуждых нам; из чувства долга перед близкими, из любви к детям и семье — мы все топчем и уродуем наши души, вечно юные, вечно изменчивые, где звучат таинственные и зовущие голоса. Только эти голоса надо слушать. Только им надо верить. Надо быть самим собой!76

It is significant that this blueprint is drawn and delivered by a man, and though with his death, Mania becomes the holder of these keys to happiness and heeds his words well, she does so at the expense of her own physical well-being and the pain of others; the desires that she allows to act as her guide are fraught with a fickle indecision that often leaves others at the mercy of her selfish whims. Further, her attempts at self-definition often appear to entail styling herself into a manic dreamgirl with whom men can fall in love.

A recurrent problem within the novel, in fact – a problem which is not, unfortunately, specific to Verbitskaia – is the conflation of independence with masculinity. Her most devoted lover tells her, for instance:

У тебя не женская душа, Маня. Ты не создала для ярма, как тысяч средних женщин. Тебе нужна власть, свобода. Ты требуешь обожания, подчинения. Ты к нему привыкла. Последние годы твоя жизнь была борьбой за признание, за свое место в мире. Все это

76Verbitskaia, Kliuchi schast'ia, Vol. 1, 67. [I'll give you the keys to happiness [...] The most valuable things in us are our passions, our dreams. Pitiful is he who denies them! Out of fear of public opinion, that is, the opinion of people who are remote and alien to us; out of a feeling of duty to one’s dear ones; out of love for children and family we all trample and disfigure our souls, which are eternally young, eternally changing, in which mysterious and plaintive voices resound. One must heed and believe only these voices. One must be oneself! - Trans. Holmgren and Goscilo, 34.]

93 плохие условия для развития женственного начала твоей души.77

Rather than expand the definition of femininity to accommodate this kind of focused determination, the behavior must be defined as that of a man. On one hand, this treatment of femininity is borderline misogynistic; on the other hand, despite Mania's physical beauty and captivating spirit, this allows her to be free of the constraints that would be placed on her by society or by the images of Sophia, Mary, or any other idealized and unattainable figure. Labelling her behavior as masculine allows her to sidestep these binds.

She does not, however, avoid them forever. By the end of the novel, two of her lovers are dead, and Mania too is compelled to take her own life. The question remains, then - once the keys to happiness are found, what is to be done with them, particularly by women? Is happiness truly an attainable end, or do the possibilities of women's emancipation and sexual freedom opened up by modernism and revolution create complicated and unavoidable conflicts that actually preclude the possibility of individual fulfillment?

Pachmuss writes that Verbitskaia’s ethical code was one of “egotistical hedonism” and that her view of individualism was one in which there could be no equality between men and women in marriage; one or the other would be dominant, with true harmony an impossibility.78 And McReynolds argues that the keys to happiness actually opened a box that was full of “sexism, repressed individualism, the perils of consumerism, and the

77 Verbitskaia, Kliuchi schast'ia, Vol II. 254. [You don’t have a woman’s soul, Manya. You’re not made for the yoke, like thousands of ordinary women. You need power, freedom. You demand adoration, submission. You’re used to it. For the last few years your life has been a battle for recognition, for your place in the world. All this hindered the development of femininity in your soul. - Trans. Holmgran and Goscilo, 242.] 78 Pachmuss, “Women Writers,” 125.

94 anxieties generated by the pace of change in modern life,” as well as a fruitless attempt at

“complete mastery of the self”.79 Both of these suppositions indicate that Verbitskaia saw the necessity for a complete overhaul of marriage and the relationship between the individual self and society, both socially and in a manner similar to that of the avant- garde, who could not reconcile the standards of legal marriage with their visions of true personal fulfillment or some kind of divine unity. The pertinent question, then, is not what sort of box the keys to happiness open, but rather who determines what types of happiness are allowed legitimacy, and by whom. I would argue that this is the central question contained in all of the women’s works of this period, and a key dilemma when the coming revolution claimed to finally get the fabled keys in hand.

Though Nagrodskaia’s novel, Gnev Dionisa (The Wrath of Dionysus), published in 1910, did not attain the same acclaim as Verbitskaia’s, the substance of the novel has much more to offer on the woman question and the development of the discussion about a woman’s decisions in the areas of sex, love, and motherhood. It opens with the protagonist, Tania Kuznetsova, on a journey to the Caucasus, where she is to recover from an illness and meet the family of her partner, Ilya, who is, significantly, married to another woman who has not yet granted him a divorce. During the train ride, Tania muses on her own masculine characteristics – her love for living independently and for the beauty of scientific achievement and mathematics, her devotion to her profession and her lack of concern with trifles and domestic affairs, and her admiration for and occasional

79 McReynolds, 104.

95 desire to kiss the faces of beautiful women 80 – and and though again it is arguable that the feminine is demeaned by marking many of these positive characteristics as masculine, the novel goes on to address exactly this question in a variety of ways. As the train ride progresses, Tania thinks of her own sexual character, as well; though she loves Ilya, she has very little sexual desire for him, and indeed has little interest in sex with men in general, despite the fact that she is clear that she is not uncomfortable with sex per se. A painter, she is a member of the intellectual class and in the position to see feminine beauty as an art object, but it is both with her painter’s eye and suddenly with a lascivious eye as well that she first sees Edgar Stark, a fellow traveler and soon the handsome and delicate object of her affections and the centerpiece of her painting, “The Wrath of

Dionysus”. Her descriptions of him are stereotypically feminine throughout the novel:

Когда я возвращаюсь в мою мастерскую или иду куда-нибудь, я прихожу в себя и могу думать. И я думаю: что, собственно, в нем так сводит меня с ума? Теперь я твердо знаю, что это именно какая-то женственность. Женственность движений, это грациозное кокетство, эта небрежная томная лень и рядом с этим детская живость и веселость. Как художница, я в восторге от его тела. Это нежное и сильное тело с тонким станом, безукоризненными руками и ногами, оно тоже немного женственно, но это именно то, что мне надо для моего Диониса. 81

It is significant that he is not only feminine but childlike; the sense of power that Tania has over him is part of her attraction to him, but her attraction is so strong that it, in turn, has power over her. The connection between Tania and Ilya is quite different; their 80 Nagrodskaia, Evdokia. Gnev Dionisa. Moskva: “Pokolenie”, 1996. 600.

81 ibid., 674-75. [When I’m in my studio or simply wandering off somewhere, I come to my senses and can think about it: what exactly is it about him that drives me out of my mind? Now I feel very positive that it’s his femininity. His movements are very feminine; he flirts gracefully and has a careless, languorous laziness that complements a childlike liveliness and gaiety.The artist in me delights in his body: at once tender and strong, a slender waist, flawless hands and feet...it’s also feminine, but that is precisely what I need for my Dionysus. Trans. McReynolds, Louise. The Wrath of Dionysus. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. 82-83.]

96 relationship is more fraternal than carnal, perhaps explained by the fact that Ilya is tall and classically masculine, a physical type which repels Tania sexually. She prefers to be physically more commanding than her lover: “Отчего же мне совсем не хочется

исчезать в объятиях мужчины и чувствовать себя маленькой, маленькой ... О, нет! Я

бы хотела сама сжать в объятиях и даже помучить любимого человека!”82 These feelings are classified by Tania as distinctly masculine, and she counterposes them against the femininity of her own frame and aesthetic.

The relationship between Edgar and Dionysus is crucial. To the symbolists,

Dionysus embodied chaos, ecstasy, the feminine principle, and the wild and timeless aspects of human nature, as opposed to Apollo, who represented logic and the masculine principle.83 Nagrodskaia, in creating a female protagonist who is subject rather than object and captures her own Dionysus, negotiates a position for Tania in the sphere of androgyny; as the Apollonian creator and master of Dionysus, Tania's domain is both halves of the whole, a reversal of the action in which a man finds – and most likely creates – his own Sophia, as a path to divine transcendence. Edgar does not enjoy being objectified in this way, and though Tania does feel remorse for bringing him this unhappiness, she does not put her painting aside to spare him.

Unfortunately, though Tania may have found this balance of spirit, the real world of laws and social more does not allow her a comparable liberation. Just as Tania realizes that her attraction to Edgar is creative, rather than romantic, she becomes pregnant with

82 ibid., 644. [“I never want to disappear into a man’s embraces and feel myself so petite...Oh no! I want to grasp my beloved in my arms myself, and even make him suffer!” - Trans. McReynolds, 55.]

83 Pyman, 239.

97 his child, and he realizes that he has found a way to keep her from leaving him. Their two reactions to her pregnancy highlight not only the differences in their temperaments, but the social and legal implications of their new roles as parents:

Как сильна в нем материнская кровь! Эта вера трогает и умиляет! Отчего у меня нет этой веры? Отчего я не чувствую счастья? Ведь мне прежде хотелось иметь ребенка. Прежде, но не теперь, тогда я еще не так всецело отдавалась искусству. Теперь ребенок возьмет меня от него. Бедный Эдди не мог бороться с этим соперником, но ребенок, маленький, беспомощный, слабый, он сильнее всего на свете. Я потеряла свободу, я связана набсегда со Старком. Навсегда!84

The issue of autonomy and motherhood is addressed even more sharply after the baby is born; Stark, knowing of that Tania has grown tired of him, uses the child as a form of blackmail, keeping Tania with him by threatening to take the child from her – a right that, as the father, was legally his – and to tell Ilya of their affair. Tania’s despair over the inescapable situation brings her a guilt that she fears will poison the milk with which she feeds her baby.85 which clearly symbolizes Tatiana's failure to embody the nurturing mother principle. Nagrodskaia presents Tania’s conundrum in clear terms that reveal exactly the bind that is faced by women, and in the end, Tania continues to act as a mother to the child and as wife to both Ilya and Stark. The lofty ideals of androgyny and non-procreation are exposed as ridiculous when tested against the facts of everyday life; procreation, a natural and often unavoidable result of heterosexual intercourse, cannot but bring woman from a pedestal down to the worries and fears of earthly existence. The

84 Nagrodskaia, 708 [How strong his maternal heritage! How touching his faith! Why can’t I believe like that? Why can’t I feel happy? Earlier I had wanted to have children. Earlier, but not now, when I have dedicated my whole being to art. A baby will take me away from this. Poor Eddy could never compete with this rival, but a baby - small, helpless, and weak is still the strongest thing on earth. I’ve lost my freedom, and I’m tied forever to Stark. Forever! - Trans. McReynolds, 113.]

85 ibid., 739.

98 androgynous sphere is not available to woman-as-mother, nor are legal autonomy or freedom from society's judgments.

Resigned to her split existence, Tania travels between her two partners, and a conversation between Tania and her close friend Latchinov in the final pages of the novel casts an even brighter light on the social and moral message of the story. Latchinov, who as it turns out is gay, tells Tania bluntly that she is most likely a lesbian, and that as he sees it, her situation would be utterly unremarkable were she a man; keeping a mistress and even a secret child, living a double life, these are circumstances which would not be out of the ordinary at all. In the course of this conversation, Latchinov suggests that Tania is lucky, in some ways, that things have turned out as they did, and that his position as a mostly-closeted gay man in society has been suffocatingly lonely, perhaps because sexual love between two women is more acceptable than that between two men.86 Nagrodskaia shows in these few pages that rigid formulations of gender affect men as well as women, and that even in the artistic milieu, where the ideas of androgyny, sexual freedom, and individual liberation are tossed about, puritanical and conservative rules of behavior still reign, and still do damage to the individual. The damage for women extends past social and psychological to legal and political, but no one is exempt.

Though Nagrodskaia did not label herself a feminist of the type that engaged in political affairs, her novel certainly illustrates what Kelly describes as “the importance of a sophisticated and ramified tradition of political feminism as a background, if not necessarily an inspiration, to a positive sense of women’s writing as gender-explicit, but

86 ibid., 777-80.

99 not necessarily limited by gender.”87 Had the feminist movements not been providing writers with an environment in which their novels could engage with these issues, the novels themselves would not have existed, and the existence of the novels no doubt fostered an environment where feminist thought could develop further. And, whether or not Nagrodskaia would have called herself a feminist, the character of Tania embodied the type of new woman that Kollontai so admired; in fact, Kollontai commented on

Tania, writing that “Таня слишком человек, слишком мало самка, чтобы голая

страсть могла удовлетворить ее; она сама сознает, что страсть к Старку не

обогащает, а беднит ее душу, сушит ее”, and praising Nagrodskaia's depiction of the relief that Tania felt when she could shake off the bonds of carnal or romantic appetite and get back to work.88 Kollontai’s new woman was surely present in boulevard literature, shuffling off the imposition of Sophia, and while she holds up Tania as an exemplar, she refers to Verbitskaia’s Mania as only a vulgar copy of the real thing.89

Willpower, level-headedness, an absorption in intellectual pursuits, a desire for respect and equal treatment by men, a search for inner freedom and self-knowledge, a personality defined not by its gender but by a liberated sexual impulse, economic and social independence – all of these traits of the new woman as formulated by Kollontai are present in Tania. Boulevard literature indeed had tooth.

While boulevard literature was maligned by the intelligentsia, there was much

87 Kelly, 180.

88 Kollontai, Novaia moral', 14. [Tania is too much a human being, too little 'wifie' for naked passion to be able to satisfy her. She herself admits that her passion for Stark does not enrich her soul, but impoverishes it, dries it out. Trans. Attanasio, 69.]

89 ibid., 17.

100 crossover between readers of boulevard novels and writings produced by the intelligentsia, such as what would be found in the so-called thick journals. For this reason, Engelstein suggests that we should reject these categories, which may often only serve as “markers of cultural value systems rather than an objective social map,” and she reminds us that, while the boulevard novel was dismissed as a crude clearinghouse for popular trends and ideas, that “the department store and the popular novel should be seen as opportunities, not travesties: the best the working person could afford and certainly better than nothing.”90 Our ability to look closely at the worth of these works is hampered if they are pre-classified as a poor man's excuse for literature. Rosalind Marsh concurs, arguing that now that scholarly studies of popular literature and culture are becoming more common, we may be able to begin examining the class issues that existed around the works of this genre, and that we must consider the possibility that the attacks on boulevard literature by critics of the era might represent arrogance, envy about the popularity of the mass marketed novels, a desire to retain control over intellectual culture, and perhaps sexism on the part of male critics who were simply agitated by Russian women’s apparent desire for more opportunities in education, society, and sexuality.91

Echoing historian Joan W. Scott, I would add to this that as we look deeper at the problems of class and gender that defined the boulevard novel, we must also keep in mind the issues of class and gender that today may continue to cloud our view.92

90 Engelstein, 387, 403.

91 Marsh, Rosalind. “Travel and the Image of the West in Russian Women’s Popular Novels of the Silver Age.” New Zealand Slavonic Journal 38, 2004. 21-22.

92 Scott, Joan Wallach. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. 2-9.

101 Though the types of emancipation sought by the new woman increased in clarity and intensity in the literature produced by women through the first two decades of the twentieth century, it was ultimately non-fictional events that were to carry more weight when it came to the making and unmaking of gender equality. The advent of World War I, for instance, ushered both women and men into new and unexpected positions. Political scientist Alfred G. Meyer points out that war often exposes the flaws in the heteronormative formulation of masculine and feminine traits, which inevitably changes the balance of gender relations for a time. By the middle of 1917, more than fourteen million men had been mobilized, and this took a toll on all levels of society at home - many industries were drastically reduced or shuttered completely (including many that had had high numbers of female workers, such as textile and garment manufacturing), families found themselves without breadwinners, and waves of women began to work either in agriculture or move to more urban areas to seek employment; many of these women had never had to work for wages before, but soon women were driving trucks, working on the railroads and as secretaries, accountants, teachers, metalworkers, railroad workers, and miners, and institutes and universities found themselves forced to open their doors to women for training.93 Women also went to the front, primarily working as medics, while women at home, especially those with the means and the time, volunteered with various support efforts, and while all of these new developments fuelled the various women’s emancipation movements, the government, preoccupied by war, was generally unresponsive; perhaps equally as damaging to feminist solidarity was the lack of support

93 Meyer, Alfred G. “The Impact of World War I on Russian Women's Lives.” In Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 210-14.

102 for working women by the wealthier bourgeois feminist groups, which sharpened the already-growing class resentments.94

Attention, of course, moved from war abroad to Revolution at home in 1917.

Rochelle Ruthchild, discussing women’s role in the Revolution, particularly the major demonstrations on February 23 – International Women’s Day – and March 19, 1917, suggests that these large-scale protests, in which women demanded equal rights for women including suffrage and the overthrow of the tsar, are undervalued in histories of the Revolution, despite the fact that women had been the initiators in several large-scale strikes and demonstrations leading up the Revolution, often physically and sometimes destructively.95 After the March demonstration, the Provisional Government granted women the right to vote and enacted a number of other reforms that made it possible for women to be elected to city and local councils, attend school at all levels, and enter legal and civil services, and though this put Russia ahead of most other countries as far as equal public opportunities were concerned, there were still many issues left unaddressed, and of the course the question of formal versus factual equality remained.96 When, on

October 24, the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government, the question of suffrage faded into the background, as a one-party system precluded much choice as far as voting rights went, and the assumption was that equality amongst workers and citizens would eventually ensure equality between the sexes.

The writings and speeches of V.I. Lenin (1870-1924) and Lev Trotsky (1879-

94 ibid., 219-23.

95 Ruthchild, Rochelle Goldberg. Equality & Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905-1917. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. 212-20.

96 ibid., 231-32.

103 1940) provide evidence that after the Revolution, Kollontai's version of the new woman was not immediately realized, and if we cannot argue that she began to move backward, we may at least argue that she did not move in a direction of her own design. A different but similarly larger-than-life feminine ideal was being born. Trotsky did not diverge as wildly from the ideals espoused in women’s emancipatory literature as did Lenin.

Trotsky, in a 1923 article titled “Ot staroi sem’i – k novoi” (“From the old family to the new”), understood that without equality in the home, there could be no equality in public, because a woman confined to the home cannot participate in social life to the degree that men may.97 From this, we may ascertain that Trotsky saw clearly that equality in public life was contingent on equality in private life, and he propagated the idea that washing, food preparation, sewing and mending, and education should be moved to the public domain, in order to allow women freedom from their domestic responsibilities. In contrast to Lenin, he supported the idea that these collective working units should be the undertaking of communities comprised of conscious and respectful individuals while the

State was yet unable to provide such organization, noting that only careful and conscientious building will prevent bureaucratic fictions from misdirecting progress.98

Further, in a speech given at the Third All-Union Conference on the Protection of

Motherhood and Children, Trotsky boldly proclaimed that any society’s values and morals could be judged by its attitudes towards women, mothers, and children,99 and

97 Trotsky, L.D. Сочинения. Vol. 21. Москва-Ленинград, 1927. Web. 12 Oct. 2014. First published in Pravda, 13 June 1923.

98 ibid.

99 ibid., address to the Third All-Union Conference on Protection of Motherhood and Children delivered 7 Dec. 1925. First published in Pravda and Izvestia, 17 Dec. 1925.

104 even more pointedly demanded in a 1925 article titled “Stroit’ sotsializm – znachit osvobozhdat’ zhenshchinu is okhraniat’ mat’” (“To Build Socialism Means to Liberate

Women and Protect Mothers”) that every new law before its passing should be judged based on its effects on mothers.100 Though Trotsky did not prescribe the types of emancipation that Kollontai or Nagrodskaia supported, it is clear that he was attentive to the fetters of domesticity and their wider effects, and that he understood that the lived experiences of women did not always reflect official laws and doctrines.

As is perhaps well-known, however, it was the ideas of Lenin that were to set the stage for the wholesale transition from women’s emancipation to a worker’s state. In a speech at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women given on November 19, 1918,

Lenin’s revolutionary principles are clearly marked by a move to make the State the ultimate arbiter of emancipation and an individual’s worth. Though he declares that abolishing divorce proceedings and granting all rights to all children, legitimate and illegitimate, will make women for the first time totally equal, the real crux of his argument is clear: “Советская власть делает все, чтобы женщина самостоятельно

вела свою пролетарскую социалистическую работу”101 – the primary goal of women’s independence is to allow them to serve the State. This statement and others of its kind move very close to addressing the question, appearing here once again, of who determines what types of happiness are allowed legitimacy, and by whom, with an

100 ibid. First published in Za Novyi Byt, Dec. 1925.

101 Lenin, V.I. Sochineniia. Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1950, Vol. 28. 160-61. First published in Izvestia 253, Nov. 20, 1918. [The Soviet government is doing everything to ensure that the woman is able to do independently engage in proletarian, socialist work. - my trans.]

105 answer that is as deeply grounded in patriarchal structures as the conditions that first compelled women to seek emancipation in the first place. A further problem appears when one considers Lenin’s statement in a speech delivered at the Fourth Moscow City

Conference of Non-Party Working Women on September 23, 1919, “O zadachakh zhenskogo rabochego dvizheniia v sovetskom respublike” (“The Tasks of the Working

Women’s Movement in the Soviet Republic”). On one hand, he declares that everyone knows that equality in the workplace does not mean equality in domestic matters, and that “это домашнее хозяйство в большинстве случаев является самым

непроизводительным, самым диким и самым тяжким трудом,” and on the other hand he suggests that it is women’s work to organize institutions and cooperatives in which they deal with the collectivization of what one can only surmise he thought of as women’s work.102 While there is certainly some merit in wanting to develop these organization based on women’s own demands and ideas, it still relegates the collectivization and performance of domestic work to women, and therefore leaves domestic work as a woman’s domain, however public that domain may be.

It is clear that ideas of emancipation have by this point been subsumed under sloganeering, rather than formulated as a service and a right given to citizens of the new

State.

Though the Revolution marked a swift transition on nearly every level of society, politics, and the economy, there were threads that ran unbroken through the fall of imperialism and rise of socialism; the woman question is one of those threads. The

102 ibid., Vol 30. 25-26. First published in Pravda 213, Sept. 25, 1919. [Housekeeping is in most cases the most unproductive, the most savage, and the most arduous labor. - my trans.]

106 commercialism of boulevard literature disappeared, but many of the issues addressed on the boulevard remained, dressed in different clothes but no less urgent, and no less controversial.

Aleksandra Kollontai and the New New Woman

Though Aleksandra Kollontai is certainly remembered for her influential and controversial political career, her fiction has much to offer in the exploration of the true gains of the various women's emancipation movements that led up to the Revolution, and perhaps as much to offer in the examination of their losses. Kollontai, the daughter of an emancipated woman of the 1860s, had a standard childhood for the families of the privileged class; she had a good education and never really wanted for anything.103 She married her cousin, Vladimir Kollontai, in 1893, but it was not to last - she wanted more than the life of a housewife, and at the end of the 1890s, she decided that she had to go to

Zurich to study, following in the footsteps of the nigilistki of the 1860s; though she was able to stay for only a year before feeling compelled to return to her young son Misha in

Petersburg, she never returned to her husband, and this decision marked a break between her life as a young woman of privilege and her entrance into a life of politics and devotion to revolution.104

Though she had grown up in a financially comfortable and intellectually supportive environment, Kollontai found that she could not align herself with the tenets of bourgeois feminism and its focus on social, as opposed to political and economic

103 Farnsworth, Beatrice. Aleksandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980. 4-5.

104 ibid., 14-16.

107 issues, and after 1905, she became increasingly interested in the interaction of the woman question with socialism. Seeing clearly that the socialist position that gender inequality would be addressed by default given a broad overhaul of the political and economic structures of the country, Kollontai was keen to make herself a public figure that kept questions of gender in the public eye. Unfortunately, in 1908, her outspokenness put her in the line of sight of the tsarist police, who had recently declared her an enemy for her agitational work, and she was forced to flee the country, leaving for Germany and staying abroad until 1917.105 After her return, Kollontai began immediately to be at clear and public odds with Lenin and the direction that he chose for the Party and the State, particularly over his approval of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and Russia's exit from World

War I, but he recognized after the start of the Civil War that her power as an orator and her ability to rally support for the Bolsheviks was indispensable, at least for a time.106

Suffice it to say, there is not space here to provide a comprehensive history of Kollontai’s work on socialist feminism, but as a political figure and a writer, her career and production illustrate well the feminist hopes and disappoints of the Revolution.

Kelly sums up neatly the fact that, after the Revolution, though Bolshevik policy had granted to women many of the rights that pre-Revolutionary feminists worked toward, issues of gender were reduced to bullet-points and nuances of social interaction were dismissed outright; additionally, in matters of cultural production, the Bolsheviks supported “an aesthetic peculiarly hostile to the forms of expression which modernist

105 ibid., 37.

106 ibid., 128.

108 women writers had evolved.”107 Now that the demands of feminism were supposedly met, it began to appear as an unnecessary or redundant movement, and the focus on collectivity and anti-individualism meant that broad theorizations of gender supplanted deeper explorations of equality, expression, and the individual. The relationship between the individual and society transformed into the relationship between the citizen and the

State; the distinction is crucial. The female citizen became a topic of discussion, rather than Woman writ large. Under these circumstances, with the fate of the State still uncertain, devising and depicting positive models of femininity took on a political dimension that calls to mind again the central question of Verbitskaia’s novel: who determines what types of happiness and fulfillment are allowed legitimacy? This very question was up for debate in the years following the Revolution.

The issue of sexuality became an important talking point. The early Bolshevik government had taken a great interest in sex, and discussions concerning sexual behaviors were carried out in all sorts of media: “party platforms, sociological studies, surveys, health brochures, journals, newspapers, special handbooks, published diaries, and letters to editors.”108 The young revolutionaries, already engaged in redefining sexuality outside of the constructs of religion, law, and bourgeois morality, had the sudden opportunity to institutionalize their new thoughts on sexuality and morality in a brand new State's structure. As Eric Naiman shrewdly observes, however, though public discussions about sexuality had the ability to draw people in and covertly involve them in politics, it was not sex, but private life itself that became the covert focus of these

107 Kelly, 179.

108 Carleton, 1-2.

109 discussions; sex became the focal point in “a national polemic concerned with eliminating differences - not sexual differences but the difference between public and private life.”109 As the discussion grew larger, so too did the collective. The fervor around new sexualities and new forms of individual fulfillment and expression could therefore ironically be transformed into a homogenization of thought.

Kollontai herself, in both her fiction and her non-fiction, attempts to negotiate the new and awkward relationship between sex, gender, and the State, and to offer readers tactics and ideas which they might use in their own negotiations. In her essay

“Otnoshenie mezhdu polami i klassovaia bor’ba” (“Relations between the sexes and class struggle”), Kollontai criticizes both the bourgeois approach to sexuality, in which it is argued that individuals should simply shake off their conservative fetters, and the socialist approach, which promises that these problems will be dealt with by default when larger social problems are solved. These misled notions, she believes, indicate that no one is yet ready to address the deeper psychological issues that play out between the sexes. In her formulation, the existential loneliness that people feel, which is caused by a disconnection from the collective, creates unhealthy dependencies and behaviors between romantic partners, and all the negative aspects of sexual relations, such as possessiveness and double standards, spring from this.110 She adds to this in her 1921 essay “Tezisi o kommunisticheskoi morali v oblasti brachnykh otnoshenii” (“Theses on Communist morals in the sphere of marital relations”), in which she discusses the fact that, as marital

109 Naiman, Eric. Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 102-03.

110 Kollontai, Novaia moral', 48-49.

110 relations change in practical terms under Communism, interpersonal dynamics should be given concerted attention. Here again she reiterates the need for devotion to the collective, and she calls for sexual freedom but also warns against promiscuity, particularly prostitution.111 While her objection to prostititution may be classified as both feminist and political, her distaste for promiscuity, positioned against her call for sexual liberation, seems to indicate that she was not calling for total abandon in this area.

Historian Elizabeth Wood makes the case that prostitution in the revolutionary era became a symbol; it came to represent the evils and exploitative nature of capitalism, and at the same time, the victimization of the prostitute came to represent the plight of the new nation, which had to be saved from decay and exploitation.112 After the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921, however, it once again began to symbolize the dangers of capitalism, and “the uncontrolled sexuality of the prostitute” was seen as an embodiment of “the anarchy and danger of market relations”.113 Wood looks at the two different fears engendered by the seeming return to capitalism during the time of the NEP, noting sharply that the vilification of the NEPman was related to his economic behavior, while the “NEPka,” meaning his mistress or wife, was seen as a greedy and sexually needy figure of capitalist consumption, a double standard that puts women in a clearly subordinate position.114 The female prostitute represented a power struggle as much as, or

111 Kollontai, Aleksandra. “Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations.” Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai. Trans. Alix Holt. London: Allison & Busby, 1977. Web. 19 Oct. 2014. First published in Kommunistka 12, 1921.

112 Wood, Elizabeth A. “Prostitution Unbound: Representations of Sexual and Political Anxieties in Postrevolutionary Russia.” In Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture, Jane T. Costlow, Stephanie Sandler, and Judith Vowles, eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. 125.

113 ibid., 126-29. 114 ibid., 131.

111 perhaps more than, she represented anxieties about sex.

Another similar issue was that of abortion. In 1920, the Kommisariats of Health and Justice legalized abortion, provided it was performed by a doctor and not by a midwife, and so the USSR became the first country to legalize abortion. It should be noted, however, that this decision was not focused on giving women freedom of choice, but simply recognized abortion as a social and economic necessity, and in 1936, it was legally criminalized, because it was determined that the economic necessity was gone.115

Throughout the 1920s, it is estimated that abortion was the second-most popular form of birth control, following coitus interruptus, with young mothers being the majority of those seeking the procedure; condoms and diaphragms were not widely available, so it was often the only option.116 By the late 1920s, abortions were outnumbering births, and though the initial law allowing abortion had not been created with women’s rights in mind, women certainly felt that a right had been taken from them when abortion was outlawed again in the mid-1930s.117 As with prostitution, struggles over economic fitness and political power played out on the battlegrounds of women's bodies and sexuality.

This is particularly poignant when we consider that, to Kollontai, the single woman, because of a long history of disenfranchisement, is more dependent on economic changes than any other group, and therefore provides a barometer for the success and

115 Goldman, Wendy. “Women, Abortion, and the State, 1917-36.” Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation. Eds. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 243-44.

116 ibid., 245-46.

117 ibid., 263-65.

112 failures of economic and political change.118 Kollontai warns against glamorizing the new woman as some sort of tenacious individual, and argues that in truth, it is those working-class women who have been forced by circumstance to depend on their community who are most prepared for revolutionary struggle, as they recognize the need for collective power.119 In her fiction, these single women of the working classes come to life, and they are dropped into scenarios with which Kollontai's contemporaries would have been familiar, working to define themselves in a new world that is itself not quite yet defined. Her protagonists are very similar, and in truth, the trajectories of their stories are similar as well: determined young woman is devoted to the Party and yet her attention is split between her work and a man who is, invariably, a cad, and the story follows her escape into independence. Because of the repetitive nature of her narratives, I will focus on only one of her works, her 1922 novel Bol’shaia liubov’ (A Great Love), and as we shall see, the great dividing line of the Revolution was porous; several concerns and themes of the pre-Revolutionary still abound.

The opening of the novel leaves no doubt about the core of the struggles faced by the protagonist, Natasha. She is parting from her married lover Senya, she thinks for the last time, and their final goodbye is shown to be somewhat less painful to her than the insult that she hears in his farewell remarks:

В вагоне, когда поезд увозил ее от него навсегда, а мимо окно, за сеткой мелкого дождя, мелькали незнакомые виды чужой страны, она продолжала ощущать беспокойную боль, неловкость на сердце, будто зуб скучно, назойливо ныл. Казалось, мучило не расставание навсегда, а его слова о том, что на работе, в любимом деле и “без нее

118 Kollontai, Novaia moral', 29-30.

119 ibid., 32.

113 обойдутся”. Значит, он не ценит ее сил? Не верит, что она нужна для их дела? Только к вечеру, когда спустились сумерки и вагон опустел, она заплакала о нем, о том, что больше не увидит его глаз - мыслителя, не поймает детской усмешки на этом строгом лице человека, чье имя было авторитетом в известном кругу.120

The political background is clear, and the description of the novel’s players and central conflict is likewise presented without room for misinterpretation. Their affair had started with her as a happy single woman, with a life full of friends and work for the Party, and though she is devoted to him, we learn as the novel progresses that Natasha has often felt unfulfilled by Senya; his worry for his wife (whose traditionalism irks Natasha) and his inability to perceive what Natasha truly wants from him are constant foils for their romance. Their first sexual encounter is out of balance; Senya's overwhelming sexual urges lead him to ignore Natasha's plea to at least let her rinse toothpaste out of her mouth before ravaging her, and while this prevents her from truly enjoying the experience, she cannot help but fall in love with him, in a way that she describes as

“благоговейно”, while for him, “он хотел, чтобы она любила в нем не бога, а

мужчину.”121 This dynamic continues throughout the novel; for her to feel loved completely, he has to know and want every aspect of her, while for him to feel loved as a

120 Kollontai, Aleksandra. Bol'shaia liubov'. Povesti, Rasskazy. Spb: Izdatel'skii Dom “Azbuka- klassika”, 2008, 204-05. [So she had left to catch the train which was to carry her away from him forever. Gazing through the film of rain on the compartment window at the unfamiliar scenery flashing past her she tried to shake off the painful anxiety which had settled in her heart, throbbing dully, like a toothache. The contemptuous way he'd referred to her work, that remark of his that her Party comrades would 'manage very nicely without her' had overshadowed the agony of this last parting. Why, he attached absolutely no importance at all to her work and the huge amount of energy she put into it! As far as he saw it her work was expendable! It was only as dusk was falling and the compartment emptied that she had begun to cry about him; she cried for those wonderful intelligent eyes of his which she would never see again, and for that childlike grin which so often lit up the stern face of a man who was, after all, an authority, a figure of power in the revolutionary circles in which they both moved. - Trans. Porter, Cathy. A Great Love. New York: Norton, 1981. 33-34.]

121 ibid., 221-22. [reverently / he wanted her to love him like a man, not like a God - my trans.]

114 man, only sexual passion is necessary. Kollontai is here clearly addressing in fictional form the need for an overhaul of relations between the sexes.

After several months of separation, Natasha becomes happy once more, because she has once again become involved in Party affairs and she is free to spend her time in any way that she sees fit; she does not have to cater to Senya or worry about feelings of neglect, and instead can read peacefully and simply experience “радость 'бытия'.”122

Even better, “рабочая деловая атмосфера стала давать Наташе новое

удовлетворение. Она ощущала себя винтиком в общем, дружно завертевшемся

механизме. Она была нужна.”123 The relief that Natasha feels when she returns to her work and has shaken off the bonds of passionate love epitomizes Kollontai's modern, emancipated new woman.

Natasha, however, is not quite free; against her better judgment, she agrees to meet Senya again for a few days in a far-off town, and the rest of the novel is a sustained exploration of the suffocating effects of misguided romantic love. Natasha, as always, is charged with paying for their lodging at a hotel – two rooms, so that they can avoid creating suspicion – and ends up spending most of her time alone, as Senya has made arrangements to meet with a distinguished old professor in town. Feelings of isolation turn to feelings of imprisonment; Natasha describes her room as a “конура,”

(“kennel”),124 and as the days wear on, she finds herself pacing up and down the hallway, desperate and delirious, checking for his return again and again, in vain. It is a kind of

122 ibid., 227. [the joy of just being alive - my trans.]

123 ibid., 226. [the work atmosphere began to give Natasha a new satisfaction. She felt herself to be a part of a whole, which ran like a well-oiled machine. She was needed. - my trans.] 124 ibid., 241.

115 insanity that recalls the cloying atmosphere of the Gothic romance: “Все та же скучная

отельная тишина, все так же тускло, по-ночному освещен коридор, все так же

скучно краснеет, убегая вдоль коридора, противно мягкий ковер... Если б не этот

ковер - она издала услышала бы, узнала бы его шаги...”125

After days of being driven crazy by neglect and longing, Natasha begins to resent

Senya and his disregard, particularly regarding her work. She begins to see the sickness in their relationship, and wonders to herself: “Но что, если он 'прислушивался' к ее

мнению, будто считался с ним только потому, что она - 'его Наташа', нравящаяся

ему женщина?”126 Finally, Natasha confronts him; she has become cold, and the devotion that she felt for him has worn out. She tells him directly that their relationship is a failure, that is marked by a “странное неравенство,” and though she has much more to say to him, her view of him has changed so drastically that she spares him her harsh words.127 She has broken down the walls of her prison.

Putting none too fine a point on it, Kollontai closes her novel with this: “В вагоне

Наташа уже не думает о Семене Семеновиче, ни о своих переживаниях. Она роется

в бумагах, в деловых письмах. Что-то уничтожает, что-то переписывает. Душою,

мыслями она уже вся принадлежит работе, их делу...”128 The new woman’s spirit is

125 ibid., 259. [Just the same boring hotel silence, just the same dull, dim nighttime corridor, just the same offensively soft red rug running along the corridor floor … If it weren't for the rug, she would be able to hear him, to recognize his step... - my trans.]

126 ibid., 247. [But what if he had only been pretending to listen to her opinion, because he considered her only 'his Natasha,' his woman? - my trans.]

127 ibid., 283. 128 ibid., 288. [On the train, Natasha had already forgotten about Semen Semenovich and their experiences together. She rustles through paper and work letters. Something is destroyed, something is rewritten. Her soul and her thoughts already belong completely to work. - my trans.]

116 finally liberated. The aspirations of her predecessors – Nagrodskaia's Tania in particular – have been realized, and she is free to devote herself completely to her own livelihood.

To Kollontai, the domestic sphere and women’s place in it was a reflection of society at large, and the relationship between women and men in her fiction represents of a microcosm of success and its failures of the changing landscape. Workers, representing collective interests and embodied by women, are positioned against the bourgeois, who are generally men and who represent exploitation and self-absorption.129 The negative characters, such as Senya, take advantage of the good will and energies of the positive characters, and these positive characters inevitably see that the only way to preserve their energies and direct them to productive ends is to remove the negative characters from their lives.130 For Natasha to ensure her own health and survival, the exploitative elements of her life – romantic passion and the selfishness of the bourgeois are here entangled, becoming one single evil – must be rejected entirely.

Naiman has characterized the type of imprisonment experienced by Natasha and

Kollontai's other protagonists as basically misogynistic on Kollontai's part, a landscape in which women are innately marked by a common weakness, and he draws a connection between this phenomenon and the Gothic impulse. This impulse, he writes, is antithetical to the progressive and rationalist program of the Bolsheviks to which Kollontai presumably subscribed, and he asks, “[w]hat could be more unsuited to the Communist worldview than ‘haunted’ fiction in which the gaze flutters nervously sideways and

129 Ingemanson, Birgitta. “The Political Function of Domestic Objects in the Fiction of Aleksandra Kollontai,” Slavic Review 48:1, 1989. 76.

130 ibid., 80.

117 backward rather than fixing itself on an on inevitable shining future? […] Why use a form of writing whose essence is the eruption of repressed terrors if these terrors are no longer repressed?”131 Naiman's inquiries beg the question. Kollontai's writings, both fictional and non-, consistently indicate her awareness of the fact that no sudden new ideologies could instantaneously reverse the social dynamics and internalized behaviors and beliefs that had dominated for centuries, and part of the reason that she was deemed so controversial by Lenin and the Party was her continued insistance that within prisons yet undiscovered lived millions of women who were still shackled to old value systems and ways of living. Her fiction illustrates this belief more than her political writings, and though her message may seem heavy-handed at times, the message itself should not be thrown out; much like the works of the boulevard, Kollontai's fiction has often been dismissed out of hand over charges of simplicity and sensationalism. In fact, a former colleague of Kollontai’s, Polina Vinogradskaia, called Kollontai the “Verbitskaia of communist journalism”,132 which is a clear indication that Kollontai's work was perceived as low-brow – too blindly idealistic at best, and at worst, nothing more than a potboiler. Political scientist Jinee Lokaneeta has suggested that it is Kollontai's

“unorthodox writings on the realm of the personal”133 that both threatened her contemporaries and has dimmed her name in historical memory to a large degree, and here too, there are similarities with the treatment of boulevard writing.

131 Naiman, Eric. “When a Communist Writes Gothic: Aleksandra Kollontai and the Politics of Disgust.” Signs 22.1 (1996): 9, 12.

132 Vinogradskaia, Polina. Pamiatnye vstrechi. Moskva: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1972. 53. Quoted in Carleton, 46.

133 Lokaneeta, Jinee. “Alexandra Kollontai and Marxist Feminism.” Economic and Political Weekly 36:17, 2001. 1412.

118 Kollontai wrote most of her fiction in the mid-1920s while on diplomatic assignment in Oslo, and the separation between her – the new woman – and the nation in which she hoped the new woman would flourish is particularly poignant. Kollontai had been appointed director of the Zhenotdel, the women’s department of the Party, in

September of 1920, despite the fact that she was known to be staunch in her radical views of gender equality and had open disagreements with Lenin.134 As director, she worked on a number of issues that were controversial not only within the Party but for the women that she was hoping to appeal to – public childcare, abolition of prostitution, and the plight of the peasant woman were all matters that were central in her mind – and while they were met with varying degrees of acceptance, her larger problem was her work in opposition to the NEP, and she was relieved of her duties as director of the Zhenotdel in

February of 1922 and set to her post in Norway.135 The Zhenotdel did not fare well after she left, and in 1930, weakened as it was by the culture of the NEP, it was officially disbanded.136 While in Oslo, Kollontai spent her time writing, and though she was able to return to Moscow at the end of 1925, the world that she returned to was changing, and not for the better. Lenin had died the previous year, and Joseph Stalin was busily consolidating power as the General Secretary of the Central Committee.

Kollontai's trajectory through and after the Revolution traces the decline and near- demise of the new woman. It had only been two decades since the woman question was addressed by Teffi with laughter and wit and the symbolists engaged in heady dreams of

134 Farnsworth, 179.

135 ibid., 285.

136 ibid., 304-08.

119 utopia and spiritual liberation, and it had been only a decade since the boulevard writers had filled the streets with their defiant protagonists and radical revisions of gender, sexual, and cultural norms. The keys to happiness opened the wrong box, the women's emancipation movements were wrapped up again, simplified or rejected, failed by the very Revolution that they were working towards. The new woman had come into the light, briefly, and even survived the Revolution, but it was less than a decade after 1917 that she saw her opportunities begin to fade, replaced by new forms of domination.

120 CHAPTER THREE

The Years Under Stalin: Women’s Writing and Voice Against Silence

When Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s, not only the woman question and developments in women’s writing but hopes for honest and generative debate and exploration were quieted, rejected by an authoritarian regime that responded to even mild dissent with violence. Time became important only insofar as people struggled to stay alive from one day to the next, or in marking the beginning and end of World War II and the Siege of Leningrad, but for the most part, Stalin’s reign was marked by an airless and muffled stagnancy belied by cataclysmic losses and swift and merciless implementations of new policies that were often even more merciless in practice.

In 1932, the Union of Soviet Writers became the only official literary organization, and the doctrine of socialist realism in 1934 spelled the end for any writings which did not support Party goals; many writers entered into a kind of “internal emigration”, withdrawing from public literary life and writing only for themselves and for their desk drawers, and though this meant a greater chance of escaping the attention of the authorities, safety through silence was by no means guaranteed.1 The writers who conformed to Party needs generally ignored the harsh realities of life – famine; shortages; the political persecution of the Purges, which occupied the second half the

1 Kelly, Catriona. A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 1820-1992. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. 232-33.

121 1930s and reappeared in the post-war period; the real effects of the war; poverty and the fact that so many women were raising children on their own – and it is the chasm between the Party’s propaganda and the true situation which must remind us that, though some of this literature is “harmless kitsch” to contemporary Western ideas, it was actually quite dangerous and symbolized unbelievably harsh censorship.2

Because of the peculiarities of this era, women’s writing during these years necessarily withdrew from questions of sexuality, marriage, economic opportunites, and personal autonomy in the public and private spheres, and they became marked instead by the distance between the official narrative of Soviet development given by the State and the struggle to create one’s own narrative in an era marked by terror, sickness, silence, and war. Mary Buckley points out that thoughtful discussion of the woman question became a “luxury” compared to questions of basic physical survival during the Stalinist years.3 This statement is borne out by the writers of the period, many of whom write of the difficulties of material survival in voices that insist on spiritual survival simply by being audible. Barbara Heldt discusses the fact that, while male writers in Russian literature have been responsible for the majority of the portrayals of women that have explored the feminine interior, these portrayals center around “the visual trope of woman objectivized and named by man, who is doing the fictive viewing and narrative commentary”, and Heldt suggests that the development of women’s writing, particularly in the areas of autobiography and lyric poetry, illuminate the creation of literary traditions

2 ibid., 252.

3 Buckley, Mary. Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989. 137.

122 in general by casting light on the voice that rises to begin to name its own experience.4

Male writers, though perhaps delving into the female psyche, lack the subjectivity necessary to name the woman’s experience from the inside, while female writers, aware of their position in a small eddy unable to enter the major current, seek a voice and a language that allow them to determine and define their own direction forward. In this era, left without access to the woman question, the tradition of women’s writing developed into a focused search for subjectivity and for an authoritative voice of one’s own. And as we shall see, part of the method by which women of this era developed an authoritative voice was in acting to preserve the voices around them that were quieted during these years. The physical and emotional toll of war and the Terrors left the nation in great need of care, and there was a clear necessity for women to amplify their traditional roles as caregivers, nurturers, sustainers, and mothers.

Beginning with the historical context overlaid on the later years of Aleksandra

Kollontai, whose increasing silence during these years is an emblem of the increasing silence overall, I will then briefly discuss socialist realism, which sits closest to the official narrative of the period. Following that, I will look at the poetry and prose of Ol'ga

Berggol'ts, who, in her position as the voice of the Blockade, is located somewhere between the official narrative and something much more traumatic and personal, and from there, I will move on to discuss the works of Lidiia Chukovskaia and then Anna

Akhmatova, both of whom engaged passionately with the atrocities of the Purge from the point of view of mother and memorialist. While my study up to this point has been

4 Heldt, Barbara. Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. 8-9.

123 primarily focused on prose, this chapter will engage with some verse of this period, as poetry is a primary location for the development of the authoritative voice, and because poetry cleary pushes against the prosaic narrative of the State. Finally, I will discuss aspects of Marina Tsvetaeva's recastings of myth and her own life, in her struggle to find a poetic voice that responded to no authority but her own. This movement will take us outward, from the centralized narratives of the State to the distant reaches where voices that refused these narratives took it as a right to create their own.

Finishing Kollontai: Silencing the New Woman

As the specific chronology of historical events in this period bear somewhat less weight in the developing tradition of women's writing than the pervasive atmosphere of fear, silence, and trauma, I will position the political and social changes that occurred throughout the rise of Stalin's rule against the later years and politial career of Aleksandra

Kollontai. Kollontai died nearly one year to the day before Stalin, and the decline of her influence and her voice are emblematic of the period between the mid-1920s and the beginning of the 1950s. Kollontai, after all, had been the loudest voice in continuing debates about the woman question, and her silencing parallels the gradual removal of the woman question from both politics and literature.

During leaves from the diplomatic positions she held in Norway (1923-26, 1927-

30), Mexico (1926-27) and Sweden (1930-45), Kollontai continued to participate in contentious discussions about policies that affected women, and questions of abortion, divorce, and social support for mothers were all matters that brought about great conflict

124 between Kollontai, the Party, and Zhenotdel leaders. Under the new proposed Family

Law that was being developed in 1925, unregistered marriages were to be recognized and alimony was to be required from husbands in case of divorce; while this was supposedly meant to protect women, the payment of alimony was often an impossibility for the impoverished, and a dynamic was kept in place in which women were seen as needing special protections. This dynamic, Kollontai argued, would be abolished by centralized and collective responsibility for the care of citizens, while the continued requirement of alimony reinforced a basically sexist and paternalist treatment of the so-called weaker sex.5 Her argument had a small group of supporters, some mild critics, and many aggressive detractors, and ultimately, Kollontai's position was rejected. The new Family

Law passed in 1926 recognized de facto marriages for those co-habitating, allowed single-party appeals for divorce, and required that year-long alimony payments be paid to ex-wives; these new policies, as Beatrice Farnsworth writes, were ostensibly meant to protect women, but they still carried a “basically conservative stabilizing function” which left women in a subordinate position financially and politically.6 Additionally, the position of wife, either registered or unregistered, was subtly given privilege over that of the single woman, leaving in place a value that Kollontai would have deemed too bourgeois for the new society.

In 1927, oppositionists led by Leon Trotsky and Grigorii Zinov’ev were expelled from the Party, but Kollontai notably abstained from vocal opposition to the increasingly

5 Farnsworth, Beatrice. Aleksandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980. 348.

6 ibid., 364.

125 authoritarian Stalinist policies; Farnsworth suggests that Kollontai’s erasure from the history of the Zhenotdel in 1927 was painful to the point that she could not bear to be expelled from the Party as well, and by the late 1920s, she had developed a casual relationship with Stalin directed more by their personal interactions that by differences on political issues.7 (958). Though she occasionally came under scrutiny, she was, by and large, left to perform her diplomatic work in peace.

The Zhenotdel, despite their more conservative approach, nevertheless suffered under Stalin. During its beginnings in 1919, led by Kollontai, Smidovich, and Inessa

Armand, it had envisioned a kind of “new woman”, one with which we are familiar from

Kollontai’s writings, both fictional and non-, and they supported the creation of local and regional associations that would cater to women’s needs as homemakers and mothers, as opposed to the large-scale projects envisioned by male Party leaders.8 After the installation of the NEP in the early 1920s, the Party moved to centralize resources and attentions, which led to the sidelining of questions of domestic and private life and the sorts of smaller local efforts that the Zhenotdel supported. Concerted discussions of sexuality and personal relationships were abandoned, and instead, male doctors were assigned to create some kind of empirical sexual code; the Zhenotdel stepped back almost completely from debates on sexuality around 1923, when Kollontai was safely removed to Norway; Clements suggests that this new reticence may have been due to their suspicion that by keeping quiet on this volatile subject, they could continue their work

7 Farnsworth, Beatrice. “Conversing with Stalin, Surviving the Terror: The Diaries of Aleksandra Kollontai and the Internal Life of Politics.” Slavic Review 69.4 (2010): 958.

8 Clements, Barbara Evans. “The Utopianism of the Zhenotdel.” Slavic Review 51.3 (1992): 485-87.

126 quietly, but in 1930, after Stalin determined that the woman question was solved, the

Zhenotdel was dissolved by the Central Committee, its work absorbed into larger agitprop bodies, and its workers sent to other posts.9 The Zhenotdel had two mild and short-lived successors, the zhensektor and the zhenorganizator; the former operated mainly in more urban areas and the latter in more rural spaces, but both had the broader task of mobilizing women to participate in political campaigns and engage more with

Party ideology, rather than deal with issues specific to women. Both of these groups existed only from 1931 to 1934, when even they were declared redundant.10

The transformation of women's roles in society between the 1920s and 1930s was significant. During the 1920s, the image of the mother who devotes herself not to her own children but to all children in service to the Soviet cause was commonly found in fiction and popular journals.11 Personal maternal attachments in this era were seen as irrelevant because they did not directly serve the socialist cause, and they were to be replaced by what Nadezhda Krupskaia would come to term a “collective mother”, wherein the bond with the biological child is secondary to the desire to mother new nation.12 Despite this new nationalistic approach to motherhood, women throughout the

9 ibid., 490-95.

10 Buckley, Women and Ideology, 124.

11 Fedor Gladkov’s 1925 novel Tsement (Cement) brought to life one emblematic mother, Dasha Chumalova, whose connection and maternal bond with her daughter Nurka is exchanged for devotion to the Party. Jenny Kaminer reports that a study published in 1928 indicated that only one-quarter of women looked favorably on Dasha, compared to half of the men polled, but these sorts of reports do not perhaps provide a true picture of how influential such a story would have been on the populace. (Kaminer, Jenny. Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. 89. For an interesting look at the ways the different edits of this novel indicated changing ideologies, see Veselá, Pavla. “The Hardening of ‘Cement’: Russian Women and Modernization.” NWSA Journal 15.3 (2003): 104- 123. 12 Krupskaia, N. “Kollektivnaia mat’.” O nashikh detiakh 3 (1930): 1, quoted in Kaminer, Jenny.

127 1920s were still being given the message that their participation as full and conscientious citizens was necessary, and during this decade, the popular women’s journals Rabotnitsa and Krest’ianka generally attempted to honestly and fully report on new laws and policies, and they addressed elements of society and politics that they considered continuingly problematic.13 During the 1930s, however, these journals and others were forced to exchange debate and discussion for ultra-patriotic messages that were as contradictory as they were unattainable; as Lynne Attwood writes, the new woman portrayed in their pages was “confident but modest, ambitious yet self-sacrificial, heroic yet vulnerable, strong yet weak. She worked like a man, but with no thought of personal profit. She was active and innovative while in the factory or ploughing the fields, but bowed to her husband’s authority as soon as she was home.”14 Prior to the 1936 Family

Law, Rabotnitsa and Krest’ianka had given practical advice about contraception and health, but by 1936, the banning of abortion under the new Family Law - called in some venues Zakon schastlivogo materinstva, or the “Law of Happy Motherhood” - precluded such material.15 Stalin’s 1936 Family Law not only outlawed abortion, but also made divorce much more difficult to obtain, and offered mothers rewards for birthing multiple children, all of which served to both reinforce the nationalistic call to motherhood and

Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. 82.

13 Attwood, Lynne. Creating the New Soviet Woman: Women’s Magazines as Engineers of Female Identity, 1922-53. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1999. 169.

14 ibid., 171.

15 ibid., 115. Sheila Fitzpatrick notes quite correctly that debates about abortion in the Soviet 1930s are not intelligible with current Western debates of abortion; the “right to life” was not a part of the Soviet argument from any direction. Fitzpatrick, Shiela. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 153.

128 push women back into atomized family units, and with the rise of the idea of the nation as a family with Stalin (the Father) at its head, “the maternal body as well as the nation troped as mother” became the rhetorical partner to his leadership.16 The woman's role was both reduced and exponentially expanded.

Unfortunately, being in the position of caregiver during this era was complicated by shortages of food and material goods, low wages, and a lack of financial support for those institutions that were meant to ease domestic struggle, such as daycares and communal kitchens, all of which meant that the mother's double-burden was not simply double, but triple to impossible. Ironically – or perhaps quite naturally – this was precisely when new images of the nurturing, stereotypically feminine woman at the head of a comfortable, cared-for family began to take hold. Clements writes succinctly that this represented a rejection of the Marxist ideals of the abolition of the nuclear family and the hierarchical State, and that instead, the new message was that “the state would endure, that the family was the cornerstone of the state, and that women were responsible for keeping this cornerstone firmly in place.”17 Women, in short, were consigned to the role of Soviet superwoman, responsible for nurturing the nation physically and emotionally.

Mary Buckley has suggested that the Obshchestvennitsa, or the “‘public spirited woman’ or ‘female activist’,” played a larger and more varied role than is often

16 Kaminer, 91-93. For an incredibly thorough discussion of changing family laws between the Revolution and Stalin’s policies of 1936, see Goldman, Wendy Z. Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

17 Clements, Barbara Evans. “Later Developments: Trends in Soviet Women’s History, 1930 to the Present.” Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation. Eds. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 269.

129 acknowledged, one in which the initiative of individuals and small groups played an integral role in creating and sustaining the official culture of this period.18 It is only relatively recently that the Obshchestvennitsa movement has been studied as an integral force in the creation of everyday life during the years that it was an officially supported movement, from 1934 to 1941. As the story goes, Grigorii Ordzhonikidze, the Heavy

Industry Commissar, was inspired to call for this movement because of his discovery of a flower garden being tended by a substation manager’s wife in front of an electrical substation, and at his initiative, a movement was officially supported. Rebecca Neary characterizes the movement as one comprised of traditional motherly duties - keeping house, raising children and supporting their education, caring for working husbands - that expanded beyond the home into neighborhoods, organizations focused on nutrition, social and educational guidance, and public beautification.19

This reified the growing “cult of domesticity” and its position in a culture where women working outside the home was not only normal but officially supported, and it brought the idealized Soviet family into public by mobilizing conscientious and outward- facing mothers, who were also called on to “utilize the intimacy of the marital bond to wield a positive influence, to insist that their husbands meet state-mandated production norms”; these efforts were, unsurprisingly, not always met with open arms.20 Overall, this movement can be seen as an integral element in styling the new interaction between

18 Buckley, Mary. “The Untold Story of the Obshchestvennitsa in the 1930s.” Women in the Stalin Era. Ed. Melanie Ilič. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. 151-52.

19 Neary, Rebecca Balmas. “Mothering Socialist Society: The Wife-Activists’ Movement and the Soviet Culture of Daily Life, 1934-41.” Russian Review 58 (1999): 398-400.

20 ibid., 401-06.

130 public and private called for the State during the Stalin years.21

More than seventy percent of women from the ages of sixteen to fifty-nine were employed by the end of the 1930s,22 but despite the image presented in official propaganda, they were not seen as equal to their male counterparts. Male workers in the

1930s objected to women working as skilled laborers, and this was not from some misdirected urge to protect the “weaker sex” – it was a function of plain sexism. Labor analysts offered supposedly objective reasons for why women were relegated to lower- paying, unskilled positions, such as “family responsibilities, poor skills and education, and physical weakness,” but female workers pointed to antagonism from co-workers and bosses as a primary reason, which they saw as representative of larger structural inequalities.23 Throughout 1931, the State attempted, as Wendy Goldman writes, “to regender the entire work force from above” by replacing men with women in various professions, and though managers and directors of factories were essentially given quotas to fill regarding the employment of women, many of them resisted if possible, and these efforts often created yet more conflict between the sexes on the job.24 As the decade wore on, an image of a Soviet sisterhood began to develop among female workers, partially because it advanced the idea of the elevated position of women as a distinct group and partially because women, enduring ridicule and abuse from male co-workers, banded

21 For an excellent overview of the creation of daily life during the 1930s, see Fitzpatrick, Shiela. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

22 Clements, “Later Developments,” 270.

23 Goldman, Wendy. “Babas at the Bench: Gender Conflict in Soviet Industry in the 1930s.” Women in the Stalin Era. Ed. Melanie Ilič. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. 74.

24 ibid., 78-82.

131 together as a matter of necessity.25 Soon, however, with the advent of World War II, women found themselves filling the majority of positions in the industrial workforce.

The number of people killed during the merciless political Purges which lasted from 1936 to 1939 is uncertain, but it is estimated that approximately twenty-seven million people were killed during the war, with women comprising eight percent of the military and a majority of the workforce by 1945; suffice it to say, the devastation was immense, physically and mentally, and any sense of political and personal stability was nearly impossible, even for those with steady work.26 Predictably, when the war was over, women were encouraged to make way for the men returning from battle by giving up their places in the workforce and creating stable, growing households, and as Clements writes, many women were more than happy to exchange the hardships of wartime for the seeming simplicities of “a happy family and material comforts.”27 Happiness and comfort, however, were difficult to attain; vast shortages, low wages, a shortage of housing, and a new resurgence of political persecution meant that recovery was slow to impossible. Women were tempted to return to the home by the creation in 1944 of the title of “Heroine Mother” and the creation of the order of “Motherhood Glory” and the

“Motherhood Medal”; additionally, heightened restrictions on divorce and increased incentives for mothers were put in place, marking a return to the reverence of the nurturing mother, but nevertheless, between 1945 and 1950, the number of women in the

25 Chatterjee, Choi. “Soviet Heroines and the Language of Modernity, 1930-39.” Women in the Stalin Era. Ed. Melanie Ilič. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. 57.

26 Clements, “Later Developments,” 271.

27 ibid., 273.

132 workforce had jumped from sixteen to nineteen million.28 The economy required this continued participation. The nation, however, required a growing population, and the pronatalist policies that were put in place during the 1940s were even more draconian than those of the 1930s.

The ratio of men to women after WWII was as abysmally low as 19:100 in some rural areas, with many existing families broken up as a result of deportation, occupation, and other forces, and in 1944, Nikita Khrushchev drew up a new and clearly pronatalist

Family Law that was more intense, carceral, and punitive than its predecessor.29

Khrushchev's new law deemed single-child families to be “insufficiently fertile,” and thus taxable, and he offered state aid to single mothers who wanted to have multiple children, which disallowed single women from escaping from these new pronatalist policies; additionally, in internal documents, he proposed that incarceration was the answer to those who exhibited “antireproductive behavior” such as abortion, seeking abortion, and infanticide, and new laws were put in place that would make it possible to fire women from their jobs so that they could focus on maternal duties and created special homes for single mothers, which was not so much a move to protect them from poverty as a move to monitor them in closed environments.30 Though the law did not often lay out explicitly the reason for such punitive measures, the dystopian intensity of the new policies sent the clear message that reproducing the nation was not only important, but mandatory.

28 Conze, Susanne. “Women’s Work and Emancipation in the Soviet Union, 1941-1950.” Women in the Stalin Era. Ed. Melanie Ilič. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. 227-28.

29 Nakachi, Mie. “N.S. Khrushchev and the 1944 Soviet Family Law: Politics, Reproduction, and Language.” East European Politics and Societies 20.1 (2006): 40-42.

30 ibid., 46-51.

133 In Sweden from 1930 to 1945, Kollontai watched all of these events and changes from afar, undoubtedly horrified, but she all but withdrew from politics, finally returning to Moscow to retire but continuing to stay silent on political issues. Farnsworth suggests that though many historians have attributed Kollontai's relative freedom to some old- world chivalry on Stalin’s part, or his self-serving maintenance of at least a handful of people who could point to his legitimacy as Lenin’s heir, there is evidence in archives and diaries that indicates that Kollontai consciously nurtured a friendly relationship with him in which she played a stereotypically demure and feminine part.31 Her requests for a position abroad, for example, or for advice on personal matters, show her voice as

“‘typically’ female: grateful, deferential, and warmly flattering”, and his as “supportive but patronizing”; additionally and perhaps crucially, she was both a major political figure and an older woman, meaning that he could feign respectable and straightforward debate with her.32 Farnsworth points out, however, that in hundreds of letters written during the height of Stalin’s popularity to a close friend, Ada Nilsson, Kollantai makes absolutely no mention of Stalin at all, suggesting that she was silently resistant to his reign.33 Though the simple act of omitting words on Stalin in letters may not appear overtly subversive, it represents a kind of passive resistance that, if a far cry from the vocal and insistent resistance of her earlier political career, indicate that Kollontai preserved her right to her own voice in the small corner in which such a thing remained possible. It is this right to one's voice that characterizes the tradition of women's writing under Stalin.

31 Farnsworth, “Conversing with Stalin,” 946.

32 ibid., 949-52.

33 Farnsworth, Aleksandra Kollontai, 397.

134 Socialist Realism and Shades of the Woman Question

The socialist realist novel in historical memory is uniformly bland and uniform, but as

Katerina Clark has demonstrated, though there are continuities in tropes and repetitions of particular symbols or story arcs, looking at “practical examples” of these novels will show that there is not a single model.34 There are basic themes that do hold, however – socialist realist novels, for example, commonly depict a transformation and an awakening of Soviet consciousness that relies heavily on ritual, “that part of the language of culture in which signs achieve the lowest degree of arbitrariness”;35 these rituals, then do not require large amounts of elucidation, reflecting as they do commonly understood patterns and meanings. Even within this framework, however, meaning is not entirely static, and these transformative patterns show some flexibility. Taking as an example the 1948 novel

Kruzhilikha (The Factory) by Vera Panova (1905-1973), which offers fragmented but interconnected stories about a factory and the lives of its workers and their families, it becomes clear that there is flexibility within these patterns of transformation, suggesting that even within socialist realism, traces of the traditions of women's writing may still be present.

The novel is in many ways an idyllic and hyper-positive view of Soviet life, evident from its very opening: the head of the factory, Aleksandr Ignatievich Listopad, is taking his wife Klavdia to the hospital, where she is about to give birth to their child, with

34 Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. 3-5.

35 ibid., 9.

135 everyone in a laughing mood, and after dropping her off, Listopad heads directly to the

Party meeting, where he cheerfully explains his lateness to a chuckling and understanding group. In a dramatic shift, however, it soon becomes clear that there are contentious power struggles within the factory's leadership, and even more dramatically, Listopad contacts the hospital to check on his wife only to learn that she and the unborn child have both died. We are immediately swept to her funeral, her last rites, and a brief interlude in which Listopad recalls her sweetness, and then we are quickly returned to Party politics.

The reason for his wife's quick demise becomes clear as the novel progresses; we learn that he was an absent husband with less-than-absolutely-perfect domestic and work habits, and her death is a signal that he will be given a chance to redeem himself.

For the most part, the characters and action in the novel are purely representational – they exist only to serve a purpose, in what is perhaps a neat parallel to the perfectly functional Soviet utopian world that they are idealizing. The wife of the chief engineer of the factory, for example, Margarita Valer’ianova, fills the role of obshchestvennitsa, albeit a clumsy and uncertain one, and a young factory worker, Lida, always overfulfills work quotas while also being beautiful, feminine, and an object of male attention, a perfect picture of the unattainable ideal of the era. We also learn of

Klavdia’s life and of her self-sacrificial care that she provided for her family during the war – truly self-sacrificial, as it was supposedly then that she acquired the health problems that led to her death in childbirth – and we briefly meet Listopad’s mother, who, despite her advanced age, is the director of a collective farm. So far, these women are a tableau vivant of Stalinist ideals, and with Listopad's impending transformation, all the

136 pieces are in place for a standard socialist realist novel. In the final piece of Listopad's transformation, however, there is a slight but significant deviation. Romantic love in socialist realism, as Clark has shown, is generally an auxiliary function in a larger journey to greater consciousness, and the permutation of this dynamic in the 1940s is one in which consciousness and devotion to the collective has already been attained, but perfecting the expression of these impulses requires developing honorable and fitting personal relations, thereby combining the needs of both the (domestic and personal)

“little family” and the (nationwide) “great family.”36 The growing love affair between

Listopad and the office worker Nonna Sergeevna promises to offer this development, by offering Listopad a chance to redeem his previously neglectful behavior. However,

Panova hints ominously at a repetition of this failure. After several months of courtship,

Listopad and Nonna Sergeevna have finally accepted their mutual attraction and entered into a relationship, but after their first night together, Listopad is suddenly called to

Moscow on work, and his quick departure and somewhat thoughtless communication offer shades of a familiar pattern: “Поступаться, и тесниться, и смиряться, и ждать

будет только она.”37 While Nonna Sergeevna is clearly happy to be in love with

Listopad, these lines suggest that their relationship will exhibit the same imbalance as his former marriage, albeit perhaps to a lesser degree. And as Listopad leaves, in the same car and with the same driver that took him and his doomed wife to the hospital at the beginning of the novel, he has feelings of exultation, even as they pass the hospital where

36 ibid., 202-04.

37 Panova, Vera. Kruzhilikha. Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1956. 228. [It will be left to her to give up herself, and to move closer, and to be humble, and to wait. - my trans.]

137 his wife died. It is not clear if he is heading into a changed future or into the beginning of repeating cycle.

Clark sees Listopad's personal and professional problems being rectified by his relations with Nonna Sergeevna,38 but this conclusion seems far from certain. In fact,

Clark writes that Panova’s novel offers “prophetic, if tentative and cautious, reevaluations of basic Stalinist values,”39 and I would argue that one of these reevaluations is delivered quietly but certainly in Nonna Sergeevna's seeming understanding of her future sidelining, and the narration’s subsequent reinforcement of this possibility in the cyclical nature of its ending and the perhaps ironic repetition of Listopad’s first ride. The fact that

Nonna Sergeevna is ill when Listopad bids her a quick farewell on his way to Moscow is also suggestive of a lack of harmony, and again hints at an uncomfortable parallel with the end of his marriage.

Panova won the Stalin Prize for this novel, and although its tropes and hero's journey bear all the marks of a socialist realist novel, thereby aligning satisfactorily with the State's official narrative, the subtleties of its ending call for a reading that acknowledges the possibility that Panova was quietly pointing to problematic and unequal relations between men and women. Women were certainly expected to be self- sacrificial in their private and public lives, so Nonna Sergeevna's subordinate position to

Listopad is certainly not subversive on its own, but in light of the fact that his own journey is not shown to be a resounding and definite success, the question remains: what is Nonna Sergeevna's sacrifice in service to? Panova provides no solid answer. In this

38 Clark, 205-06.

39 ibid., 213.

138 way, though her novel stands as part of the master narrative accepted and disseminated by the State, Panova's story shows that even within socialist realism, the struggle for a voice that marks the tradition of women's writing in this era is still present.

Ol'ga Berggol'ts and Official and Personal Truths

Born in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, Ol’ga Berggol’ts (1910-1975) and family relocated to the town of Uglich in 1917 to escape the civil war and returned to the newly named city of Petrograd in 1921. Berggol’ts offers a concise summary of her youth and her devlopment as a broadcaster and writer in “Popytka avtobiografii” (“Attempt at an

Autobiography”), written in 1972. Her summary of her life, of her early years with the

Komsomol and her studies in art history, is that of a young woman who was both enthusiastic for the Party and for revolution and who also had a predilection for writers that would eventually fall on the wrong side of the line – during school she met influential formalist theorists Boris Eikhenbaum, Yuri Tynianov, and Viktor Shklovsky, and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and she applies the same reverent word – “кланяюсь”

(“I bow down”) – when she writes of her gratitude to those who were influential to her growth as a woman and as a writer: Mayakovsky, Sergei Esenin, Akhmatova, Boris

Pasternak, Mikhail Zoshchenko, her nanny, her grandparents, aunts and uncles, and mother and father, indicating that she attributes to each of them a semi-equal hand in her development.40 This confluence of participation in official institutions and engagement with those reviled by official institutions was to be a conflict for Berggol’ts for the

40 Berggol’ts, Ol’ga. Sobranie Sochinenii. 3 vols. Leningrad: “Khudozhestvennaia literatura”, 1972. Vol. I. 8-14. Henceforth referred to as SS, followed by volume number.

139 entirety of her life.

After finishing at Leningrad State University in 1930 and beginning work as a journalist, she became a member of the Communist Party in 1936; she was, however, expelled from the Party and its Writer’s Union in 1937, only to be readmitted in 1938 and then soon arrested, released after several months, rehabilitated, and reinstated shortly before the end of the decade.41 Despite the trauma that these events caused her, she was assigned to Leningrad Radio at the start of the war and remained a constant presence on the airwaves until the end of the Siege, from September 1941 until January 1944. She avoids self-praise, but public reaction shows that she was beloved for her words, her dependability, and her resilience throughout these years. After the war, however, official and popular reaction to her began to take unkindly to the darkly realistic tone of her work, and though she continued to work as a journalist and writer of poetry and drama, her career was never without criticism and trouble, and by the early 1950s she was being treated for alcoholism, a problem that attracted unfortunate and disparaging attention.42

She continued to produce poetry, prose, and drama until her death in 1975. Though this quick summary necessarily omits many details of her life, it illustrates the degree to which she was in uncomfortable conflict internally and externally with the Party and its ideals, and the toll that having a dual voice – one official, one personal – took on her over the years.

Her creative and autobiographical Dnevnye zvezdy (Daytime Stars), published

41 Berggol’ts, SS I, 11-17.

42 Hodgson, Katharine. Voicing the Soviet Experience: The Poetry of Ol’ga Berggol’ts. Oxford: British Academy and Oxford University Press, 2003. 23-30.

140 between 1954 and 1959, is a free-form version of a memoir, taking not just from her life, but from history, folding back on itself with self-aware musings on writing and writers, and experimenting with joining her two voices. Katharine Hodgson suggests that this work may be an attempt to find some organic wholeness in her life that is not dictated by political dogma or machinations, in a loose structure that reflects the air of change and possibility that followed Stalin’s death.43 It is a bold experiment with a kind of historico- personal subjectivity that implies an attempt at an authoritative voice that does not diminish its feminine gender; the feminine has a constant presence in all of Berggol’ts work in every medium, particularly in her broadcasts and her poetry, and it is in these two arenas that her engagement with the mode of women’s writing during these years is at its most challenging and explicit. There was a painful schism between official and personal voice, but it is clear that she did not experience the same disjuncture between authorial and female voice.

The collection of broadcasts that she published in 1946 under the name Govorit

Leningrad (Leningrad Speaks) are as much a part of the women’s writing tradition as they are grounded in their moment and in the terrible realities of their specific time, and this sets them apart from the other works of this era – they are neither bowing to the doctrine of nor a conscious resistance to the official narrative. German forces attacked the

USSR on June 22, 1941, and in September of that year the Siege began; for 872 days,

Leningrad was under attack. Figures and memoirs indicate that it was, during this time, a city of women. All of the able-bodied men under the age of fifty-five with few exceptions were sent to war, and in the first few months of the Blockade, men accounted for the

43 ibid., 124-28.

141 majority of deaths in city; there was not a current census to indicate the population demographics during this time, but it is known that by the end of 1942, women accounted for nearly eighty percent of all factory workers in the city, working also in medicine, military, government, industry, and civil defense, and digging trenches and building fortifications, not to mention caring for children and families physically and emotionally in the face of widespread famine and illness.44

Lisa Kirschenbaum writes that the memory of the Second World War and of the

Blockade that emerged after Stalin’s death as a symbol of the strength of the nation, but that in the particulars of its portrayal by the State, certain gendered aspects of the experience of the Blockade were excised; victory was painted as largely male and militaristic, while “the allegorical identification of women’s suffering with the suffering of the nation” downplays the active participation of women by showing them as largely passive victims.45 In actuality, women’s daily efforts were in many senses at least as heroic as military action, and Berggol’ts was one of few visible figures who focused in real time on the heroism of this work; in a broadcast from December 29, 1941, she told her audience: “может быть, товарищи, мы увидим наш сегодняшний хлебный паек,

этот бедный, черный кусочек хлеба, в витрине какого-нибудь музея.”46 She understood that these seemingly insignificant things were indeed worthy of commemoration, and she understood that her audience needed to hear that. In the

44 Simmons, Cynthia and Nina Perlina. Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. 2-7.

45 Kirschenbaum, Lisa. “Gender, Memory, and National Myths: Ol’ga Berggol’ts and the Siege of Leningrad.” Nationalities Papers 28.3 (2000): 552.

46 Berggol’ts, SS II, 162. [Maybe, comrades, we will see our daily bread rations, that poor, black piece of bread, in the display of some museum. - my trans.]

142 introduction that she wrote for Govorit Leningrad, she states plainly that “нигде не

значило радио так много, как в нашем городе во время войны,”47 and here she both acknowledges the power of radio and its ability to unite and give voice, and quietly conveys her own part in this effort, and the beauty that she saw in the struggle.

Her broadcast on March 8, 1943, “Khoziaika Leningrada,”48 speaks directly to women in their roles as mother, wife, sister, and bride to men that have gone to war, but she transitions immediately to recognizing their roles as defenders and keepers of the city: “В эти дни отрадно знать, что мы, ленинградские женщины, являемся

активными бойцами, уже имеющими огромный воинский опыт. Наши руки, наше

сознание, наши сердца приобрели этот опыт в небывалом бою за свой родной

город.”49 While she is here pointing to their physical strength and the militancy of their fortitude, elsewhere she draws out those qualities of women that are not commonly acknowledged as traits of a fighter – “вот вечные, незаменимые женские качества —

выносливость, самоотреченность, любовь”50 – because she recognizes that these characteristics, too, are as integral to survival as physical capabilities in battle and defense, and that to acknowledge these traits aloud to her listeners could only help them stay the course.

47 ibid., 132. [Nowhere has the radio ever meant as much as in our city during wartime. - my trans]

48 “Khoziaika” is a difficult word to translate; it is often translated as “hostess,” but this does not reach the meaning in its usage here, where the connotation is one of both caretaking and protecting.

49 ibid., 208-09. [These days, it is gratifying to know that we, Leningrad women, are active fighters who already have plentiful military experience. Our hands, our minds, and our hearts have gained this experience in an unprecedented battle for our hometown. - my trans.]

50 ibid., 212. [Those timeless, essential feminine qualities – endurance, sacrifice, love. - my trans.]

143 A poem that she broadcast on December 29, 1941, “Pis’mo na Kamy” (“Letter to

Kama”), shows both the physical and psychological distance between a mother and daughter separated by the Siege:

Я знаю — далеко на Каме тревожится, тоскует мать. Что написать далекой маме? Как успокоить? Как солгать? Она в открытках каждой строчкой, страшась и всей душой любя, все время молит: «Дочка, дочка, прошу, побереги себя...» ... «Я берегу себя, родная. Не бойся, очень берегу: я город наш обороняю со всеми вместе, как могу...» ... Я не пишу — и так вернее, — что старый дом разрушен наш, что ранен брат, что я старею, что мало хлеба, мало сна. И главная, быть может, правда в том, что не все узнает мать.51

The daughter protects her mother as she protects her brother and her city; her mother does not need to know the whole truth. And it is only fitting that this is a poem that contains only women’s voices and engages with the seeming banalities of bread and sleep, that it is a love poem between mother and daughter. Leningrad, after all, was a city running on the strength of women, and Berggol’ts herself lost two infant daughters in the 51 ibid., 162-63. [I know – far away on the Kama my mother worries, mourns. What to write to my distant mother? How to reassure her? How to lie? In every line of the cards, with fear and love in her heart, all the time praying: “Daughter, daughter, I beg you, take care of yourself...” / “I’m taking care of myself, mama. Don’t worry, I’m taking very good care. I’m defending our city, with everyone, as I can...” / I don’t write – and this is more true – that our old house is destroyed, that my brother is hut, that I am growing old, that there is little bread, little sleep. It is, perhaps, important that mother does not know the truth. - my trans.]

144 mid-1930s, and the losses that she saw all around her no doubt resonated with her own loss. Her first daughter, Irina, was born to her and her first husband Boris Kornilov in

1928, and her second daughter, Maia, was born to her and second husband Nikolai

Molchanov in 1932. Maia died in 1933, less than a year old, and Irina in 1936, and

Berggol’ts wrote several poems about their deaths. The poems “Maia” (1933) and

“Pamiat’” (1934) show Berggol’ts struggling with guilt and sadness and her failed attempts to recover or make sense of her loss. In “Maia”, she writes of the four days of sickness, the suffering, and visits to the cemetery, and it closes with this:

Но я — живу и буду жить, работать, еще упрямей буду я и злей, чтобы скорей свести с природой счеты за боль, и смерть, и горе на земле.52

The repetition in her insistence that she lives, that she will continue to live, seems to strengthen her resolve that she will find a way to locate some worth in continuing on, but

“Pamiat’,” written the following year, rejects this hopefulness:

Вся белизна, сравнимая с палатой, вся тишина и грохот за окном. Все, чем перед тобою виновата,— работа, спешка, неуютный дом.53

No amount of work or forward-thinking resolutions will hold the emptiness at bay in this blank and uncomfortable world, and Berggol’ts implicates herself in this as well - she is also guilty, not for losing her daughter but for attempting to continue on, surrounded by

52 Berggol’ts, SS I, 44. [But I – I live and will live, will work, will still be stubborn and fierce, so that the score will be settled for the pain, for death, and sorrow on the earth. - my trans.]

53 ibid., 49. [Everything is white, like in a hospital ward, the quiet crashes against the window. I and everything is guilty before you – work, rushing, the cheerless house. - my trans.]

145 the cold and meaningless trappings of life.

In the poem “Sama ia tebia otpustila” (“I myself let you go”, 1936), written for

Irina, the desperation of a mother’s unbearable sadness for a lost child comes through clearly:

Сама я тебя отпустила, сама угадала конец, мой ласковый, рыженький, милый, мой первый, мой лучший птенец... … Зачем я тебя отпустила, зачем угадала конец, мой ласковый, рыженький, милый, мой первый, мой лучший птенец?54

Again, the many forms of repetition in these verses underscore the sentiment that they convey, and the sentiment is one of a loss so unbelievable that the speaker must continue to repeat herself in order to make this trauma seem real. It is no wonder that the poem that she presented to her radio listeners on December 29, 1941 revolves around a mother and daughter so devoted to protecting one another in the small ways that they can; unable to protect her own daughters, Berggol’ts zeroed in on this dynamic. Significantly, the women’s writings of this era that centered on mothers and children are generally focused on sons – Chukovskaia and Akhmatova wrote extensively on this relationship and the maternal worry for a son, and Berggol’ts stands out for these wrenching paeans to her lost daughters. Though Chukovskaia had a daughter, for instance, she still chose to portray a mother’s desperate hopes for her son in her novel Sof’ia Petrovna, because this love was

54ibid., 61. [I myself let you go, I guessed the end, my sweet, red-haired darling, my first, my best little chickadee. / Why did I let you go, why did I guess the end, my sweet, red-haired darling, my first, my best little chickadee. - my trans.]

146 more intelligible to an audience who had come to associate the losses of the nation with the losses of their young men, through war or political persecution or illness, and so identified the sustenance of the nation with sustaining its young men. The fact that

Berggol’ts so honestly offers these verses about her own and others’ lost daughters indicates that she saw daughters as just as worthy for mourning as sons.

Berggol’ts struggled with her feminine voice in her verse, partially because, as the voice of the Siege, she was afforded an authority that most female writers were not. The post-war poem “Stikhi o sebe” (“Lines about myself”) shows that she was highly conscious not only of the feminine voice in her poetry, but also of its excision during the war:

И в черный час зажженные войною, затем чтобы не гаснуть, не стихать, неженские созвездья надо мною, неженский ямб в черствеющих стихах.55

Hodgson rightly points out that the repetition in this stanza highlights the “unwomanly”, wondering if the authoritative voice that Berggol’ts gained during the Blockade was necessarily masculine exactly because of its authority,56 but I would counter that in highlighting this repetition, Berggol’ts is actually attempting to regain her feminine voice, to underline what is missing so intently that it begins to arise again, to name it, and therefore to begin once again to lay claim to what has been taken. Elsewhere, she makes it clear that she reveres the female voice in poetry partially because of its perseverance in the face of the likely outcome that it will never be heard. In a 1960 poem that was,

55 Berggol’ts, SS III, 9. [And in the black hour, burning war lights, which will never go out, never fade, unwomanly constellations above me, unwomanly iambs in hardened verse. - my trans.]

56 Hodgson, 81.

147 fittingly, not published until 1990, “Neuznannye zhenskie stikhi” (“Unrecognized women’s poetry”), she writes:

Неузнанные женские стихи. Они начнутся с самой первой строчки. С тоски о муже. О погибшей дочке. Пускай они унылы и плохи, Я не для вас пишу. Глубокой ночью. Одна. Опухли веки - навсегда. Пришло страшнейшее из одиночеств: То одиночество напрасного труда.57

“I am not writing for you.” These lines are extraordinarily striking in the oeuvre of a woman whose career was facing outward, whose words were directed at the great You of the Leningrad populace during the hell of the Blockade. She is no longer surrounded by fellow sufferers, but alone. Her career at this point was marked by a rise and fall of popularity and official recognition, and now just a poet, and a female poet at that, no longer expressing a universal truth to a needy audience, her words fall on no ears.

Berggol’ts wrote love poems as well, often from a distinctly feminine perspective.

“Ia serdtse svoe nikogda ni shchadila” (“I never spared my heart”, 1952), in particular, embodies a storminess that is often associated with the bold emotionalism of women, and it is worth offering here the entire poem, for it works on many levels:

Я сердце свое никогда не щадила: ни в песне, ни в дружбе, ни в горе, ни в страсти... Прости меня, милый. Что было, то было Мне горько. И все-таки всё это - счастье. 57 Berggol’ts, Olga. Ekho. Moskva: Pravda, 1990. 28. [Unrecognized women’s poems. They begin right from the first line with sorrow about my husband. About my dead daughter. Never mind that they are depressing and bad. I am not writing for you. In the depths of night. Alone. My eyelids are swollen – for ever, and the most terrible loneliness of all has come: the loneliness of work done in vain. - Trans. Hodgson, Katharine. Voicing the Soviet Experience: The Poetry of Ol’ga Berggol’ts. Oxford: British Academy and Oxford University Press, 2003. 82.]

148 И то, что я страстно, горюче тоскую, и то, что, страшась небывалой напасти, на призрак, на малую тень негодую. Мне страшно... И все-таки всё это - счастье.

Пускай эти слезы и это удушье, пусть хлещут упреки, как ветки в ненастье. Страшней - всепрощенье. Страшней - равнодушье. Любовь не прощает. И всё это - счастье.

Я знаю теперь, что она убивает, не ждет состраданья, не делится властью. Покуда прекрасна, покуда живая, покуда она не утеха, а - счастье.58

These lines drew criticism from Soviet authorities for not presenting the self-assured, logical, and calm devotion that Soviet women were meant to embody; Hodgson points to the assonance as representative of Berggol’ts’s acceptance of the coexistence of happiness and fear, and aligns its intensity and sound with the works of Marina

Tsvetaeva.59 The sound symbolism does indeed bear some resemblance with Tsvetaeva’s, whose work I will be discussing toward the end of this chapter. Here, it is not only the assonance in the repeated sounds of “s”, “shch”, “sch”, “sh”, and “st”, but the rhythm in

“что было, то было” in the first stanza, the repetition of “и то, что” in the second, “все-

таки всё это - счастье” throughout, and “покуда” in the final stanza that drives this

58 Berggol’ts, SS III, 36. [I never spared my heart, not in song, not in friendship, not in grief, nor in passion. Forgive me, dear, what happened – happened. I am distressed. But nevertheless – happiness. / And passionately, with bitterness I yearn, and fear some misfortune, some ghost, some small evil shadow. I’m scared. But nevertheless – happiness. / Allow these tears and this choking, allow these reproaches to whip against me like branches in foul weather. Even scarier is forgiveness. Even scarier is indifference. Love does not forgive. But everything is – happiness. / I know now that it kills, that it doesn’t wait for compassion, that it doesn’t lose power. So far things so good, so far so alive, so far it is not pleasure, but – happiness. - my trans.]

59 Hodgson, 87-8.

149 poem with such self-certain force. The rhythmicity and repetition indicates the assuredness of the speaker, the willingness to speak with conviction, and to determine her own relationship to passion and terror.

Finally, in “Iz tsikla ‘Anne Akhmatovoi’”, written in 1947, Berggol’ts explains what it is that Akhmatova has given to her. It is known that she met Akhmatova in 1928 and that the two remained in touch until Akhmatova’s death, but there is not much specifically known about their friendship. There is good indication that the two were quite close, as Berggol’ts recounts in a diary from September 1941 a day in which the two of them sat quietly, sharing malaise and exhaustion, and Akhmatova announced her hatred for Hitler, for Stalin, for anyone who would make war, to which Berggol’ts responds with agreement.60 Their intimacy was not only as friends, but as fellow writers, and Berggol’ts here indicates the depth of Akhmatova’s influence on her:

…Что же мне подарила она? Свою нерекламную твердость. Окаяннейшую свою, молчаливую гордость. Волю — не обижаться на тех, кто желает обидеть. Волю — видеть до рези в глазах, и всё-таки видеть. Волю — тихо, своею рукой задушить подступившее к сердцу отчаянье. Волю — к чистому, звонкому слову. И грозную волю — к молчанию.61

60 Berggol’ts, Ol’ga. Vstrecha. Dnevnye zvezdy. Moskva: “Russkaia kniga”, 2000. 161-62.

61 Berggol’ts, SS III, 86. [What did she give to me? Her unassuming strength. Her stolid, silent prinde. The will to not be offended by those who would wish to offend. The will to keep looking, though it hurts the eyes, nevertheless to keep looking. The will to be quiet, to stifle the stirrings of despair with the hand. The will for clean, singing words. And the terrible will for silence. - my trans.]

150 There is a repeated focus here on both silence and will; the repeated волю, however, outweighs any of the other learned traits that she has taken from Akhmatova, despite the fact that the final line claims a will – not just волю, but грозную волю – to silence. This offers a sort of response to Akhmatova’s extremely brief 1914 poem written to the poet

Aleksandr Blok:

От тебя приходила ко мне тревога И уменье писать стихи.62

The brevity of Akhmatova’s poem is countered by the rhythmic insistence of Berggol’ts, and though the final line of Berggol’ts’s poem would have us believe that this knowledge of silence is foremost in what she has inherited from Akhmatova, the poem is a declaration that she will choose when she will deploy this silence, and when she will use her voice.

Berggol’ts’s writings straddle the line between what was officially accepted in her time and what remained unheard. Her voice urged on the survivors of the Siege, praising the resilience of her listeners and their service to the nation and their families, and elsewhere, she used her voice to propel only herself and to insist that her own history and her own personal truth was as valid as the shared truths that were lived by millions.

Moving further outward, further away from the centralized narratives given by the State, the tradition of women’s writing during this era shows even more persistently that maintaining one’s voice means laying claim to one’s life and identity, that bare physical survival is not enough.

62 Akhmatova, Anna. Sochineniia. Vol 3. Paris: YMCA Press, 1983. 31. [From you I acquired anxiety and the ability to write poetry. - my trans.]

151 Lidiia Chukovskaia: Writing from Inside

Lidiia Chukovskaia (1907-1996) wrote Sof’ia Petrovna during the winter of 1939-40, and as such, her novel is a rare work about the Great Purge written contemporaneously with the event itself. Her novel Spusk pod vodu (Going Under), written between 1949 and

1957, focuses on the second wave of Purges that occurred in the late 1940s, and these works, taken together, fall solidly within the tradition of women's writing that developed during these years and also comment on the tradition itself and on its generative and protective qualities.

Sof’ia Petrovna, a widow, works as the head of a typing pool in a Leningrad publishing house and lives in a single room with her son Kolia, who is finishing school and hoping to be accepted to the engineering institute. Holmgren notes that though Sof’ia

Petrovna lives in a kommunalka (a communal flat) and is gainfully employed, she retains in many ways hierarchical and largely bourgeois understandings of power relations, as seen in her interactions with neighbors and coworkers;63 within this framework, she has a difficult time knowing and trusting her own mind and her own voice, given that she holds little to no authority at work and in society. This trait is both her undoing and her salvation. She guilelessly becomes a non-Party activist with such zeal that Kolia begins to refer to her as “мама-общественница,”64 and she soon learns that Kolia has not only been accepted to the engineering school but is being sent to work on a project in

63 Holmgren, Beth. Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time: On Lidiia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelstam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. 48-9.

64 Chukovskaia, Lidiia. Sof’ia Petrovna. Spusk pod vodu. Moskva: Moskovskii rabochii, 1988. 10. [mama-obshchestvennitsa; see note 18].

152 Sverdlovsk, where he works so tirelessly and so inventively that a delighted Sof'ia

Petrovna finds that his picture is in the paper; she, resultingly, is the picture of maternal pride. Holmgren points out that the novel until this point actually portrays a Soviet socialist realist “success story” - Sof’ia Petrovna is developing her consciousness and working hard, just as her son is, and the proper rewards are given to them.65 When traces of trouble begin to arise, however, and news of arrests start reaching her, lacking the critical means by which she might be able to see the truth behind the arrests that begin to occur, Sof’ia Petrovna simply accepts the given story, and it is here where the balance between her undoing and her salvation begins to play out.

Sof’ia Petrovna learns of the arrest of a doctor Kiparisov, a friend of her late husband and Kolia’s godfather, and as the arrests begin to occur with increasing regularity, we see that Sof’ia Petrovna, along with her young friend and coworker

Natasha, believes wholeheartedly that the arrests are the legitimate result of crimes that have been committed. Running into the doctor’s wife on the street, Sof’ia Petrovna offers her words that will become a variation on a common refrain: “‘В нашей стране с

честным человеком ничего не может случиться.’”66 Unable to believe that anything more sinister than a simple misunderstanding is going on, Sof’ia Petrovna can only offer reassurances, but these reassurances do not calm her when her son's friend Alik arrives with the news: Kolia has been arrested. The fact that this story follows a mother’s pride and then fear for her son is meant to highlight the severity of the Purge and the rhetoric

65 Holmgren, Women's Works, 51.

66 Chukovskaia, Lidiia. Sof’ia Petrovna, 36-7. [In our country this couldn’t happen to an honest man. - my trans.]

153 surrounding it, and also the chasm between the real situation for many mothers and the image of perfect mothers and happy motherhood being disseminated by the State and its media, and it is into this senseless chasm that Sof’ia Petrovna falls when she hears of

Kolia’s arrest.

Chukovskaia’s descriptions of the scene that meets Sof’ia Petrovna when she finds her way to the prison to ask after her son highlight the suffocation and confusion of the process and the seemingly arbitrary rules and customs of this futile daily pilgrimage to nowhere. Sof’ia Petrovna sees that she is surrounded by primarily women: women with children and without, women wearing layers of clothing to protect against the cold but are freezing nonetheless, women who appear as distraught as she feels. And yet even as she returns day after day, she cannot help but think that all of the other women are

“жены и матери отравителей, шпионов и убийц.”67 Holmgren characterizes Sofia

Petrovna's experience in this mob as that of an “amateur ethnographer” who eventually

“masters the customs, if not the meaning of this world,”68 and I would argue that in fact

Chukovskaia shows that Sof’ia Petrovna prefers to be in the position of ethnographer, of outsider, so that she can continue to see the problems of the hundreds of women that she waits with every day as distant from her own. She is not sly enough to willfully misunderstand the situation, but perhaps a deeply buried sense of self-preservation prevents her from realizing that the truth that she avoids is even more awful than the truth that she has accepted.

Five months pass, and during this time the situation deteriorates still further; Alik

67 ibid., 57. [wives and mothers of poisoners, spies, and murderers. - my trans.]

68 Holmgren, Women's Works, 52.

154 is kicked out of the Komsomol and subsequently arrested, her friend Natasha is fired from the publishing house and soon commits suicide, and Sof’ia Petrovna receives news that Kolia has been sentenced to ten years in a remote camp for terrorist activity. Despite the fact that she saw the extremely minor mistake that led to Natasha's dismissal, Sof’ia

Petrovna continues to trust that the system is essentially just. At this point, it could be said that her willing naivete is her salvation; without any recourse, what good would it be to know the terrible truth? But Chukovskaia is not advocating for acceptance, and the denouement of the novel points to Sof’ia Petrovna's final undoing. After more than a year of waiting, she hears that people are being released, and her hope leads her to begin telling people that her son is coming home soon, despite the lack of any real evidence to suggest this. “‘У нас не станут держать человека зря’,”69 she hears from an acquaintance; the repetition of this sentiment makes it more trustworthy to Sof’ia

Petrovna than all indications to the contrary, and when she finally receives a letter from her son, she is unable to truly understand its message. He has not been released; he is deaf in one ear from a beating; he asks her to write an appeal. With no one else to turn to,

Sof’ia Petrovna goes to Kiparisova, who advises: do not appeal. It will not help and in fact will only result in more trouble. Sof’ia Petrovna returns home, beside herself.

Finally, she burns the letter; this is her final undoing. Though she loves her son, she lets the rhetoric of the party and the repeated lies – “у нас не станут держать человека зря”

– take precedence over her own voice, even when the last meaningful message that she might convey with her voice is a plea for her son. Chukovskaia was, by the twisted logic of the Purge, committing treason by writing this novel, and it is the very message that one

69 Chukovskaia, Lidiia. Sof’ia Petrovna, 94. [They don’t hold a man for nothing. - my trans.]

155 must reject the veracity of this allegation that she conveys with this story.

The protagonist of Going Under is very much the opposite of Sof'ia Petrovna; like

Chukovskaia, she is a writer. The action of the novel takes place in the late winter of 1949 during the wave of post-war Purges. Nina Sergeevna has come to a sanitorium in the countryside, and the entirety of the story is the contrast between her personal truth and that given by the newspapers and the State. Nearly all of the other people at the sanitorium are men, and as Kelly points out, here as in Sof'ia Petrovna, men control the official language, and women are left with their private language, a language which holds deeper and more flexible meanings than the sharp iron language of the official presses.70

Nina Sergeevna, in fact, does not want the others to know that she is a writer, because their official language, empty, is so distant from the world that she retreats to, a world of

Pushkin, Lermontov, Pasternak, and Akhmatova. She cannot help, however, angrily disparaging the official language while in conversation with her fellow residents: “Не

слова, а какая-то словесная шелуха. Пустышки. Знаете, как младенцам дают соски-

пустышки? Без молока... Так и эти слова: без содержимого. Без наполненности. Не

фразы, а комбинации значков.”71 It is significant that the metaphor that she chooses to offer is one of an unfed baby; it clearly contrasts their language with women's language, a language of nurturing and life and real meaning.

And we see in a short story that our protagonist is writing a familiar setting: lines of women, hungry, cold, many of them with hungry babies, waiting for news of their

70 Kelly, 262.

71 Chukovskaia, Lidiia. Sof’ia Petrovna, 180. [They’re not words, but some kind of verbal husks. Dummies. You know how they give pacifiers to children? Without milk?... That is how these words are - without content. Without substance. Not sentences, but a combination of signs. - my trans.]

156 husbands and sons, all of them convinced that there has been some mistake, but that all of the other women are the wives and mothers of criminals, spies, traitors. Our protagonist’s protagonist meets a young woman, a Finn, whose infant daughter is ill, sneezing, suffering in the cold, and again we hear the familiar refrain, this time from an official:

“Раз взяли ваших мужей, значит, не зря. Чего еще спрашивать? Честного человека

зря не возьмут.”72 And when Nina Sergeevna's protagonist, again unsuccessful in learning news of her husband, meets the young Finn outside, we learn that the baby is now dead. Her young mother, not wanting to lose her place in line, would not have been able to save her anyway, so she carried the dead child for hours. Nina Sergeevna's metaphor – a pacifier without milk – resonates in a sickly way with her fictional depiction of a dying child, and those who create and disseminate the empty language that is used to deliver lies to a suffering populace are indicted in the death of this fictional child and the innumerable real children who perished during this period.

At the end of the story, Nina Sergeevna returns home to her daughter. The type of trauma that marked the end of Sof'ia Petrovna is absent from this sedate conclusion, perhaps because, as Holmgren suggests, Nina Sergeevna has an interior that she can enter to process her pain and the nonsensical workings of the world, an interior where she can engage in “recollection and inscription” and record the truth as she knows it, while Sof’ia

Petrovna did not have this space, and had therefore no mechanism with which to protect herself.73 I would add to this that Chukovskaia's engagement with the mode of women's

72 ibid., 188. [If they took your husbands, that means it’s not for nothing. Why keep asking? They don’t take honest men. - my trans.]

73 Holmgren, Women's Work, 58.

157 writing in this period allowed her to depict from the inside what ten years earlier she had depicted from the outside. Sof'ia Petrovna was a novel written to capture a mother's suffering during a terrible moment in time, to preserve the moment and the truth it held, while Spusk pod vodu reveres the very act of writing to catch a moment in time, to preserve the very personal truth within it and to assuredly declare that this personal truth is enough, that it may be everything. As we move now to Akhmatova and then Tsvetaeva, we will only see this motion intensifying.

Anna Akhmatova: Voice and Mother As Memorial

Though hobbled by years of enforced silence and incredible censorship, Anna Akhmatova

(1889-1966) produced during the most active period of Stalin’s Purge poetry which displays both a grim acceptance of personal and national tragedies and a protest against the system which silenced her. Separated from many of those that were dear to her, she turned to the company of poets with whom she could commune; these poets, though removed from her by decades and sometimes centuries, provided her with a poetic tradition in which she could mourn for the imprisonment of her son, Lev Gumilev, and for the loss of Russia, when the wedge of the USSR was driven between her and the country she knew. Akhmatova’s adherence to the Russian poetic heritage was partially informed by her association with the Acmeist school of writing, a school which attempted to resurrect the clarity of an earlier age, in response to what they identified as the chaos of

Decadence and symbolism.74 The Acmeists, however, while stylistically attempting to

74 Mirsky, D.S. A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900. Ed. Francis J. Whitfield. New York: Knopf, 1964. 485.

158 move backwards in time, were unfortunately unable to escape from the reality of their present, so their uses of these traditions were necessarily altered or hidden, if not physically, then in subtext. However, though the correspondences between Akhmatova’s writing and those of the earlier elegiac poets may be buried in nuance, there are plentiful indications that she was, nevertheless, “deeply conscious of writing within a literary tradition”, clear in her use of traditional elegiac features, such as separation or estrangement due to death or the steady march of time, and the communication which occurs despite this separation.75 This is seen most clearly in her cycle Rekviem, a collection of poems that she wrote during the darkest and most devastating days of the

Purges. Akhmatova was certainly familiar with Horace’s “Exegi monumentum”,76 and she also clearly aligns herself with a poetic tradition shared by Gavriil Derzhavin and

Aleksandr Pushkin, in which writing on the deaths of friends and countrymen is a path to transformation of both subject and poet.77 In fact, in the mid-1960s she collected and documented similarities between the two writers.78 However, though Akhmatova grounds herself in images and concepts that have been given to her by her predecessors, she uses these tools not only to extend back to the past but to reach forward, into an unsure future.

75 Wells, David. “Akhmatova and Pushkin: The Genres of Elegy and Ballad”. Slavonic and East European Review 71.4 (1993): 633-35.

76 Anderson, Nancy K. Anna Akhmatova: The Word That Causes Death’s Defeat: Poems of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 193.

77 Levitsky, A. “ ‘Vesna’ Zvanskaya i Osen’ ‘Boldinskaya’, ili o poezii ‘Vne vremeni i mesta’.” “On vidit novgorod velikoi...” Materialy VII Mezhdunarodnoi pushkinskoi konferencii ‘Pushkin i mirovaya kul’tura’, Velikii Novgorod, 31 May - 4 June 2004 g. SPb: Rossiiskaya Akademiya Nauk, 2004. 27.

78 Wells, David. Akhmatova and Pushkin: The Pushkin Contexts of Akhmatova’s Poetry. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Slavonic Monographs 25, 1994. 17.

159 Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of poet Osip Mandelstam, writes in her memoir

Vospominaniia (Hope Against Hope) that both her husband and Akhmatova were able to commune with poets that had long since passed, engaging in conversations with them that were as intimate as those they had with living contemporaries and thereby drawing the past and the present together.79 These relationships offered to both poets the ability to communicate with kindred minds at a time when their interactions with peers were severely limited. Akhmatova’s relationship with Pushkin specifically was a sanctuary for her; her continuing conversation with him provided her with focus during the years when she was unable to publish under the Zhdanov Doctrine following WWII.80 Though some may argue that Akhmatova and other female writers of the time “turned to the elegy as a more apparently conventional form in which they could mourn and protest simultaneously,”81 this argument is based on the assumption that conventionalizing writing along gender lines could somehow make it acceptable, when in fact there was no amount of convention that could make any poetic protest tolerable to the Soviet government or its censors. While elegiac writing may have offered personal solace, it was not a viable public outlet, as evidenced by the continued ban of Akhmatova’s work.

It is notable, however, that Akhmatova did write many poems to honor the lives and deaths of numerous poets and public figures, a segment of her body of work that, it may be argued, suggests that she knowingly took up the mantle of public elegist. Over the course of her career, she wrote verse to or about Blok, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky,

79 Mandel'shtam, Nadezhda. Vospominaniia. Moskva: Soglasie, 1999. 276.

80 Wells, Akhmatova and Pushkin, 1.

81 Stone, Carole. “Elegy as Political Expression in Women’s Poetry: Akhmatova, Levertov, Forche”. College Literature 18.1 (1991): 86.

160 Bulgakov, Pasternak, and a whole host of others, in addition to the elegiac cycles for which she is perhaps best known: Rekviem and Poema bez Geroya. It is in her cycles where Akhmatova’s prowess as a memorialist reaches its apex. Though Rekviem is widely acknowledged to be centered around her grief surrounding her son’s arrest and imprisonment and the arrests and eventual deaths of Mandelstam and her common-law husband Nikolai Punin, her “articulation of her son’s and her own suffering is a monument to the suffering of an entire nation.”82 In a sort of prose elegy to Akhmatova,

Wladimir Weidle writes that “[s]he wrote only the last act and avoided all melodrama,”83 and in Rekviem, despite the facade of daily life, Akhmatova is able to illustrate that she and innumerable others were essentially living in the last act at all times, and physical death was but one type of tragedy. Forced silence was another; during her son’s imprisonment, she was not able to publish anything other than state mandated “verse of praise”, with the tacit agreement that by remaining mute, she could preserve his safety.84

Both Akhmatova and her poetic persona, however, are aware that, “while the narrator’s sufferings are individual, they are anything but unique,”85 and throughout the cycle, there are numerous indications that her subject, while personal, expresses a universal grief.

Even the title of the cycle supports this case, as the traditional Requiem is a Mass for the Dead; in addition to this, however, Akhmatova claims repeatedly throughout the cycle that her verses are dedicated to those still living, and so it seems that she counts as

82 Bailey, Sharon M. “An Elegy for Russia: Anna Akhmatova’s ‘Requiem’ ”. Slavic and East European Journal 43.2 (1999): 325.

83 Weidle, Wladimir. “Anna Akhmatova: In Memoriam”. Russian Review 28.1 (1969): 12.

84 ibid., 20.

85 Anderson, 181.

161 victims of the Terrors anyone for whom loss has occurred, whether living or not. Her son, after all, was not killed - he was alive, but imprisoned, so it is clear that death was not a prerequisite for grief, but acted rather as “a foil or as a background against which the experiences of the poet and her son are projected.”86 The sense of loss, not always dependent on death, was amplified by the knowledge that many people in positions parallel to her own had suffered similar or far worse fates, and the constant expectation of further unpredictable but imminent losses was a suffering in itself.

Akhmatova begins her cycle with an acknowledgement of the parallel experiences of millions of Soviet women with “Vmesto Predosloviya” (“Instead of a Foreword”,

1957), which is a clear and simple cue to the reader that this cycle will be a memorial to both the deceased and to those that have lost their lives in waiting.

Тогда стоящая за мной женщина с голубыми губами, которая, конечно, никогда в жизни не слыхала моего имени, очнулась от свойственного нам всем оцепенения и спросила меня на ухо (там все говорили шепотом): – А это вы можете описать? И я сказала: – Могу. Тогда что–то вроде улыбки скользнуло по тому, что некогда было ее лицом.87

Akhmatova almost suggests with this passage that she is writing this cycle in answer to a challenge, and that her challenger is an anonymous but ubiquitous woman not unlike

86 Bailey, 327.

87 Akhmatova, Anna. Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh. Tom 3. Moskva: Ellis Lak, 1998. 21. Hereafter referred to as SS. [Then a woman with blue lips who was standing behind me and who, of course, had never in her life heard my name before, awoke from the torpor normal to all of us and breathed a question in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there): ‘Can you describe this?’ And I said: ‘I can.’ Then something like a smile slipped across what once had been her face. - Trans. Anderson, Nancy K. Anna Akhmatova: The Word That Causes Death’s Defeat: Poems of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 135.]

162 herself. By framing the beginning of the cycle as a conversation between women on a day like any other, “the poet justifies her civic, collective ‘we’ by virtue of her ability to articulate aloud what other suffering Russians only whisper.”88 She is a poet, but she is using her voice to speak the words of others, and she is no different than the women to whom she addresses the “Posvyaschenie” (“Dedication,” 1940):

Где теперь невольные подруги Двух моих осатанелых лет?89

Akhmatova’s reason for dedicating the cycle to those still living, rather than those that have passed, becomes clear in the “Vstuplenie” (“Introduction,” 1935), in which she writes,

Это была, когда улыбался Только мертвый, спокойствию рад.90

The implication is that the dead are the only ones content, that death brings peace, and in choosing this view, Akhmatova creates what is almost an “Anti-Requiem,”91 and she upholds this valuation of death through much of the cycle.

Akhmatova then contrasts the release of death with the pain of the survivors in the first poem of the “Vstuplenie”, in which she likens her son’s arrest to his removal in a

88 Cavanagh, Clare. “The Death of the Book a la russe: The Acmeists under Stalin”. Slavic Review 55.1 (1996): 133.

89 Akhmatova, SS, 22. [Where now are my involuntary friends, / Companions of my two years spent in hell? - Trans. Anderson, 136.]

90 ibid., 23. [There was no one who smiled in those days / Except the dead, who’d found peace at last. - Trans. Anderson, 136.]

91 Katz, Boris. “To What Extent is Requiem a Requiem? Unheard Female Voices in Anna Akhmatova’s ‘Requiem’ ”. Russian Review 57.2 (1998): 259.

163 coffin. This act, however, is but one portion of the funeral rites, and another is expressed in the second poem of the “Vstuplenie” (1938), in which Akhmatova’s rhythmicity calls to mind a chant, an incantation, or a funeral lament.

Тихо льется тихий Дон, Желтый месяц входит в дом.

Входит в шапке набекрень. Видит желтый месяц тень.

Эта женщина больна, Эта женщина одна.

Муж в могиле, сын в тюрьме, Помолитесь обо мне.92

By using this simple rhyme and cadence, Akhmatova emphasizes the universality of its message, and its form lends to it an ease that is disturbing in its repeatability, and a reminder of the fact that it is a lament whose substance was undoubtedly repeated by countless wives and mothers.

In the fourth poem of the “Vstuplenie” (1938), however, there are more specific and pointed textual references:

Как трехсотая, с передачею, Под Крестами будешь стоять И своей слезой горячею Новогодний лед прожигать.93

92 Akhmatova, SS, 24. [Quiet, quiet the Don flows, / Yellow moon through the window goes. / The moon comes in, its cap askew, / And sees a shadow lost in gloom. / Here’s a woman - she’s sick, bereft, / Here’s a woman with no one left. / Husband’s dead, and son’s in jail, / When you pray, tell God my tale. - Trans. Anderson, 137.]

93 ibid., 24. [Standing in line at the Crosses Prison walls / With three hundred women ahead of you, / Clutching a package, and your hot tear falls / Upon the New Year’s ice that it burns through. - Trans. Anderson, 138.]

164 The line “pod krestami budesh’ stoyat’” has a two-fold meaning: “kresty” signifies both the Cross and the Petersburg prison where her son was being kept, which draws an interesting parallel between Rekviem and the Stabat Mater, a Catholic medieval devotional poem in which the Virgin Mary’s keeps a vigil by Christ’s Cross,94 much as

Akhmatova and many other mothers sat in silent wait for their sons. The further significance of this similarity is that, being Catholic, the Stabat Mater was at odds with both Russian Orthodoxy and Stalinism, making it a political protest of a different nature; reverence for the Catholic religion or indeed any religion at all was strictly forbidden.

In Poems V and VI (1939), however, the cycle takes on a distinctly personal tone as Akhmatova addresses her son directly. Both poems are quite clear, without any unnecessary ornamentation or artifice, and Akhmatova writes plainly of her horror and the passing weeks as she wonders how her son is faring. These two poems, placed precisely in the middle of the cycle, carry the focal point and the seed of the cycle’s inception, it is in these two poems that the poetic persona is most representational of

Akhmatova herself; rather than a poet documenting the realities of the pervasive fear and loss of her times, she is here simply the mother of an imprisoned son.95 The surrounding poems of the cycle represent the suffocating reality from which there is no escape.

This very personal poetic persona seems to continue into the “Prigovor”

(“Verdict,” 1939), though a closer reading of this poem shows the reader that Akhmatova has once again taken up the position of poet.

Надо память до конца убить,

94 Katz, 258-260.

95 Anderson, 188.

165 Надо, чтоб душа окаменела, Надо снова научиться жить.96

Her desire to rid herself of her memory amounts to a desire for death, a sentiment which is made more explicit in the following section, “K Smerti” (“To Death,” 1939):

Прими для этого какой угодно вид, Ворвись отравленным снарядом Иль с гирькой подкрадись, как опытный бандит, Иль отрави тифозным чадом.97

Akhmatova wrote both of these poems just after her son was sent to the Gulag, and it is, simply, a call for death. This marks the lowest point in the cycle. Though it is clear that in the very writing of these poems, Akhmatova never intended to truly do away with her memory, it also represents a darkening view of the future that becomes all the darker in the following poem.

Poem IX (1940) is perhaps the only poem in the cycle that does not fit easily into the elegiac mood. It is instead a plaintive cry against the mechanism that has imprisoned her son, and a very personal narration of grief.

И не позволит ничего Оно мне унести с собою (Как ни упрашивай его И как ни докучай мольбою)98

96 Akhmatova, SS, 26. [Must smash my memory to bits, / Must turn my heart to stone all through, / And must relearn how one should live. - Anderson, 139.]

97 ibid., 26. [Do what you please, take any shape that comes to mind, / Burst on me like a shell of poison gas, / Or creep up like a mugger, club me from behind, / Or let the fog of typhus do the task. - Trans. Anderson, 139.]

98 ibid., 27. [I know that it will take my past, / What was mine - won’t be any more / (However endlessly I ask, / However meekly I implore)... - Trans. Anderson, 140.]

166 Akhmatova wrote to Stalin personally in 1935 to appeal for the release of her son and

Punin, but Lev was arrested again in 1938. This poem more than any other in the cycle is an expression of her frustration at her helplessness, both as a mother and a poet. She could not help her son and she could not publish poetry, and for that matter she did not even feel safe writing her poems down on paper for fear of an unexpected search of her home. In fact, she habitually destroyed her poems to keep them out of sight of official eyes; Chukovskaia writes that Akhmatova would quickly write verses on scraps of paper, make small talk until Chukovskaia had memorized the verses, and then burn the small slips of paper immediately.99 Though it is a desperate image, Clare Cavanagh posits that the persistence of the poetry through its physical destruction “gives rise to the metaphor that enables Akhmatova, the banned, forbidden lyric poet, to take on Stalin himself as she forges her own collective, civic voice to speak for the masses who have been either figuratively or literally obliterated by stalinist collective rhetoric.”100 (135). Even in her helplessness, Akhmatova finds poetic value.

Though the significance behind “Raspyatie” (“Crucifixion,” 1940) and the parallels between the crucifixion of Christ and Akhmatova’s experience are clear, the final two lines of the second poem lay the groundwork for the “Epilog” (1940):

А туда, где молча Мать стояла, Так никто взглянуть и не посмел.101

99 Chukovskaia, Lidia. Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi. Tom 1, 1938-1941. Paris: YMCA Press, 1976. 10.

100 Cavanagh, 135.

101 Akhmatova, SS, 28. [But where the Mother stood - no one would look there, / None dared to glance at her, so silent and alone. - Trans. Anderson, 141.]

167 Refusal to look at the mother is also refusal to keep her in one’s memory. The place where she stands is a void, a black hole, and buried behind the religious overtones of

“Crucifixion” is a protest against the simple act of forgetting. In the figure of the mother made invisible by the blind eyes of others, Akhmatova shows us the counterpoint to the monument that she writes of in the “Epilog.”

Here, Akhmatova both employs a tradition shared by Derzhavin and Pushkin and pushes consciously against it. In writing of her own posthumous existence, she avoids both the pastoral graveyard images that were so popular for the nineteenth-century poets and the self-glorifying monuments for which they wished. Pushkin used the former to his own effect in the poem 1836 “Когда за городом...”:

Но как же любо мне Осеннею порой, в вечерней тишине, В деревне посещать кладбище родовое, Где дремлют мертвые в торжественном покое.102

Pushkin dreams of pastoral peace for his posthumous days, rather than the gray and rigid anonymity of a city graveyard and the bustle of Moscow and St. Petersburg, with his monument safely standing in the minds of readers to come. Akhmatova’s chosen resting place, on the other hand, is neither green nor peaceful; instead, she envisions a monument to herself in the most anonymous of places, to represent not only herself but all those who stood with her for countless hopeless hours. In the first poem of the “Epilog”, she writes:

И я молюсь не о себе одной, А обо всех, кто там стоял со мною

102 Pushkin, A.S. Sochineniia. New York: International University Press, c1944. 378-79. [Yet how I love / On autumn evenings, when the sky above / Sleeps like the dead in solemn quietude / To walk in the ancestral solitude / Of our poor village graveyard… Trans Sokolov. A. The Complete Works of Alexander Pushkin. Vol III: Lyric Poems: 1826-1836. Norfolk, UK: Milner and Company Limited, 1999. 250.]

168 И в лютный холод, и в июлский зной Под красною, ослепшею стеною.103

She does not wish for the monument to bring her personal peace, nor to honor her poetry or her life - instead, she wants it to be a lasting monument to her pain, a pain that was shared by many others. Put simply, Akhmatova wants her memory to be useful; she wants it to represent not only her own poetic legacy, but the suffering of all the mothers with whom Akhmatova mourned through the Yezhov era. In the second poem of the “Epilog,” she makes her message yet more clear:

Согласье на это даю торжество, Но только с условьем – не ставить его Ни около моря, где я родилась: Последняя с морем разорвана связь, Ни в царском саду у заветного пня, Где тень безутешная ищет меня, А здесь, где стояла я триста часов И где для меня не открыли засов.104

Though it has been written that Akhmatova’s reversal of the monument motif “marks a partial rejection of the poetry of Akhmatova’s youth now that her pen has found its vocation as public chronicler of the Terror,”105 and that she “turns the topos on its head by speaking not metaphorically of her poetry as a future monument, but literally of a future

103 Akhmatova, SS, 29. [Not for myself alone, for all I pray, / All those who stood beside me without fail, / Alike in bitter cold and sweltering haze, / Beneath the brick-red blind walls of the jail. - Trans. Anderson, 141.]

104 ibid., 29-30. [My consent to a statue I would only grant / With a condition on where it should stand. / Not down by the southern sea where I was born - / My last tie to the seacoast has long since been torn - / Nor in the Tsar’s park by the stump of that tree / Where an unconsoled ghost is still looking for me, / But here, where I stood while three hundred hours passed, / And the gates never budged, and the bolts remained fast. - Trans. Anderson, 142.]

105 Wells, Akhmatova and Pushkin, 74.

169 monument to be erected by her native land in her memory,”106 it must be noted that it is still a continuation of her conversation with her predecessors; her adjustment of the theme to her own needs, rather than rejecting tradition, merely expands upon it.

Akhmatova expanded her monument to include all of those whose names were undoubtedly lost, but this expansion was by no means a rejection of poetic tradition. It was simply an acknowledgment that tradition needed to accommodate contemporary needs.

While Akhmatova’s predecessors wrote of their own future glory, she undoubtedly wrote with the knowledge that her memory may be subject to distortion by the state, and so only her poems themselves could be her monument. “Rekviem,” however, was an act of life and movement, rather than memory at rest. Translator D.M. Thomas writes that the overflowing crowd of mourners at Akhmatova’s funeral in 1966 was a sign of their gratitude and their acknowledgement of the fact that “[s]he had kept the ‘great Russian word’, and the Word, alive for them,”107 which stands as evidence that her poetry functioned not only as a memorial; rather, it acted as a symbol of life’s persistence and as a vessel in which tradition was saved from destruction.

The Poet, Out of Time: Tsvetaeva

Hélène Cixous wrote of Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941): “She writes texts of such frightful intelligence that we can almost say that she dies of it [...] In her poems no words

106 Amert, Susan. A Shattered Mirror: The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. 58.

107 Thomas, D.M. “Translator’s Preface”. Anna Akhmatova: Selected Poems. London/New York: Penguin Books, 1988. 11.

170 are spent on hunger; there is only work on poetry, and on an astounding force of life.”108

This statement is especially poignant because Tsvetaeva was hungry, hungry for years, living in emigration from the early 1920s until 1939, primarily in Czechoslovakia and

Paris, where she struggled daily to care for her family and make ends meet in the face of poverty and exile. The work that she produced during these years, however, revolves around survival of a different sort – more than any of the other writers that appear in this chapter, in any of these chapters, perhaps in the twentieth century or beyond, Tsvetaeva’s writings compose the writer, line by line, sound by sound.

To the extent that she thought about politics at all, she was critical of any power or regime whose needs would supersede the freedom of the individual, and her personal engagement with the political situation that surrounded her was, for the most part, limited to the fact that she was forced to shuffle through years of emigration.109 While she did not respond to these circumstances with political statement, she certainly responded, in her own language and within lyrical landscapes of her own creation. Krysolov (The Rat-

Catcher), for instance, a 1925 play in verse based on the story of the Pied Piper, allowed

Tsvetaeva to show her resistance both to the Bolsheviks (the rats) and the bourgeoisie gatekeepers of culture (the villagers); Tsvetaeva often found a productive tension between the use of well-known fables and myths and her personal, passionate reworkings of the plot, combining the familiar with the lyrical, and the satirical to challenging and

108 Cixous, Hélène. Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva. New York/London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. 113-14.

109 For an excellent overview of the larger emigre experience at this time, see Raeff, Marc. Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919-1939. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

171 unexpected ends.110 Shortly before writing Krysolov, Tsvetaeva had produced another reworking of a familiar myth in her verse drama Tezei (Theseus), later renamed Ariadna, and in 1926 she began work on Fedra (Phaedra); the two works were meant to be followed by a third, Elena (Helen), which unfortunately never came to light.

These years, marked as they were by isolation and alienation, no doubt drew

Tsvetaeva to the story of Fedra, who was similarly living as a stranger, separated from a homeland from which she had been exiled. Euripides, Seneca, and Racine are responsible for the most well-known incarnations of the myth, and there are general elements common to all: Phaedra, married to Theseus but in love with his son, Hippolytus, tells

Theseus in resentful anger that Hippolytus has raped her; Theseus curses Hippolytus;

Hippolytus is killed; and in her guilt, Phaedra commits suicide. Tsvetaeva’s telling of this myth, while quite similar to this basic frame, differs in significant ways; gender, motherhood, and self-definition through language are foregrounded in her version.

Tsvetaeva herself treats language as malleable, and in Fedra there are numerous instances of neologisms, archaisms – both real and invented – and colloquial speech. Tsvetaeva has a penchant for this roughening of language because it defamiliarizes even those small parts of verbal expression that are often taken for granted by readers and writers alike, and because, to Tsvetaeva, the texture and shape of a word in the mouth and in the ear is inseparable from the word’s meaning. As we shall see when we look at the autobiographical essays that she wrote during the 1930s, this focus on sound was with her from childhood, as was a tendency toward myth-making. It is not only Tsvetaeva’s self-

110 Ciepiela, Catherine. “Taking Monologism Seriously: Bakhtin’s and Tsvetaeva’s ‘The Pied Piper’.” Slavic Review 53.4 (1994): 1019.

172 definition, however, that is formed via the language in the play, but Fedra’s as well. The second act of the play is primarily a conversation between Fedra and her kormilitsa

(nursemaid), and it is here where the real engagement with gender and the formative powers of language arise.

Thomson points out that though the Nurse generally has a prominent role in all versions of the myth – Euripides gives her more lines than any other character but

Hippolytus, with Racine and Seneca nearly following suit – Tsvetaeva’s version gives the

Nurse more lines and far more prominence in the plot than she is given in other versions.111 It is Tsvetaeva’s Nurse, for example, that delivers the lie to Theseus that

Hippolytus has raped Fedra, rather than Fedra herself, which drastically reduces the view of Fedra as a liar and a woman with angry sexual appetites. In addition, Tsvetaeva makes

Fedra childless and the much younger wife to a potentially impotent husband, allowing her to be seen as a victim, rather than as a devious and selfish aggressor.112 As Heldt writes, Tsvetaeva’s heroines “are rescued from their portraits as either destructive or victimized beings - the familiar dual interpretations of masculine tradition - to be reclaimed as new female self-definitions,”113 and in Fedra, there is a much different duality at play. Tsvetaeva’s Fedra is very much at the mercy of her Nurse, who seems to be in some ways her voice or her dark alter-ego; Fedra is feverish and delirious at the beginning of Act II, and it is her Nurse telling Fedra that it is only natural that she is

111 Thomson, R.D.B. “Tsvetaeva’s Play ‘Fedra’: An Interpretation.” The Slavonic and East European Review 67.3 (1989): 340.

112 Fox, Maria Stadter. The Troubling Play of Gender: The Phaedra Dramas of Tsvetaeva, Yourcenar, and H.D. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2001. 51.

113 Heldt, 131.

173 unhappy, that her marriage is cold, that she is in love with another, and that as her devoted servant, she cannot bear to see Fedra in such a state, that something needs to change. The connection between these two women easily outweighs any of the other passions of the play, and when Fedra attempts to convince her Nurse that she is not unhappy, the Nurse’s response is protective and almost proprietary:

Ложь! Оттого что лжешь Мне, себе, ему и людям. Я тебя вскормила грудью. Между нами речи лишни: Знаю, чую, вижу, слышу Все - всех бед твоих всю залежь! - То есть впятеро, чем знаешь, Чуешь, видишь, слышишь, хочешь Знать.114

Their relationship is both bodily and emotional, and they do not require speech to understand one another. In Tsvetaeva’s world, where the word is mighty, the superfluity of verbal expression can only suggest that they are of one mind, and the mirrored string of verbs that the Nurse utters – “Знаю, чую, вижу, слышу,” “Чуешь, видишь,

слышишь, хочешь знать” – is further evidence that they are two halves of a whole. The

Nurse reminds Fedra that though they are not biologically mother and daughter, their bonds are just as solid:

Кроме кровного - молочный Голос - млеку покоримся! - Есть: второе материнство.115

114 Tsvetaeva, Marina. Teatr. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo “Iskusstvo”, 1988. 310. [A lie! Here you are lying to me, to yourself, to him and to everyone. I nursed you with my breast. Between us speech is unnecessary. I know, I feel, I see, I hear everything – all your accumulated ills – five times more than you know, than you hear, than you see, than you want to know. - my trans.]

115 ibid., 311. [Beside blood, the milk voice – we resign ourselves to the milk! It is a second motherhood. - my trans.]

174 This shared voice, passed through milk, is ultimately what allows the Nurse to speak and act on Fedra’s behalf. R.D.B. Thomson points out that though the Nurse seems to dominate Fedra verbally and physically, she also voices what Fedra cannot, perhaps serving as “a metaphor for the heroine’s artistic potential.”116 In this sense, there are two possible tragedies occurring here that were not at all present in earlier versions: the first possible tragedy is that the Nurse has turned to words what should have remained meaningless sounds, the feverish ramblings of a distraught Fedra, and the second is that

Fedra herself cannot truly speak. As we shall now see, in Tsvetaeva’s autobiographical writings, the transference of sound between mother and daughter was a powerful theme in her life, and one that she has superimposed over this classical myth, creating new meaning in the familiar.

As Holmgren writes, Tsvetaeva’s essays on childhood are populated by women, and while she does not treat them unconditionally positively, “they are almost never detached or conventional. Rather, Tsvetaeva, develops new non-essentialist constructs of gender that frequently assign primary value to female characters and ‘second-rate’ feminine traits.”117 And Stephanie Sandler demonstrates quite clearly that Tsvetaeva’s writings address the complexities of writing as a woman and the gendered struggles of self-creation “while paradoxically analyzing the grounds for women’s silence,” and suggests that the years of exile in which these works were written gave Tsvetaeva further

116 Thomson, 350.

117 Holmgren, “For the Good of the Cause: Russian Women’s Autobiography in the Twentieth Century.” Women Writers in Russian Literature. Eds. Toby W. Clyman and Diana Greene. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.” 141.

175 impetus to exploring her own subjectivity by consciously developing a “habit of representing herself from the closed-off, knowable tale of a lived past to an open-ended fragment of the present.”118 During these years in Paris, 1925-1939, she was responsible for the care of her family with no help from her ailing husband, and this both inevitably separated her from the focus on writing and meant that she was forced to fill the stereotypical role of mother and full-time caregiver. Sandler offers many examples from

Tsvetaeva’s letters that indicate the extent to which she was aware that she was filling the traditional woman’s role with this labor, and that she wanted to be a writer, rather than a woman; Sandler takes this as indication that Tsvetaeva saw the two as mutually exclusive,119 but I would argue that Tsvetaeva’s statement on Mayakovsky’s suicide indicates that she saw the writer as separate from the biological human, regardless of gender. Tsvetaeva writes: “Двенадцать лет подряд человек Маяковский убивал в себе

Маяковского-поэта, на тринадцатый поэт встал и человека убил”;120 clearly, the living person and the writer are not directly equivalent, regardless of gender.

And in her essays, Tsvetaeva closely examines the creation of both woman and writer. In the 1934 essay “Mat’ i muzyka” (“Mother and Music”), for example, she explores the effects that her mother’s relentless pushing had on her as a child, and develops theories about the inception of both her focus on sound – an element so integral to her practice of writing – and her will to answer to only those authorities that she deems

118 Sandler, Stephanie. “Embodied Words: Gender in Cvetaeva’s Reading of Puskin.” The Slavic and East European Journal 34.2 (1990): 139-40.

119 ibid., 142.

120 Tsvetaeva, PS, 853. [For twelve years on end Mayakovsky the man killed in himself Mayakovsky the poet; in the thirteenth the poet arose and killed the man. - Trans. Livingstone, 183.]

176 worthy of her devotion. Both of these aspects of her growing sense of self and sound, we learn, frustrated her mother’s desires to mold the young Tsvetaeva into a concert pianist, and one particularly significant moment illustrates the ways in which Tsvetaeva bent her mother’s musical teachings to fit her own preferred form:

Это до — ре (Дорэ), а ре — ми — Реми, мальчик Реми из «Sans Famille» [...] Это ре-ми. Взятые же отдельно: до — явно белое, пустое, до всего, ре — голубое, ми — желтое (может быть — midi?), фа — коричневое (может быть, фаевое выходное платье матери, а ре — голубое — река?) — и так далее, и все эти «далее» — есть, я только не хочу загромождать читателя, у которого свои цвета и свои, на них резоны.121

She does not even accept the simple notes without infusing them with her own meaning, and though she points to her mother’s dissatisfaction with her stubborn resistance to her lessons, it becomes clear that her mother’s zeal left marks of a deeper lesson and a deeper influence. “Мать точно заживо похоронила себя внутри нас – на вечную

жизнь ...Мать поила нас из вскрытой жилы Лирики,”122 Tsvetaeva writes evocatively, and we begin to see the distillation of both the woman and the artist out of the child. In addition, the bodily quality of this inheritance of blood and lyricism recalls the connection between Fedra and her nurse, suggesting an inescapable bond defined by a deep duality. Her mother was both the authority to resist and the provider of the tools with which young Tsvetaeva learned to resist authority.

121 ibid., 991-92. [That’s do-re (Dore), and re-mi is Remy, the boy Remy from Sans famille [...] That’s re-mi. But taken separately: do - is clearly white, empty, do vsego “before everything else,” re is blue, mi is yellow (maybe - midi?), fa is brown (maybe mother’s faille street dress, and re is blue - reka - river?) - and so on, and all these so on’s - do exist, only I don’t want to overburden the reader who has his own colors and his own reasons for them. - Trans. King, J. Marin. A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose. By Marina Tsvetaeva. London: Virago Press, 1983. 271.]

122 ibid., 994. [Mother truly buried herself alive inside us - for life eternal … Mother gave us drink from the opened vein of Lyricism - Trans. King, 276.]

177 In the 1933 essay “Dom u starogo pimena” (“The House at Old Pimen”), we see the early workings of her rewriting mind and the tendency to take a familiar story and make it hers, to put herself in the position of teller. Hearing a Ukrainian tale in which a dead mother haunts and wants to kill her own daughter, Tsvetaeva describes her childish yet intuitive and prefigurative attempt to understand the reason behind this desire: “Когда

я эту сказку, как всегда в таких случаях, для выяснения самой себе, стала

рассказывать и потом опрашивать, - в чем дело? почему? - только один из моих

собеседников: собеседница, категорически: ʽСовершенно понятно. Ревность. Ведь

дочь - соперница’.”123 Retelling a story to make sense of it, Tsvetaeva inscribes her own voice over the story, and also gives some indication that the dynamic described in the story – the jealousy between mother and daughter – was at first incomprehensible to her.

This suggests that, though her relationship with her mother was a power struggle, it was as if it was played out between equals who determined their own dynamic, rather than by competitors whose rivalry fit into a stereotypical pattern.

Perhaps the most illuminating of her autobiographical essays, however, is her

1937 “Moi Pushkin” (“My Pushkin”). Much of the essay is a love poem in prose to

Pushkin, to his monument, to the figure that he represented to the young Tsvetaeva, and to Pushkin’s Onegin and Tat’iana and all that she learned from them of love. It is not, however, an objective paean with Pushkin at its center, but an expression of a radical subjectivity that creates Tsvetaeva more than it portrays Pushkin. As Heldt writes,

“Tsvetaeva revises the life of the poet Pushkin to account for the life of the poet

123 ibid., 900. [When I took that story, as always in cases like that, and started telling it to make it clear to myself and then asking, ‘What’s the point? Why?,’ only one of my audience, a woman, said categorically: ‘It’s perfectly clear. Envy. You know - a daughter is a rival.’ - Trans. King, 236.]

178 Tsvetaeva,”124 and in this way, she is not merely joining his poetic tradition, but using the existence of his tradition to create and participate in one of her own, one which clearly engages with the tradition of women’s writing in that it demands that her voice be afforded the same authority as his even as she aligns herself with his suffering Tat’iana.

Tsvetaeva recounts how she, as a child, watched Pushkin’s 1837 Evgenii Onegin brought to life on stage and became aware of love and of its relationship to both sacrifice and pride:

Скамейка. На скамейке - Татьяна. Потом приходит Онегин, но не садится, а она встает. Оба стоят. И говорит только он, все время, долго, а она не говорит ни слова. И тут я понимаю ... что это - любовь: когда скамейка, на скамейке - она, потом приходит он, и все время говорит, а она не говорит ни слова.125

While Tsvetaeva had felt that she had understood love even earlier, felt its presence in

Pushkin’s 1824 Tsygany (Gypsies) and divined that love meant absence and abandonment, this new vision of love between Onegin and Tat’iana superseded all that.

Watching the scene at the bench, Tsvetaeva fell in love with Onegin, with Tat’iana, with the two of them together, and she describes how her understanding of their interaction laid the foundation for her approach to love, to writing, and to laying herself bare even in the face of certain disappointment and heartache:

Эта первая моя любовная сцена, предопределила все мои последующие, всю страсть во мне несчастной, невзаимной, невозможной любви. Я с той самой минуты не захотела быть счастливой и этим себя на не-любовь - обрекла. [...] У людей с этим

124 Heldt, 102.

125 ibid., 1133. [A bench. On the bench sits Tatyana. Then Onegin comes in, but he doesn’t sit down and she stands up. They both stand. And only he talks, the whole time, and she doesn’t say a word. And then and there I understand … that this is love: when there’s a bench, and she is on the bench, and then he comes in and talks the whole time, and she doesn’t say a word. - Trans. King, 335.]

179 роковым даром несчастной - единоличной - всей на себя взятой - любви - прямо гений на неподходящие предметы. [...] Если я потом всю жизнь по сей последний день всегда первая писала, первая протягивала руку - и руки, не страшась суда - то только потому, что на заре моих дней лежащая Татьяна в книге, при свечке, с растрепанной и переброшенной через грудь косой, это на моих глазах - сделала. И если я потом, когда уходили (всегда - уходили), не только не протягивала вслед рук, а головы не оборачивала, то только потому, что тогда, в саду, Татьяна застыла статуей.126

In a writer who endured criticism and rejection because of her singular voice and her refusal to modify her voice for greater accessibility or simply stay silent, and in a woman who engaged in impossible and sometimes long-distance relationships that left her feeling even more distant from her home, it is easy to see that this formative understanding of love as non-love reverberated painfully throughout Tsvetaeva’s life and career. We learn in this essay that her mother actually had to turn her back on the man she loved, to marry an older man that she did not love – Tsvetaeva’s father – and that she bore up, just as Tat’iana might have, and so we see that this penchant for sacrifice was inherited from many lines. Tsvetaeva sacrificed herself to her family and to her writing, ultimately paying the highest price for her devotion.

Though it is Tsvetaeva’s poetry for which she is best known and on the strengths of which she is most often assessed, these essays reveal the connection between the woman and the writer, and they clearly strike down the repeated argument that she wrote

126 ibid., 1134. [That first love scene of mine foreordained all the ones that followed, all the passion in me for unhappy, non-reciprocal, impossible love. From that very minute I did not want to be happy and thereby pronounced the sentence of non-love on myself. [...] People with this fatal gift of unhappy love - one-sided love - all taken upon themselves - have a positive genius for unsuitable objects. [...] If afterwards, a whole life long, and to this day, I was always the first one to write, the first one to stretch out my hands and my arms, not fearing judgment, it is only because at the dawn of my days, a Tatyana in a book, lying prone, by the light of a small candle, her braid tousled and thrown across her breast, before my eyes, did what she did. And if afterwards, when they went away (they always went away), I not only did not hold my arms outstretched after them, but did not turn my head, then it is only because then, in that garden, Tatyana grew rigid like a statue. - Trans. King, 336-37.]

180 “like a man”. This sentiment has been expressed by many, but I will allow Clarence

Brown’s particularly hard-headed declaration to illustrate this standpoint. Tsvetaeva was

“a baffling combination of vulnerable and vainglorious woman ... but she wrote like a man,” Brown writes defensively, and preemptively invokes imaginary detractors:

“Furious hands will shoot up throughout the audience: how exactly is it that ‘a man’ writes? Explain in detail, even if it means abandoning the present essay. I can’t. I don’t know.” All he can offer is that the rhythm, the drive, and the inventiveness of her verse

“is not, one somehow desperately feels, unmanly.”127 We must not lazily account for her place in the canon by stubbornly repeating that she writes “like a man”; instead, it is time to acknowledge that she wrote powerfully as a woman, and that it is only the power of her work and the authority with which she writes that causes her voice to appear masculine to audiences that are not yet prepared to attribute power to the female voice.

The male voice is seen as unmarked, as universal, and Tsvetaeva’s work, as Heldt writes, is “women’s poetry at its most female and universal”;128 the female and the universal do not conflict. Even Tsvetaeva’s own writings argue this point. For instance, in the 1933 essay “Poety s istoriei i poety bez istorii” (“Poets With History and Poets Without

History”), she offers an homage to the feminine voice in Akhmatova’s poetry precisely because of its fluid expression of both the feminine and the poetic:

Когда молодая Ахматова в первых стихах своей первой книги дает любовное смятение строками: Я на правую руку надела Перчатку с левой руки, — она одним толчком дает все женское и все лирическое смятение —

127 Brown, Clarence. “On Not Liking Tsvetaeva.” London Review of Books 16.17 (1994): 13-14.

128 Heldt, 143.

181 всю эмпирику! … В этом двустишии - вся женщина, весь поэт и вся Ахматова в своей единственности и неповторимости, которой невозможно подражать. До Ахматовой никто у нас так не дал жест. И никто после нее.129

The feminine and the lyric combine well, Tsvetaeva conveys, but it is a difficult act, an act that because of its very difficulty must be acknowledged as a feat of great writerly strength and skill, an act that is worthy. Though Tsvetaeva’s writings are very different from Akhmatova’s, Tsvetaeva herself clearly rejected the idea that the feminine and the lyrical are mutually exclusive.

Tsvetaeva, though misunderstood in her own time (and also in ours), all but expected her writings and, in fact, the writings of any great poet, to fall on the deaf or critical ears of contemporaries. Her clearest statement on this phenomenon is given in her

1932 essay “Poet i vremia” (“The Poet and Time”), in which she explains that it is the very lack of temporariness that prevents great writers from finding an audience around them: “Стихи наши дети. Наши дети старше нас, потому что им дольше, дальше

жить. Старше нас из будущего. Потому нам иногда и чужды.”130 Tsvetaeva’s work, then, stands far from the official truth of the State, so far that it seems irrelevant to even examine the distance between them, existing as they do in different worlds, in different

129 ibid., 870. [When in the first poem of her first book, the young Akhmatova conveys the confusion of love in the lines: I drew my left-hand glove / onto my right hand - she conveys at one blow all feminine and all lyric confusion (all the confusion of the empirical!) … The whole woman, the whole poet is in these two lines; the whole Akhmatova, unique, unrepeatable, inimitable. Before Akhmatova none of us portrayed a gesture like this. And no one did after her. - Trans. Livingstone, 143.]

130 Tsvetaeva, Marina. Polnoe sobranie poezii, prozy, dramaturgi v odnom tome. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Al’fa-Kniga, 2010. 772. Henceforth referred to as PS. [Poems are our children. Our children are older than us, because they have longer and further to live. Older than us from the future. Therefore sometimes foreign to us. - Trans. Livingstone, Angela. Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry. Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2010. 96.]

182 times. While official language filled the mouths of Panova’s protagonists and existed uncomfortably alongside Berggol’ts’s personal language, and while official lies hung in the background of the works of Chukovskaia and Akhmatova, it is not audible in

Tsvetaeva’s work at all. Even the echoes of it are delivered by her voice into landscapes unchangeable by others.

Shaking Off the Silence

As Nadezhda Mandelstam writes in her second book, Vtoraia kniga (given the name

Hope Abandoned in English), her project in her first book, Vospominaniia, was to memorialize her husband; that and that alone was her clear and definite goal. In her second book, however, she looks closely at this dynamic, and discovers the extent to which her own subjectivity was obliterated by horrors of the 1930s and by her focus on her husband. “Думая об этом,” she writes, “я забывала и себя, и свою судьбу, и даже

то, что говорю о себе, а не о ком другом.”131 She wrote her first book but she did not write herself, and while her second book also contains lengthy passages on literature and history in which she is scholar rather than subject, she meditates on the ways in which subjectivity and a focus on the self became abhorrent to her in a time when a whole nation was suffering: “В этом вареве и крошеве изчезло слово ‘я’. Оно стало почти

постыдным - запрещенной темой. Кто смеет говорить о своей судьбе, жаловаться на

свою судьбу, когда это общая судьба?”132 She recalls, in fact, that she even became

131 Mandel’shtam, Nadezhda. Vtoraia kniga. Moskva: Soglasie, 1999. 9. [thinking about this, I forgot myself and what had happened to me personally, and even that I was writing about my own life, not somebody else’s. - Trans. Max Hayward. Hope Abandoned. By Nadezhda Mandelstam. New York: Atheneum, 1981. 3.]

132 ibid., 10. [In the midst of such general misery and doom, the word ‘I’ lost its meaning,

183 furious with Akhmatova because of Akhmatova’s frequent use of the word “I” in her poetry, and in her reflections decades later, Mandelstam explains that it was a revelation when she realized that it was, in fact, quite an admirable feat to keep sight of one’s own self in such terrible and destructive times, and that losing oneself is not noble at all.

Realizing that she lost herself, she regains herself.

And, though she finishes Vtoraia kniga with a letter to her husband, she is the subject, and it is her love and her loss that are foregrounded:

Ты всегда со мной, и я - дикая и злая, которая никогда не умела просто заплакать, - я плачу, я плачу, я плачу. Это я - Надя. Где ты? Прощай. Надя.133

Though Mandelstam did not engage with the tradition of women’s writing developed in this era in her first memoir, she begins to enter it here by announcing herself as a worthy subject. Her realization poignantly casts light on this tradition by focusing on its absence, because the absence of it, she realizes, was the absence of her.

Though censorship was loosened after Stalin’s death and women’s writing began, once again, to be able to engage with those questions of sexuality, marriage, economic opportunites, and personal autonomy in the public and private spheres that left off in the

1920s, their voices addressed these questions with a growing strength and rising volume that was made possible by the work of the women of this era. These women who wrote became shameful or taboo. Who dared talk about his own fate or complain about it when it was the same for everybody? - Trans. Hayward, 4.]

133 ibid., 628. [ You are with me always, and I who was such a wild and angry one and never learned to weep simple tears - now I weep and weep and weep. It’s me: Nadia. Where are you? Farewell. Nadia. - Trans. Hayward, 621.]

184 themselves insisted on their presence, and their devotion to this insistence and to their own voices created a tradition of women’s writing upon which later traditions would build.

185 CHAPTER FOUR

Not from Gogol’s Overcoat: New Genealogies from the Thaw Past the End of the Century

Who, feeling a funny desire inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn’t thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble.1

Following the death of Stalin in 1953, Soviet Russia undertook to change itself from the inside out. It was not only policies that were to change; the entire nation was to reassess its approach to both leadership and Communism. Nikita Khrushchev (head of the

CPSU from 1956-1964), at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, softly opened the so- called woman question once again, arguing that discrimination against women in public life was a problem that Communism had not yet solved. While any re-introduction of an examination of the status of women politically or socially after three decades of repression was a positive turn and represented Soviet society’s emergence from the

Stalinist era, there were two crucial givens that remained undisturbed: women as well as men were still positioned as primarily servants of the State, and domestic labor was generally accepted to be private, a woman’s concern, becoming public only in those instances where it hampered her position as a wage-working citizen.2 A rejection of

1 Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1.4 (1976): 876.

2 Kelly, Catriona. A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 1820-1992. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. 343.

186 Stalinism, then, was not a wholesale rejection of total political authority, and in fact the critique of Stalinism worked to hide the continuing hierarchical control of the State.

Catriona Kelly rightly points out that the marked difference of Stalin’s leadership from the periods preceding and following him cannot be denied; we must only be careful to remember that Stalin the Symbol and Stalin the Actual Dictator worked hand in hand, and the power of the symbol outlived the man.

This immediately post-Stalin period and the better part of the decade that followed came to be known as the Thaw; named after writer Il’ia Ehrenburg’s 1954 novella “Ottepel’”, the Thaw became an emblem of this period of undoing Stalinism and confronting a new and uncertain future. Historians Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd argue that the metaphor of the Thaw, when pushed to its logical end, indicates not just one season emerging from the last, but further cycles of winter and spring; for this reason, and for many more, Kozlov argues that the Thaw period and its understanding of progress was crucial, not just for undoing Stalinism, but for creating the whole era that followed it, even past the dissolution of the USSR.3 A tentative rebirth of a semblance of the intelligentsia and a testing of social strictures became possible, but these new freedoms quickly led to the expression of a deep sense of anxiety and unease for both the Party and the Soviet citizenry; no certainty existed that a terrible cycle would not begin again.

Women made up approximately 55% of the population during Khrushchev’s time in office; there were many women in the workforce and also many single mothers, which, though less preferable to the State than traditional families, were not as negatively

3 Kozlov, Denis and Eleonory Gilburd, eds. The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. 23, 3.

187 stigmatized as they may have been in the West in these years. However, while women were encouraged to become both mothers and also workers in the public sphere, there was enough social assistance offered to make filling both of these roles an easy task; a common problem was one in which the creche closed at the same time - or even earlier - than a mother got off work herself, meaning that she was unable to pick up her own child.4 While the question of how to ease the burden of women was taken seriously in

Party discussions and in magazines, the actual results of these discussions were nil or slow to become actualized; the Seven-Year Plan, which was to cover the years 1958-

1965, meant to raise living standards domestically by providing new appliances, materials, and cultural goods such as radios and televisions, and yet these promises were, in large part, not realized. Additionally, as women spent more of their so-called free time on housework than did men, they fell behind men in time spent on work, education, sports, and other activities deemed valuable for the individual; while there was some discussion in the press about men doing more around the house, the house remained a female-dominated space, which in turn dominated the female.5 The zhensovety was created in the late 1950s, an organization which allowed women to work together on civic questions and play an active role in improving conditions at home and at work, and this imbalance in domestic labor was one problem among many that came to be explored regarding possible reasons for unsuccessful partnerships; alcoholism, domestic violence, and even sexual abuse were also discussed.6 However, the questions addressed by the

4 Ilič, Melanie. “Women in the Khrushchev Era: an Overview.” Women in the Khrushchev Era. Eds. Melanie Ilič, Susan E. Reid, and Lynne Attwood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 6- 9.

5 ibid., 11-12. 6 ibid., 13-18.

188 zhensovety were often handed down from above, rather than generated from women themselves, and the Stalinist assertion that the woman question had been basically solved was not disrupted.7 Overall, there were many efforts and promises made, and while there were some successes, the situation remained one in which women remained dragged down by a heavy double burden.

Historian Susan Reid makes a simple yet excellent observation about the quieter types of control established in this era: “[t]he relation between the Khrushchev state and society was not totalitarianism; it was, nevertheless, paternal and patriarchal”.8 This is a crucial distinction, because it points to the ways in which social control was played out in the interactions of regular citizens with one another, and as such had the potential to become more effective and intrusive than completely top-down control. Even parenting styles were dictated by the State, bringing paternalism into an arena that, assuming the traditional family is in place, already possesses its own pater, creating an interesting conundrum: if one was to believe that the traditional family was desirable, then one was also to accept that the structure of the family, which normally places the head of the family within the family, rather than outside it, was still in place.9 This presented an interesting twist on the double burden, and one which left women with a multitude of masters.

7 Racioppi, Linda and Katherine O’Sullivan See. “Organizing Women before and after the Fall: Women's Politics in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia.” Signs 20.4 (1995): 821.

8 Reid, Susan E. “Women in the Home.” Women in the Khrushchev Era. Eds. Melanie Ilič, Susan E. Reid, and Lynne Attwood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 156.

9 Field, Deborah A. “Mothers and Fathers and the Problem of Selfishness in the Khrushchev Period.” Women in the Khrushchev Era. Eds. Melanie Ilič, Susan E. Reid, and Lynne Attwood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 107.

189 Though the years under Leonid Brezhnev (1964-1982) saw renewed tightening politically and socially, his so-called “era of stagnation” was a time of both scarcity and certain securities. Brezhnev himself was politically moderate, neither Stalinist nor anti-

Stalinist, and while Soviet bureaucrats under Stalin feared for their lives, and under

Khrushchev feared for their careers, Brezhnev nurtured the growth of cadres and bureaucratic stability, and this type of tenure brought about a not-insignificant amount of true stagnation in the party membership.10 Internationally, the USSR gained strength, but nationally, economic growth was low and availability of key goods was erratic and minimal. On the other hand, things were extremely predictable and generally peaceful, and opportunities were growing; there were more students in institutions of higher learning during Brezhnev's era than at any other time in Soviet history. Historian Archie

Brown points out, however, that this was a double-edged sword - greater education meant greater understanding of world affairs and greater access to critical assessments of Soviet life. Finally, despondency and alcoholism were on the rise, a long-term trend that is not to be understated; from 1964 to the early 1980s, the life expectancy for men fell from 66 to

62, and this took a demographic and psychological toll on the country.11

The Brezhnev era, however, despite certain spikes in social control, did leave room for new cultural developments, not least of which was the increased visibility of female writers. In novels and stories, narratives of working women and the endless trials of their daily lives pushed against the master narrative and its claims that Soviet socialism had achieved – or was even concertedly interested in achieving – factual

10 Brown, Archie. The Rise and Fall of Communism. New York: Ecco Press, 2009. 401.

11 ibid., 417-418.

190 equality for women. With Brezhnev introducing the concept of “mature socialism” in the late 1960s, the idea that there were stages of development toward fully developed

Communism led to an understanding of the woman question that presented women’s inequality and their position within the traditional family structure as “non-antagonistic contradictions,”12 meaning that they were issues that could be addressed without any radical alteration in social structures and norms. This is ironic given the fact that women had formal but not factual equality, and it was exactly social structures and norms that would have to be changed to address the imbalance. It is, however, not ironic at all - the traditional family was necessary to provide all the material and spiritual comfort that the

State could not provide, particularly given the great deficit in comforts inherited from the post-war period. The use of the family and of women within it was not disguised; the

State’s attempts to affect family life throughout the 1970s and 80s did not focus on the socialization of housework or the redistribution of domestic labor, but on higher birth rates and stable family structures.13 Pronatalism and nationalism conspired to push the woman question into maternity wards and motherhood, and it is in those places where the female writers of the last decades of Communism and the first years of post-socialism took up arms. They moved from the quotidian surroundings of workplaces and kitchens to the sick and sterile settings of hospitals right into the torn open bodies and minds of women, bedraggled and worn but always encased in an increasingly suffocating everyday world. If we follow their path, we discover a new telling of the decades surrounding the

12 Buckley, Mary. “Soviet Interpretations of the Woman Question.” Soviet Sisterhood. Ed. Barbara Holland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. 42.

13 ibid., 45.

191 close of the Soviet century, a found and dirty narrative, a story without end.

A Life Like Any Other: Natal’ia Baranskaia Reopens the Woman Question

The re-introduction of the woman question, uneasily incomplete in its governmental incarnation, found completion elsewhere; the questions that Khrushchev had not asked began to be addressed in literature, and with the publication of the novella Nedelia kak nedelia (A Week Like Any Other) by Natal’ia Baranskaia (1908-2004) in Novyi Mir in

1969, women, though still in their capacity as servants of the state, began once again to be portrayed with new dimensions. Their interior lives, their roles as mothers and wives, as friends, and finally as individuals with identities that hinged on only some or none of these roles, began to unfold from the confines of cupboards and laboratories and lines.

It was not only the content of the novella but the circumstances surrounding its publication that marked a turning point in women’s literature; Baranskaia was already over 60 years old when the story was published, and even more notably, she had never been a part of the Soviet literary establishment’s writing institutions, which had generally been a prerequisite for nearly all successful writers since the mid-1930s.14 Even more significantly, however, Baranskaia’s age put her in a generation that had seen women joining the workforce in great numbers and with great hopes for the future; coming of age in the 1920s, she had grown up concerned with work and revolution, not with child- rearing and domestic obligations.15 These biographical details, however, have often been used to feed into the criticism that Baranskaia’s place in even the secondary canon is

14 Kelly, 398-99. 15 Monks, Pieta. “In Conversation with Natalya Baranskaya.” Trans. Pieta Monks. Writing Lives: Conversations Between Women Writers. Ed. Mary Chamberlain. London: Virago Press, 1988. 29.

192 attributable only to her “sociological acuity and sensitivity to topical issues”16, but I would argue that it is her very engagement with these issues that creates such a response; her quotidian subject matter in the wrong hands creates an illusion of a quotidian writer, just as the dismissal of the worth of boulevard literature often hinged on its very accessibility. Additionally, though her depiction of women as the arbiters of morality is in line with the post-Stalin Soviet framework, her focus on the interaction of these morals with the unstable political and social systems that surrounded them places both the morals and the women that hold them on a precarious tightrope, rather than on a pedestal.

In Ol’ga Nikolaevna, the protagonist of Nedelia kak nedelia, and in the catalogue of her week with all its hurrying and frustrations, a nation of women recognized themselves. Baranskaia received what she considered to be a surprising number of letters from women upon its publication, epistolary commiseration, and she was even told of instances of direct and immediate changes that came about when the text was able to create a dialogue between wives and husbands.17 The story, a record of an unremarkable week for an unremarkable woman, shook off the sheen of the perfect Communist family, and the tired woman at its center gave voice to a mental and physical exhaustion that quietly plagued Soviet society. Emotional difficulties, unforgiving working conditions, and casual talk of abortion are spread throughout the novella. Abortion had been criminalized by Stalin in 1936, and though Khrushchev legalized abortion again in 1955, it was strongly condemned by the State, and because it was seen as an “undesirable social

16 Kelly, 399.

17 Monks, 31.

193 practice,” women’s comfort during abortions was not a priority.18 Baranskaia's story indicates, however, that this was not so unusual; women's comfort was not prioritized at any other time, either.

The novella, like Ol’ga Nikolaevna’s week, begins on Monday; Ol’ga Nikolaevna is late for her job at the polymer laboratory. Once there, after reprimands and explanations, she finds a questionnaire at her work-station, and this questionnaire is to set the scene for the narration that follows; her entire life is broken into an accusatory barrage of bullet points. What’s your family situation? Do you have a husband? How many children, and how old are they? Do any other relatives live with you? Are your children in nursery school? Kindergarten? How many rooms do you have, and how many square meters? How many hours are spent on housework? With children? Enjoying free- time? How many days off due to illness, either your own or your children’s? This questionnaire, Ol’ga Nikolaevna thinks, wants to know absolutely everything about her,19 and so the reader should understand: this is absolutely everything.

In the ensuing discussion between Ol’ga Nikolaevna and her co-workers, the ugly heart of the questionnaire and the even uglier heart of its origins in pronatalism and social control is exposed, hopelessly and conversationally. “‘Дадут нам, матерям, какие-

нибудь льготы. А? Вот рабочий день сократят. Может, начнут больничные за детей

оплачивать, не только три дня... Раз изучают, что-нибудь да сделают’”,20 comes the

18 Rivkin-Fish, Michele. “Conceptualizing Feminist Strategies For Russian Reproductive Politics: Abortion, Surrogate Motherhood, and Family Support after Socialism.” Signs 38.3 (2013): 572-73.

19 Baranskaia, Natal’ia. "Nedelia kak nedelia." Novyi Mir 11 (1969): 25. 20 ibid., 27 ['Maybe they’ll give us mothers some benefits, eh? Shorten our working day; pay us for the whole time we have off when our kids are sick and not just the first three days, don’t you think? Now that they’re looking at it they’re bound to do something’ - Trans. Monks, Pieta. A Week

194 hopeful voice, while the cynical voice responds: no. The Soviet government wants to know how to increase both the birth rate and the rate of productivity, and for that they need all spare hands, all spare wombs, because they have to continue building, building

“дома, заводы, станки, мосты, дороги, ракеты, коммунизм... В общем, все ’”.21

Though the utopian dream of collective child-rearing was no longer in effect after the

Thaw, tight control of parenthood and even educational programs in which mothers and fathers were taught to nurture and educate their children, with the aim of turning out generations of dutiful Communists, had brought the government into the private homes of citizens in new and strangling ways, and though parents often only went through the motions, the intrusion into private life and even sometimes into the body could generally not be avoided.22 Frustrated and exhausted by the seeming futility of envisioning positive changes, the women abandon the conversation, to the disappointment of our protagonist.23 This simple workplace conversation, killed before it could even get started, is a metonym for the larger conversation that never seems to take place.

The women, tasked with doing the shopping for their families, take turns running these errands during their lunch hour, sharing the load by lessening the time that each individual has to spend waiting in lines; working through lunch is not uncommon. By the end of the day, Ol’ga Nikolaevna is exhausted, and yet it is only one workday that’s over; her work at home has just begun. Throughout the rest of the week, there is more wage-

Like Any Other: Novellas and Stories. Natalya Baranskaya. Seattle: Seal Press, 1990. 9.]

21 ibid., 27. [houses; factories; machines; bridges; missiles; communism. Everything. - Trans. Monks, 10.]

22 Field, 96.

23 ibid., 34

195 work, more hurrying, more care for crying children, tears, casual stories of abortions and motherhood, increasingly frequent arguments with her husband Dima, and more hurrying, more hurrying. Baranskaia creates tension throughout the entire novella by playing with tenses, subtly changing the reader's understanding of the stress or immediacy of certain moments and events in Ol'ga Nikolaevna's week,24 and by the final day of her narration, Ol'ga Nikolaevna's deep exhaustion and feelings of helplessness are perfectly justified – at least to the reader. Her thoughts to herself, however, are marked by an attempt to rationalize her despair: “Отчего я злюсь? Не знаю. Может, оттого, что я

вечно боюсь забеременеть. Может, от таблеток, которые я глотаю. Кто знает? А

может, она вообще не нужна мне больше, эта любовь?”25 Fear of pregnancy, exhaustion, the stress of a relationship determined by duty rather than love or common understanding - these are what bubble up between tasks. But the pressure to continue, to bear up, is compounded by the fact that, even though her wage-work is a heavy load, it is one of the very few things with which Ol’ga Nikolaevna may define herself, and her attempts to remain reasonable in unreasonable circumstances indicate her need for this definition; the idea of becoming a full-time housewife means only further restriction. Her response to her husband's suggestion that she give up her work to stay home with the children full-time shows how clearly she perceives her conundrum:

— Дима, неужели ты думаешь, что я не хотела бы сделать так, как лучше детям? Очень хотела бы! Но то, что предлагаешь ты, это

24 Lahusen, Thomas. “‘Leaving Paradise’ and Perestroika: A Week Like Any Other and Memorial Day by Natal’ia Baranskaia.” Fruits of Her Plume: Essays on Contemporary Women’s Culture. Ed. Helena Goscilo. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1993. 210.

25 Baranskaia, 52. [Why have I got so upset? Why? Is it because I’m always worried about getting pregnant? Am I taking too many pills? God knows … Or perhaps I don’t need this kind of love anymore. - Trans. Monks, 57.]

196 просто... меня уничтожить. А моя учеба пять лет? Мой диплом? Мой стаж? Моя тема? Как тебе легко все это выбросить — швырк, и готово! И какая я буду, сидя дома? Злая, как черт: буду на вас ворчать все время. Да вообще о чем мы говорим? На твою зарплату мы не проживем, ничего другого, реального, тебе пока не предлагают... — Не обижайся, Оля, ты, вероятно, права. Не стоит об этом говорить. Зря я начал. Просто мне примерещилась какая-то такая... разумно устроенная жизнь. И то, что я, если не буду спешить за ребятами, смогу работать иначе, не ограничивать себя... Может быть, это эгоизм, не знаю. Кончим об этом, ладно.26

The “ordered” life that Dima dreams of exists only in propaganda, a fact more clear to his wife than to him; it is she, after all, who must create and keep the order. Dima sees the illusion of the perfect Soviet family, but not the reality of the Soviet families that surround him, the family that surrounds him. Part of Ol’ga Nikolaevna’s task, after all, is to spend her days and nights creating the illusion.

Even given the strength of the argument contained in the narration of this fictional woman’s life, however, Baranskaia makes it clear that she herself is not a feminist: emancipation and hard work have, yes, made women strong, but concurrently, men have become weak, useless, and drunk, and what good is feminism in restoring this lost balance, in returning women to their natural feminine state, softer and more nurturing, so that men may regain the strength that they have lost?27 This argument, as we shall see, is a popular one, echoed by several female writers of the late Soviet period, and though it is

26 ibid., 53-54. [ʽDima, do you really think I don’t want what’s best for the children? You know I do, but what you’re suggesting would kill me. What about my five years at university, my degree, my seniority, my research? It’s easy enough for you to dismiss it all, but if I didn’t work I’d go mad, I’d become impossible to live with. Anyway, there’s no point in talking about it. There’s no way that we could live on your salary and at the moment you really haven’t been offered anything else.’ ʽAll right, Olya, all right! I was wrong to mention it. I just had this vision of a different, ordered kind of life. If I didn’t have to fetch the children all the time I could work so much better, I wouldn’t feel so constrained. Maybe I’m being selfish, I don’t know. Let’s drop it.’ - Trans. Monks, 60.] 27 Monks, 34-35.

197 essentialist at its core, its position gives agency to women, rather than taking it from them; strength in this formulation is a female attribute, and with strength comes responsibility.28

This certain acceptance of women’s unflagging steel and the deepening examination into its sources continues along as an unbroken thread through women’s writing to the 21st century, past perestroika. Despite any ensuing changes in style and tone, Baranskaia’s writing and her stripping down and peeling back of propagandistic illusions of woman made way for more exposure, for the peeling back of yet deeper layers, for women that become more multivalent and bodily as the years push forward.

Feminism Reemerging: Zhenshchina i Rossiia

Though Baranskaia and her realist works made it past censorship to popularity, ten years after the initial release of Nedelia kak nedelia, a different kind of realism appeared in print, this time explicitly feminist and, according to the KGB, completely unacceptable.

In the fall of 1979, a samizdat publication called Zhenshchina i Rossiia: Almanakh

Zhenshchinam o Zhenshchinakh (Woman and Russia: An Almanac for Women about

Women) appeared in a small print run of only ten copies. At that time, state control was present in every realm of public and private life, and even typing and distributing ten copies of the Almanakh was difficult and dangerous. Further compounding the difficulty of such an endeavor was the fact that even within dissident circles and the so-called

“second” culture, feminism was generally unwelcome. Tat’iana Mamonova (1943-), one

28 For further evidence of this trend’s continuation through the 1980s, see Francine du plessix Gray’s Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

198 of the founding editors of the journal, explains that dissident men, like other men in the

Soviet Union, simply “have not grasped that the feminist movement is directed, not against men, but against the violation of the person in any manner for any purpose.”29

Mamonova and two others of the four founding editors of the journal, Iuliia

Voznesenskaia (1940-2015) and Nataliia Malakhovskaia (1947-), came from a dissident background; the fourth, Tat’iana Goricheva (1947-), was led to the group by her dissatisfaction with Soviet attitudes towards motherhood and family relations.30 The journal, comprised of essays, articles, poetry, and short fictional pieces, begins with a statement by the editors, “Eti dobrye patriarkhal'nye ustoi” (“Those good old patriarchal foundations”), in which they state outright that the position of woman in society is the central concern of the day, and that while it is being addressed in Europe, in Russia it is not yet even on the table.31 This discomfort with feminism, often manifested as outright rejection, mirrored in some ways the fate that certain feminisms had found during the late

19th century and then again in the revolutionary era; feminist ideologies, seen as bourgeois and narrow, had once again taken a subordinate role to broader movements surrounding class conflicts and other forms of radical action.

Mamonova was questioned by the KGB in November and December of 1979, nearly immediately upon the journal’s release, as were Goricheva and Voznesenskaia,32

29 Mamonova, Tatyana, ed. Women and Russia: Feminist Writings from the Soviet Union. Trans. Rebecca Park and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. xiv.

30 Holt, Alix. “The First Soviet Feminists.” Soviet Sisterhood. Ed. Barbara Holland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. 240.

31 Zhenshchina i Rossiia: Almanakh Zhenshchinam o zhenshchinakh. Paris: Des femmes, 1980. 11.

32 ibid., 241-42.

199 but for entirely separate reasons, by March of 1980 the group had split; ideological differences had created two factions. Mamonova was the lone secular feminist, while

Goricheva, Malakhovskaia, and Voznesenskaia considered themselves to be Christian feminists, even going so far as to call their group (and their second journal) Maria. The resultant differences proved to be irreconcilable. Among the most contentious issues were

Bolshevism, which Mamonova accepted in its pre-Stalin form and the others rejected outright; idolization of the Virgin Mary, which Mamonova could not tolerate; abortion, which the Maria group staunchly opposed and which was considered by Mamonova to be an inalienable right; and the position of traditional, heterosexual marriage, which the

Marias supported and which Mamonova rejected.33 After the four were summarily exiled in the summer of 1980, Mamonova’s secular approach led to an intelligibility and exchange with Western feminism that the others neither achieved nor sought.34

Mamonova, however, still kept her focus tightly on the Russian context, and in her writing she engages with radical women in Russian history, invoking revolutionaries

Sophia Perovskaia, Vera Figner, and Vera Zasulich, and she suggests that, because of the generation gap and the erasure of history under Stalin, the feminists of her age know very little about the feminist history of the years around the Revolution.35 The feminism of the

Marias, in calling for a return to a soft, nurturing femininity and traditional marriage, was

33 ibid., 247-48

34 British media in particular developed a fascination with the exiled feminists. See Guppy, Shusha. “The Women’s Camp: Shusha Guppy marks the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by reporting on the women’s movement in the Soviet Union.” The Observer, Dec 13 1981, 35; Nichols, Jill and Karen Margolis. “Can perfume and flowers conceal a whiff of discrimination?” The Guardian, Feb 29 1980, 8; “How the Russian kind of freedom has turned women into monstrosities”. The Guardian, Jul. 31 1982. 8. 35 Mamonova, xvii.

200 simply not compatible with Mamonova’s militancy. However, despite what may seem to be a greater degree of conservatism on the part of the Marias, the re-engagement with religious principles can be understood as a late Soviet reworking of the religious experiments that had occurred in the first decades of the 20th century; a reach back to

Christian symbolism in the context of Soviet state-mandated secularism shares certain qualities with the ecstatic turn to Dionysian and utopian religious trends that had been a hallmark of the Symbolists and others, namely the attempt to use religion on one's own terms and to one's own ends and the desire to position sexual and familial ties in the domain of the individual, rather than as components of institutional structures.36 Though the reassessments of sexuality and identity that were the central feature of the works of

Nagrodskaia and Verbitskaia were not directly analogous to the work undertaken by the

Marias, all of them may be understood as attempts to change the relationship between the individual woman and the structures built around her by the desires of the State. For instance: despite the fact that marriage laws had been relaxed in the time of both

Baranskaia and the new feminist movement to prevent discrimination against single mothers and illegitimate children, the push for traditional families was still strong in

Soviet society, and even given the so-called Thaw, this was partially due to a mentality that had been set in place under Stalin. Stalin’s government identified that the family exerted the most immediate control over the individual, which called for a two-pronged approach: the family had to be controlled by the State, and the primary function of the

36 For a discussion of the evolving treatment of sexuality within and without the family in the late imperial and Revolutionary periods, see Engelstein, Laura. The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.

201 family had to be control of its members.37 The Marias did not wish to alter the basic structure of the family, but rather hoped to re-examine and redistribute power within the traditional family unit, and even this was unacceptable to the State.

It is possible that the editors of the Almanakh were so immediately exiled because of the fact that, in 1981, one year after their expulsion from the USSR, the 11th Five-Year

Plan was put forward by the 26th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the new hopes for the family rested on women’s shoulders; in this scenario, it was imperative that women not question their roles. Policy changes that supposedly helped women but in actuality strengthened the traditional patriarchal structures were to be put in place: maternity leave was changed from 56 paid days off to a partially-paid year, with another 6-12 months of unpaid time off with no break in work record; working women were also given more vacation time, both paid and unpaid, and encouraged to take up part-time, rather than full-time work; “equality plus” rears its head yet again.38 These changes, seemingly benevolent, actually created an atmosphere in which women were encouraged to have more children and work out of the house less, in which self- determination was still not encouraged, and in which the impetus existed to create an idealized image of women in which they are nurturing, caring, and naturally possessed of a maternal instinct, which, as Mary Buckley points out, falsely suggests that these are characteristics which men then necessarily lack; femininity and masculinity thus become politically constructed categories.39 And, of course, the facts remain: although in the

37Alexandrova, Ekaterina. “Why Soviet Women Want to Get Married.” Trans. Rebecca Park. Women and Russia: Feminist Writings from the Soviet Union. Ed. Tatyana Mamonova. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. 47.

38 Buckley, 47. 39 ibid., 49-50.

202 1980s women made up 52% of the labor force, with 90% of women employed, they were clustered in lower-paid, less-respected jobs, and they were poorly represented in decision- making bodies.40 Good old patriarchal foundations indeed.

Writing the Body: Voznesenskaia’s Damskii Dekameron

Although Iuliia Voznesenskaia was a member of the Maria group, her novel Damskii

Dekameron (The Women’s Decameron), written in exile in West Germany in 1985, displays that her thoughts on traditional marriage and femininity had changed somewhat in the intervening years; her novel is populist, feminist, and explicitly and unapologetically takes on questions of rape, abortion, and non-traditional lifestyles. Like

Baranskaia, Voznesenskaia uses the voices and materials of the everyday to construct a narrative - or rather, ten woven-together narratives - that puts on display all the unglamorous layers of the lives of Soviet women; fittingly, the action takes place in a maternity ward. This confluence of sexuality and motherhood and coarse language marks the beginning of a new exploration of the female body in Russian women’s prose.

The maternity ward here represents not only a culture where motherhood and maternity is so fraught, but the awkward relationship between public and private. Using

Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, Helena Goscilo suggests that, while broad generalizations may indicate that women’s space is domestic and therefore private, while men’s space is open and public, the hospital may represent for women what the prison

40 Goscilo, Helena. Dehexing Sex: Russian Womanhood During and After Glasnost. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. 8-9.

203 has traditionally represented for men in Russian literature.41 In the hospital chronotope exists the tension between public and private, and a kind of victimization specific to women is highlighted. Maternity care in Soviet Russia was brutish, and the mandated eight to ten days of hospital stay, with visitors rarel allowed, create a type of isolation that is only compounded by the impersonality of the care. The demoralizing humiliation and the special combination of lack of privacy and isolation only represent a more extreme version of the everyday experience of women of the time.42

This treatment of childbirth and maternity was far from the ideals that were held at the time of the 1917 Revolution. Maternity had been regarded as a social, rather than private responsibility, and between 1917 and 1920, there were experiments with collectivized childbirth centers and institutional supports for mothers and infants, but before long they were disregarded, and it became assumed that maternity and childcare would be addressed more fully when material conditions improved.43 Though infant and mother mortality was successfully reduced by about half by 1925, with a large network of clinics having been created, the quality of care slowly decreased under Stalin, and by the

1980s, mortality rates were rising in comparison to other developed nations, and the process, which denied women family and community support, was treated like any other bureaucratic routine.44 Additionally, new mothers were only allowed to see their babies at 41 Goscilo, Helena. “Women’s space and women’s place in contemporary Russian fiction.” Gender and Russian Literature: New Perspectives. Ed. Rosalind Marsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 328. For an elaboration on the chronotope, see Bakhtin, M.M. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”. In The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. 84-258.

42 ibid., 337.

43 Holland, Barbara and Theresa McKevitt. “Maternity Care in the Soviet Union.” Soviet Sisterhood. Ed. Barbara Holland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. 149. 44 ibid., 146.

204 feeding time, strictly every three hours.45

It was against this background that Voznesenskaia set her novel, and in the community of women that she creates, she, like Mamonova, seems to be calling for a return to Revolutionary ideals. In this community is Galina, a bookworm who fell madly in love with a dissident; Nelya, a music teacher whose Jewish background meant that she spent years of her childhood in Auschwitz, which has left her with a deeply ingrained suspicion of men; Irishka, a simple secretary from a milk factory; Larissa, a doctor of biology; Natasha, an engineer; Emma, a theater director with an active and independent mind; Zina, a transient wildcard who has done time in labour camps; Valentina, a party bigwig with a perfect centrally-planned family; Olga, a worker at the Admiralty shipyard; and Albina, a blond and attractive Aeroflot hostess who uses drugs, has a history of extreme sexual abuse, and has had a number of abortions. These women represent a spectrum of class and ideology, and in their ten days together in the maternity ward, through ten themes and ten stories a day, they uncover the commonalities that they share as women in general and as Soviet women in particular.

Each day, as in Boccaccio’s Decameron, has a theme, and for each theme each woman tells a story. It is Emma who suggests that they pass their time in this way, but it is Albina who sets the tone for the days ahead, when she declares that most of women’s problems arise from idle fantasies of better lives, and why do they have to have these fantasies? Albina surmises: “исключительно от сексуальной необеспеченности,”46 a

45 ibid., 165. 46 Voznesenskaia, Julia. Zhenskii dekameron. Tallinn: Tomas, 1991. 28. [Because of sexual insecurity. - my trans. W.B. Linton translates this as “To put it bluntly, it's because we don't get fucked enough,” which, although evocative of the tone of the novel, is not strictly precise (Linton, W.B., trans. The Women's Decameron. Julia Voznesenskaia. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1985, 19).]

205 statement which is illuminated in a number of ways throughout the text. Some days’ themes are more notable than others, but there are certain elements that seem to arise whatever the theme. The first day’s theme, for instance, First Love, is fairly predictably comprised of awkward young romances, with the exception of Zina’s story, a rather brisk account of assault and rape.47 The second day’s theme, Seduced and Abandoned, is generally much more humorous than its name would suggest, but rape is once again recounted, this time by Albina, whose description of two years of frequent rape and mental abuse at a very young age by a figure skating coach and his colleague is graphic and extremely pointed. Responding to what she considers to be Galina’s naive interpretation of the Nabokov’s Lolita, Albina launches furiously into her own story:

А то, что если бы вас с десяти лет толкли толстой вонючей палкой, все бы вам внутри перекорежили, так вы бы так легко не отделались. Из меня мою девку трое суток тащили, уж хотели кесарево делать. Моя б воля, я бы и этому вашему Набокову, и всем мужикам, которые на детей лезут, раскаленными щипцами все их хозяйство повырывала!А первому - тому гаду, который со мной в Лолиту эту сыграл...Этот Набоков деньгу, видно, зашибить хотел покрупней, вот и рассусолил пакости свои на целую книжку, размазал сперму по страницам. А вы, интеллектуевые дурочки, вздыхаете, будто там медом намазано. Слышала я ваши разговорчики, бывала я в культурном обществе. А в жизни все это так просто бывает, что и рассказывать нечего, а только взять да повеситься от злости.48

47 ibid., 13

48 ibid., 60-61. [If someone had been screwing you with his fat smelly cock since you were ten years old and all your insides were twisted up, you wouldn’t have gotten off so lightly. They spent three days dragging my little girl out of me, and they even wanted to do a Caesarean. If it was up to me I would take your Nabokov and all the men who go after children and pull off all their equipment with red-hot pincers! And the first one would be the swine who did a Lolita on me … That Nabokov obviously wanted to make a packet of money, so he spread his filth over a whole book, smearing the pages with sperm. And you silly little intellectuals sigh over it as if as it were spread with honey. I’ve heard your little discussions, I’ve been in cultured society. But in real life everything is so simple and there’s so little to tell that all that’s left is to hang myself out of spite for men and all you lot. - Trans. Linton, 46.]

206 Voznesenskaya here is not only condemning, rape, pedophilia, the culture of silence that surrounds sexual abuse, and the canon and its objectification of young women, she is using language that is messy and sticky, bodily and connected to both sex and childbirth.

Yelena Furman points out that, though Voznesenskaia has never been thought of in relation with the novaia zhenskaia proza (new women’s prose) and Novye Amazonki

(New Amazons) movements that began in the late 1980s, her approach to the body can be read as of a piece with the later movements. This new prose is characterized by “an open and graphic depiction of corporeal phenomena, with sex, violence, pregnancy, abortion, and disease being some of the many bodily acts on display”, and one in which the female body, though violated, is “a body that ultimately overcomes its brutalization through narrative.”49 At the same time that words are beginning to be used to express the pains and pleasures of the body, the body itself must become fully exposed, unapologetically showing itself. In this we may invoke Helene Cixous’ concept of écriture féminine:

“Woman must writer her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies - for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal.”50 To reverse these effects, to push against the denigration of woman and of motherhood, women must use their words and their bodies in tandem, to force themselves into existence. With each bloody word spit out by the women of Voznesenskaia's maternity ward, the lines of their bodies emerge bit by bit out of darkness. While a woman's sexual autonomy had been a focus of feminism

49 Furman, Yelena. “‘We all love with same part of the body, don’t we?’: Iuliia Voznesenskaia’s Zhenskii Dekameron, New Women’s Prose, and French Feminist Theory”. Intertexts 13.1/2 (2009): 97.

50 Cixous, 875.

207 and radicalism from the late 19th century through the Revolution, it had never been laid quite so bare as this.

The theme of rape is not fully explored until the sixth day, however, when the theme is Rapists and their Victims. Graphic descriptions of sexual assault against women, men, and children are swapped, there is an account of the familiar refrain that nice girls don’t get raped, given in response when legal help is sought,51 and there is even a story in which humorous twist (of a mitten string around a man’s balls) allow Valentina to escape her attacker.52 This humor is a mixed blessing; a little lightheartedness is welcome in this stream of harrowing stories, but the fact that the story is accepted so lightly is proof that assault was a regular enough occurrence that even a few laughs can be had.

The rest of the stories told are filled with the everyday trials of which life is composed: loves lost, loves found, money problems, revenge, but disappointingly, the novel ends on a hopeful yet heavy-handed note. Irishka, mild and friendly and the most traditional of the bunch, tells the last story, and though her conclusion is distinctly feminist, it sacrifices the edgy defiance of the rest of the novel for saccharine moralizing and vague hopes for a vague future:

Я никуда не рвусь, крыльев у меня нет, талантов тоже. Нарожаю себе побольше ребят и буду уже до одури счастлива. И только одно я скажуЬ как бы счастливо я ни жила, а хочется жить еще и по- человечески. Кажется мне, что все мы, не только мы, что тут лежим и рассказываем друг другу разные байки, а и вообще все наши женщины стоят того, чтобы жизнь у них стала чуть-чуть полегче. Вот и все.53

51 Voznesenskaia, 153.

52 ibid., 150. 53 ibid., 355. [I’m never itching to go anywhere, I have no wings and no special talents. I shall have as many children as possible and then be absolutely drunk with happiness. But one thing I will say: no matter how happy I’ve been, I still wish life here could be civilized. I think we women

208 Though the tone of the ending is indeed out of step with the rest of the novel, it cannot be said that Voznesenskaia couched her feminist principles in ambiguous or subliminal messaging. She even hides a version of herself in the text, in plain sight but in exile, as a writer of the satirical journal Red Dissident who has been exiled to the West and who is writing a book that tells the stories of her friends.54 There is also a reference to an artist, “Natasha Lazareva,” who has a day-job at a boilerhouse,55 obviously a tongue-in-cheek reference to Maria member and theater producer Natalya Lazareva, who was forced to work menial labor after her participation in the movement put her out of a job and ultimately into prison.56 Building on Baranskaia’s realist blending of literature and life, Voznesenskaia pushed further in the same direction; here expressed in an often crass but still realist fashion, the layers of everyday life are peeling back, exposing the body, exposing the flesh. The experiments with collective childbirth of the Revolutionary era, which had perhaps had their grounding in experiments with collective childrearing beginning in the 1860s,57 had not returned under the Soviet engagement with the woman question; Voznesenskaia's novel is an indictment of this neglect, and it shows an attempt, as previous attempts at collectivity had, to bridge class concerns, illuminating clearly the fact that class stratification had also not been abolished by the Soviet state, despite any deserve to have life get a bit easier; and I don’t just mean us who have been sitting here telling each other various stories, but all the women in the country. That’s all. - Trans. Linton, 301-02.]

54 ibid., 265.

55 ibid., 196.

56 see Reddaway, Peter. “Russia Puts First Feminist on Trial.” The Observer, 4 Jan. 1981. 57 Engel, Barbara Alpern. Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth- Century Russia. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000. 87.

209 claims to the contrary.

Women’s Writing Coalesces: Novye Amazonki and New Forms of Narration

In 1988, only three years after the release of Voznesenskaia’s novel, the Novye Amazonki

(New Amazons), the “only all-female literary collective in Russian history” formed,58 followed by the release in 1990 of their collection Ne pomniashchaia zla (She Who Bears

No Grudge), and in 1991 of the second and final official collection, Novye amazonki.59

The distinctly feminist stance of the group sets them apart from the so-called “new women’s prose” that was becoming popular around the same time, which included such writers as Tat’iana Tolstaia and Liudmila Petrushevskaia, both of whom distanced themselves from feminism. Both of the collections released by the Novye Amazonki included manifestos, and while the first volume’s placed the Novye Amazonki within a larger feminine tradition, the second volume’s placed great importance on distancing the group and its writers from the Russian literary canon, which in their view was exclusively male-dominated. They explicitly state, in fact, that they did not emerge from Gogol’s overcoat, a play on a quote commonly attributed to Fedor Dostoevsky that suggests that

Russian fiction took its largest influence from the style of Nikolai Gogol60; from this, it is clear that they were seeking a new genealogy, one that rejected Russian canonical influences and the Soviet literary establishment alike, and which searched for both new

58 Skomp, Elizabeth. “Russian Women’s Publishing at the Beginning of the 1990s: The Case of the New Amazons.” Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 33.1 (2006): 85.

59 Though the collections contained contributions by many women, the so-called official members of the group were Nina Gorlanova, Nina Iskrenko, Valeriia Narbikova, Irina Polianskaia, Nina Sadur, Elena Tarasova, Svetlana Vasilenko, Svetlana Vasil’eva, and Larisa Vaneeva. 60 Skomp, 88-89.

210 forms and new meanings.

The focus on the body that had been so central to Voznesenskaia’s project continued with the Novye Amazonki, and, as with Voznesenskaia, childbirth and motherhood were once again a locus for femininity and femaleness in general, while the role of wife was secondary or nonexistent. The clearly feminist position, too, is shared, but it is there that the similarities come to an end. Stylistically, the experimentation of the

Novye amazonki, particularly those of Valeriia Narbikova (1958-), mark a new turn, from realism and past modernism directly to a postmodern stream of consciousness, still bodily, now existential. In Narbikova’s 1989 novel Ravnovesie sveta dnevnykh i nochnykh zvezd (rendered in English as Day Equals Night, or The Equilibrium of Diurnal and Nocturnal Starlight), which stands apart from any of the work that was produced at the time, exists what Larissa Rudova refers to as “a model of modern Russia that lacks coherence, logic, and humanistic attitude toward both social and natural environments.”61

Though the novel loosely concerns a love triangle and contains explicit scenes of sexual encounters, the bold physicality of Voznesenskaia is exchanged for a physicality of language, a text that tries to make up for the loss in viscera and bodily fluids by challenging the very idea of the body. Structures of language and things are abhorrent to

Narbikova; she wants to overcome the standard in all levels of expression, because anything that she would want to write about doesn’t abide by these standards.62 And, indeed, it is easy to see in her writing that Narbikova is trying to change language in an

61 Rudova, Larissa. “A Mindset of Present Russia: Valerija Narbikova’s Fiction.” Russian Literature 39.1 (1996): 79. 62 Roll, Serafima. Contextualizing Transition: Interviews with Contemporary Russian Writers and Critics. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. 88.

211 attempt to change the very processes of living and thinking. Due to the texture and intent of her writing, I feel it useful to quote some passages at length:

За окном была бесполая луна, и кончал бесполый дождь...Потом дождь кончил, звезды стали уже, а может, это уже из ниш шел дождь. Одновременно. Дождь был “он” для удобства людей, и звезда была “она” для их удобства, не своего, и солнце оно для..., а там у них были свои отношения. Дождь менял свой пол в другом языке; луна, она же месяц, меняла пол в одном и том же языке. Переход пола. Язык являлся как бы материализацией перехода пола.63

Clearly, Narbikova hopes that by stripping language, she can strip reality. Though

Russian literature had been witness to a number of attempts to use language to alter reality or at least perceptions of reality, such as Futurism, the work of the OBERIU writers, or even the poetic experimentation of Marina Tsvetaeva, Narbikova’s moment called for a different formulation of the attempt, and to her it is a noble one: she wants to disrupt the complacency that comes from comfortable and stagnant living; she wants to push against the kitsch that arises when people are forced to fabricate their troubles.64

Left with a lack of urgency in everyday life, Narbikova reasons, people can no longer simply have a dialogue with one another; they converse in a vacuum, answering their own questions and muddling through incomprehensible conversations with others that they must piece together later, and this disrupts the temporal flow between the past and

63 Narbikova, Valeriia. Izbrannoe, ili shepot shuma. Parizh: Izdatel'stvo “Tret'ia volna,” 1994. 90. [Outside the window there was a sexless moon, and the sexless rain was approaching climax … Then the rain climaxed and the stars came out, or maybe the rain was not falling from them. Simultaneously. The rain was a ‘he’ for the convenience of people, and a star was a ‘she,’ also for their convenience, not for its own, and the sun was an ‘it’ for…, but up there they had their own relationships. The rain changed its sex for another in a different language, and the sun changed its sex in a different language; the moon, which is also luna, changed its sex in the same language. A sex change. Language was somehow the materialization of a sex change. – Trans. Graham, Seth. Day Equals Night, or, The Equilibrium of Diurnal and Nocturnal Starlight. Valeria Narbikova. Dana Point, CA: Ardis, 1999. 30.] 64 Roll, 88.

212 the present.65 Proscribed society has led to disconnection, and it is this in this disconnection that she finds her material.

Like Mamonova and Voznesenskaia, Narbikova wants to reach back to the literature of the Silver Age, to pretend that socialist realism never existed. The sexlessness of her moon and rain plays not just with language, but with a transcendence of gender that recalls the symbolist project.66 She acknowledges, however, that socialist realism is to be thanked for providing the clear necessity to break down structure and form, for the urgency to struggle against the “naturalization” of unnatural things that were created artificially by mass culture.67 To defamiliarize what has become so familiar that it has become oppressive, to force objects and people into non-existence or at least a kind of physical and temporal interchangeability - this is Narbikova’s project. Rudova suggests that Narbikova’s work is not exactly sots art, because while sots art and pop art were born from canonized and recognizable visual and ideological markers, her work is characterized instead by “a marked detachment from grand political events and figures”;68 it almost seems as if a sots art mayhem is the unpronounced backdrop of

Narbikova's action, that it is a carnivalesque reality floating just off-screen,. And, while she pushes against intelligibility and the stable worlds of the Russian literary giants, there are certain passages that firmly place her in the midst of the grand grotesquerie of the

65 ibid., 89

66 Peterson, Nadya L. “Games Women Play: The ‘Erotic’ Prose of Valeriia Narbikova.” Fruits of Her Plume: Essays on Contemporary Women’s Culture. Ed. Helena Goscilo. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1993. 176.

67 Roll, 90; Peterson, 170. 68 Rudova, Larissa. “Paradigms of Postmodernism: Conceptualism and Sots-Art in Contemporary Russian Literature”. Pacific Coast Philology 35.1 (2000): 70.

213 canon, exactly as she tries to destroy them:

Пусть нам говорят про нас, что нас нет в памятнике нам, поносят нас, пусть изнасилуют нас надписями на нас, и приставят новые нам, чистят зубы нам и поливают нас; золотые коронки, мраморная шея и грудь, и гипсовые тапочки годятся нам, атас, кто не видит, что из памятника нам выпирает бездна нас, ни венки, ни искусственные цветы для нас, ни корзины, набитые тряпичным дерьмом, не нужны нам, веселая картинка с хороводом скамеек не для нас, с классикой голубей на макушке, с негативом снежных масок, нас можно размножить дагерротипным путем и гругим путем, наделать голограмм, отснять и отпечатать, чтобы вы подавились нами, расцеловали нас в памятнике нам, чего хлынули к нам, когда от нас остались только формы, чего прилипли с газонами и фонтанами к нам, чтобы нам в рот стекал ручеек из водопроводного крана, руки не мыть, не пить, не сорить на нас.69

She is clearly invoking the monument-laden culture of Russian literary history while at once disowning it, and yet, in creating it with her own textured and dizzy language, she is also laying claim to it. The real world that she implies cannot be real; Russia, to her, is “a total postmodern simulacrum inseparable from language,”70 and yet in pulling this simulacrum apart, she is bringing it to life, creating a grotesque landscape which allows her to express how fabricated even the most quotidian things may be. Particularly at the time that this novel was written, when supposedly cataclysmic political changes were in

69 Narbikova, 174. [Let people tell us about us, that there is no us in the monument to us, let them abuse us, violate us by putting plaques on us, cut off our extremities to make us unrecognizable, attach new ones to us, brush our teeth and water us; gold crowns, a marble neck and breast, and plaster slippers suit us, and let three meters of us and two tons of us serve us, watch out, who can’t see that an abyss is forcing us out of the monument to us, and we don’t need it, neither the wreaths nor the artificial flowers are for us, nor the baskets full of soft manure, the cheerful picture of folk dancers is not for us, the classic writer with doves on top of him, with a negative snow mask, you can duplicate us using a daguerreotype, or using another method, make a hologram, shoot and print us until you choke on us, until you smother us in kisses in a monument to us, until you rush to us in crowds when all that remains of us is shapes stuck to us with lawns and fountains, a stream of tap water flows into our mouth, no hand-washing, no drinking, no littering on us. - Trans, Graham, 119.] 70 Rudova, “Mindset”, 86.

214 the air and on the airwaves, the artifice of the master narrative was especially exposed, especially visible to those who had only been included in the narrative as workers, voiceless and exhausted.

Further, and even more significantly in the female context, she disowns this artificial culture because it has no place for her, for women in general, and in doing so, she makes a place for herself:

Наша квартира - не наша, она, квартира-музей, работает без передыха, каждый день - сегодня, даже в понедельник, выходной день, потому что все большие специалисты, которые изучают нашу жизнь, могут только сегодня...говорят на нашем языке, потому что, изучая жизнь объекта, на пушкинском языке, на тургеневском, на языке Толстого и Достоевского, они пьют день и ночь за могучий русский язык, чтобы сохранить его чистоту. Русская литература - это вещь, и русская жизнь - явление, сказать почему? А только у русских литература смешана с жизнью до пассива и актива, и писатели - всегда актив, а героини - всегда пассив, живых женщин нет. Все мужчины хотели бы иметь дело только с Наташей, Сонечкой и Таней Лариной, начиная с детского сада - с золотой рыбкой, идеальной женщиной, а все женщины зато с самим Пушкиным, Толстым и Достоевским. Мы гуляем по ночам, по гостям, мокнем под дождем - от памятника к памятнику, которые сидят, стоят и мокнут под дождем, гуляют каждый напротив своей квартиры-музея...Даже под землей, в метро, мы среди своих, и там памятники - в спортивных майках и трусах, физкультурники, атлеты, большие писатели, от кого торчит голова, кто по пояс, кто в полный рост.71

71 Narbikova, 175. [Our apartment is not ours, it’s an apartment-museum, it never closes, every day is today, even on Monday, the off-day, because all of the big specialists who study our life can only do it today … they speak our language because when you study the life of a subject it’s best to speak and think in the language of that subject, in Pushkin’s language, Turgenev’s, in the language of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, they drink to the mighty Russian tongue day and night to preserve its purity. Russian literature is a thing and Russian life is a phenomenon, want to know why? Only the Russians’ literature is mixed with their life to the point of passive and active, the writers are always active and the heroines are always passive, there are no living women. All the men would like to deal only with Natasha, Sonechka and Tania Larina from kindergarten on - from the golden fish, the ideal woman, but all women would like to deal with Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky themselves. We go for walks at night, visit friends, get wet in the rain - from monument to monument, which sit, stand and get wet in the rain, each walks from its own apartment-museum … Even underground in the subway we’re among our own, there are monuments there, too - in athletic jerseys and shorts, body-builders, athletes, great writers who blow your mind, some in torso, some in full body. - Trans. Graham, 120.]

215 Here there is an obvious protest against the place of women in Russian society in general and in literature in particular, and despite her anti-realist approach, the sting of her accusations is clear and bright, and in 1989, a tipping point politically and culturally throughout the Communist sphere, her ability to hold on to certain certainties in the midst of extreme uncertainty is especially poignant. Though sometimes Narbikova’s writing can seem labored, it is at points like these when she is able express these extreme absurdities of Soviet life, of what it has preserved from pre-Soviet Russian culture, how idols and monuments overshadow the real life that surrounds them, the “real life” that surrounds them. Even as Narbikova invokes Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, she uses them as empty placeholders, signifiers signifying nothing more than an empty memory, thereby rejecting their cultural import.72 The edifices are being torn apart, but there are no clear or desirable alternatives being exposed in their wake.

The purposeful destruction of sexual, social and moral norms in the pre-

Revolutionary period, while in some ways analogous to the decay highlighted in the work of the 1970s and 80s, was infused with hopes of rebirth and regeneration; the works of the late Soviet period do not as clearly display this utopian vision. They point to an end, but they were not yet prepared to point to a beginning.

Tolstaia Versus Women’s Writing

In 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became head of the CPSU, no one would have

72 Peterson, 180.

216 predicted with certainty the dissolution of the USSR. In retrospect, there are various overly-simplistic explanations offered: that the fall of Communism and the end of the

Cold War were brought about by Reagan’s might, or that the rigidity of the Soviet government had made it brittle to the point of snapping; certainly, no one claimed that it had been a dissident movement that led to revolution, as any movements were immediately and ruthlessly checked by an experienced and skilled Soviet leadership.73

Movement in civil society – even the development of civil society itself – followed the onset of perestroika, rather than preceded it, let alone having been a cause for it. The people, however, were crucial in one very important way: Gorbachev saw them as being absolutely ready for change, for new possibilities of expression; though their systems of learning were extremely standardized, they were among the best educated in the world, and by that time they had knowledge of different approaches to political structures and civil societies in the rest of the world.74 It was against this backdrop that Tat’iana

Tolstaia (1951-) was in the beginnings her literary career.

Though Tolstaia was not involved with the Novye amazonki and has in fact taken an acidic stance against feminism, her writing does share some salient similarities with

Narbikova’s. Though neither of them engage in explicitly political discourse in their fictional writing, both drive to the heart of the dysfunctional relationships between culture and ideology, between externally and internally created identities, exploring the trauma of the everyday in order to illuminate larger traumas, and they both reject the

73 Brown, Archie. Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 3-4.

74 ibid., 282-83.

217 stability of identity that was found in both bourgeois writing and socialist realism. And, like Narbikova, (and Mamonova, and Voznesenskaia), Tolstaia rejects literature that came after the 1920s, favoring instead the heady dreams and experimentations of the

Revolutionary years. She is, however, careful to warn against being certain of better things to come; after all, as Tolstaia stated in an interview with literary scholar Serafima

Roll in 1995, “[i]t's not interesting for a Russian to dream about a concrete future. After all, a dream is attractive precisely because of its insubstantiality; the minute it starts to get weighted down by material things it immediately becomes debased.”75 In her stories, this dissatisfaction with the past and wary relationship with the future is expressed in the disappointing drudgeries and disgusting frustrations of daily life. However, her female protagonists of the mid to late 1980s, mirroring the fugue state of the Soviet state of the perestroika years, exhibit the desperate and misguided fumbles with existence that

Nadezhda Mandelstam positioned as the futile half of the battle between aim versus meaning: short-term goals and aims supersede any larger views or questions about the meaning or purpose of life, and one's sense of identity and self is sacrificed to petty and momentary concerns, leaving even dreams to become debased.76

In the 1985 story “Okhota na mamonta” (“Hunting the Mammoth”), the central character, Zoya, is trying to find a man. And who is Zoya? “Пожалуйста, подробности:

ноги хорошие, фигура хорошая, кожа хорошая, нос, глаза - все хорошее. Шатенка.

Почему не блондинка? Потому что не всем в жизни счастье”.77 Automatically, we

75 Roll 99

76 Mandel’shtam, Nadezhda. Vtoraia kniga. Moskva: Soglasie, 1999. 17-18.

77 Tol'staia, Tat;iana. Noch’. Rasskazy. Moskva: “Podkova”, 2001. 235. [All right, here are the details: good legs, good figure, good skin, the nose, eyes, all good. Brunette. Why not a blonde?

218 are using the male gaze to look at Zoya, a gaze that is also no different from her own. It is from her, after all, that these judgments arise; the object of her (anti-)affection, Vladimir, is actually quite subdued, and it is from Zoya that this need to be viewed as an object originates, as seen in her frustrations with a group camping trip that Vladimir takes her on: “Все инженеры были со своими женщинами, никто не глядел на Зою особенным

взглядом, не говорил: “О!”, и она чувствовала себя бесполым брючным товарищем,

и противны ей были смех у костра, бренчание на гитаре, радостные вопли при виде

пойманной щуки.”78 Fishing, clearly, is not to Zoya’s liking; she’s a hunter, and it is the woolly mammoth, the elusive and perhaps phantasmagorical prospective husband, that she has within her sights: “Зоя ставила западни выроет яму, прикроет ветвями и

подталкивает, подталкивает... Вдруг, уже одетая и накрашенная, отказывалась идти

в гости, ложилась на диван и скорбно смотрела в потолок [...] И так далее, и так

далее, и все в сторону от замаскированной ямы.”79 The reader learns that Vladimir helps out around the flat, is very understanding, even affectionate, and yet because of his lack of marriage proposal, Zoya is becoming increasingly miserable. Even his good behavior makes her miserable, for it increases her crippling fear that he will suddenly leave. The short glimpse into their lackluster romance ends with this somewhat ambiguous scene: Because you can’t have everything. - Trans. Bouis, Antonina W., trans. White Walls: Collected Stories. Tatyana Tolstaya. New York: New York Review of Books, 2007, 51.]

78 ibid., 240. [All the engineers had their own women, no one gave Zoya special looks or said ‘Oh!’, and she felt sexless, a camping buddy, and she hated the laughter around the campfire, and the guitar playing, and the peals of joy over catching a pike. - Trans. Bouis 54.]

79 ibid., 244-45. [Zoya set traps: she’d dig a pit, cover it with branches, and nudge him toward it...Suddenly, all dressed and made up, she would refuse to go out, lie down on the couch, and stare balefully at the ceiling [...] And so on and so forth, and always moving away from the camouflaged pit. - Trans, Bouis 57.]

219 Она накинула двухбородому на шею веревочную петлю, легла на тахту, дернула и прислушалась ... он ей всегда был отвратителен. Маленькое, мощное, грузное, быстрое, волосатое, бесчувственное животное. Оно еще возилось какое-то время - скулило, беспокоилось, пока наконец не затихло - блаженной, густой тишиной великого оледенения.80 Though the description of a man being suffocated to death seems quite literal, the (very non-)magical (anti-)realism of Tolstaia’s narration make the reader question the veracity of the action, and even the existence of veracity itself. If the great ice age is the suspended animation of the repetitions of married life, the illusion is perhaps of fulfillment, or is perhaps of death. Here, as in the writing of Narbikova, reality itself is pulled apart, deflated, left to die.

Goscilo argues that the fact that Vladimir is presented as an object with no subjectivity of his own is a reversal of this treatment of women by society, that he

“becomes co-opted and subsumed as alterity within an epistemologically imperialist system that denies him all autonomy”,81 just as women are. I would argue, however, that one must be looking specifically for this meaning in order to choose it over the more obvious alternative, which is that Tolstaia has created an image of a detestable, stereotypical, man-hunting woman. There is a parallel here to Teffi’s role reversal in her short play “The Woman Question”, but where Teffi explicitly draws the audience’s attention to the plight of women by superimposing it over men, Tolstaia’s heroines are not explicitly representing patriarchal control; Zoya’s version of control is one in which she

80 ibid., 250. [She tossed a noose around the two-beards’ neck, lay down, jerked, and listened … he had always repulsed her. A small, powerful, heavy, quick, hairy, insensitive animal. It puttered around for a while - whimpering, fussing - until it quieted down in the blissful thick silence of the great ice age. - Trans. Bouis, 61.]

81Goscilo, Helena. “Monsters Monomaniacal, Marital, and Medical: Tatiana Tolstaya’s Regenerative Use of Gender Stereotypes.” Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture. Eds. Jane T. Costlow, Stephanie Sandler, Judith Vowles. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. 206.

220 is manipulative, self-obsessed, vain, shallow, and desperately unaware of her own subjectivity in her continued outward gaze, which so resembles negative stereotypes of women that any attempt to subvert this norm may be lost. Goscilo even points out that

Zoya “ineluctably degrades herself and Vladimir into commodities for barter on the market of dehumanized pseudosexual relations that Marxist feminists identify with paradigmatic patriarchal institutions”,82 but by painting Zoya as entirely ignorant or uncritical of this action, Tolstaia's attempt to draw attention to the damage inflicted on women by society may simply inflict yet further damage.

In the 1986 story “Ogon’ i pyl’” (“Fire and Dust”), we are once again led through the story by the semi-indirect speech of an unreliable narrator and quasi-protagonist

Rimma, whose arch-nemesis, Svetlana (also known as Svetka-Pipetka, or Pipka, loosely meaning“cunty”), torments her day and night, in presence and in absence. The story opens with Rimma wondering what happened to her dreams and her childhood hopes for a promising tomorrow, and the dire consequences of expecting much from the future, let alone happiness, seem destined to visit themselves upon her. As in “Okhota na mamonta”, our protagonist is tortured by her own unhappiness, by the failings of her own life to bring her joy, but this time, this torment is embodied by another woman. Pipka, with her fantastical adventures and black and rotted teeth, disgusts Rimma to no end: “вечно-то

она дрожала, полуодетая, или одетая не с того конца: на босу ногу - детские

задубелые ботиночни среди зимы, руки - красные, в цыпках.”83 Pipka, to Rimma’s

82 ibid., 209. 83 Tol'staia, Noch', 110. [she was always trembling, half dressed, or dressed topsy-turvy: crusty stiff children's boots on bare feet in the middle of winter, her hands all chapped. - Trans. Gambrell, Jamey. White Walls: Collected Stories. Tatyana Tolstaya. New York: New York Review of Books, 2007, 103.]

221 angry disbelief, is somehow enticing to men; they are enchanted by her spectacular tales, her vivacity, and they run off with her, black teeth and all, only to return some time later, disoriented and remembering little. Even Rimma’s husband, Fedya, disappears one day, but it turns out not to have been for carnal purposes; rather, he had to help Pipka move quickly one day, due to some circumstances that involve Pipka’s previously-unheard-of daughters: Karina and Angela, twins, conjoined at the head.84 Though it is Pipka, unkempt and wild, and her babies, deformed and seemingly sprung full-grown from a head full of rotted teeth, that seemingly represent sickness and filth, it is actually Rimma who is the more grotesque; driven to distraction by her own wrecked dreams for the future and her jealousy, it is Rimma for whom everything is over: “жизнь показала свой

пустой лик - свалявшиеся волосы да провалившиеся глазницы.”85 And this story, too, ends with a question-mark death; rumor has it that Pipka was in a taxi that exploded, rumor has it that the fire was burned despite attempts to extinguish it and that no remains had been found.86 Though it is Pipka that has perhaps died, both body and soul went up in flames together, while Rimma is left alive, “alive”, disconnected from body and future, and again: what in the narrative is real? What is real for the reader, for the characters?

Nothing concrete is certain, save for the fact that unmet needs and wants create rivalry between women.

Finally, in the 1986 story “Poet i muza” (“The Poet and the Muse”), we are shown a story through the eyes of Nina, a doctor who has concocted her own heroine's journey:

84 ibid., 118.

85 ibid., 126. [life had shown its empty face, its matted hair and sunken eye sockets. - Trans. Gambrell, 113.] 86 ibid., 127.

222 стоптать семь пар железных сапогь, изломать семь железных посохов, изгрызть семь железных хлебов - и получить в награду как высший дар не золотую какую-нибудь розу, не белый пьедестал, а обгорелую спичку или автобусный, в шарик скатанный билетик - крошку с пиршественного стола, где поел светлый король, избранник сердца”87

A heroine who wants to be a pauper to her hero, Nina, like Zoya, is engaged in a quest for marriage, but unlike Zoya, Nina succeeds; success, however and of course, comes at a price. But we must begin at the beginning: Nina tends to the poet Grisha, ailing with the Japanese flu, and upon laying eyes on him, “незримые скрипки сыграли

свадебный вальс - ловушка захлопнулась. Ну, все знают, как это обычно бывает.”88

The scheming man-hungry woman trope thus reappears, this time followed by the equally familiar trope of rivalry between women; as Nina first lays eyes on Grisha, Lizaveta,

“оверзительно красивая женщина с трагически распущенными волосами” is also attending to him, and she is an obstacle and opponent.89 This turn quickly sets Tolstaia apart from the other writers that we have examined; the friendship and commiseration found in Baranskaia and Voznesenskaia, even the vague but pointed female solidarity of

Narbikova has been exchanged for catty competition and superficial, traditional stereotypes.

Nina, however, is victorious (if you can call it victory); she bests Lizaveta and

87 ibid., 310. [to wear out seven pairs of iron boots, break seven iron staffs in two, devour seven loaves of iron bread, and receive in supreme reward not some golden rose or snow-white pedestal but a burned-out match or a crumpled ball of a bus ticket - a crumb from the banquet table where the radiant king, her heart’s desire, had feasted. - Trans. Gambrell, 309.]

88 ibid., 314. [Invisible violins played a wedding waltz, and the trap sprang shut. Well, everybody knows how it usually happens. - Trans. Gambrell, 312.] 89 ibid. [a sickeningly beautiful woman with tragically undisciplined hair - Trans. Gambrell, 312.]

223 little-by-little edges Grisha into marriage. “Семь пар железных сапог истоптала Нина

по паспортным столам и отделениям милиции, семь железных посохов исломала о

Лизаветину спину ... надо было играть свадбу.”90 Her dream has been moved from a folktale to real life; her imagined future has become her present. That’s where things must necessarily fall apart. Grisha, unable to write poetry because of Nina’s suffocating love, announces that he’s sold his body to science, that his corpse will be a research object for the state, and with this grotesque and legally-mandated wrenching of body from spirit, the life goes out of their already-injured marriage and, eventually, out of Grisha as well.

Nina bears up and wears the moniker of widow with noble pride: “И подумайте, какие

чувство должна была пережить она, прекрасная, обычная женщина, врач,

безусловно заслужившая, как и все, свой ломтик в жизни, - женщина, боровшаяся,

как нас всех учили, за личное счастье, обретшая, можно сказать, свое право в

борьбе?.”91 Again, even the pitiful scraps of happiness that our protagonist has managed to collect amount to nothing in the end; with that in mind, did they ever even exist? Or were they only fabricated by the characters, or by the storyteller, by Tolstaia herself?

Goscilo writes that, in fact, the three stories that have been discussed all “dethrone specifically gender stereotypes though ironic double-voicing, literalization of metaphor, and parodic interpolation of myth”,92 and yet the irony is perhaps so strong that it circles

90 ibid., 322. [Seven pairs of iron boots had Nina worn out tramping across passport desks and through police stations, seven iron staffs had she broken on Lizaveta’s back ... it was time for the wedding. - Trans. Gambrell, 318.]

91 ibid., 329. [“And just think what she must have gone through - she, a marvelous, ordinary woman, a doctor, who had indisputably earned her piece of the pie like everyone else, a woman who had fought for her personal happiness, as we were all taught to do, and had won her right in battle. - Trans. Gambrell, 322.]

92Goscilo, “Monsters”, 205.

224 back on itself, validating the very stereotypes that it hopes to overturn. Roll suggests that

Tolstaia focuses on the psychology of her heroines rather than the realities that surround them as a sort of pointedly “feminine” counterpoint to the conceptual and metalinguistic narratives found in traditionally “masculine” modes of storytelling, and this removal from explicit or identifiable historical, social, and political frameworks prevents her from using these psychological portraits to illustrate any larger transformations, which in turn entrenches unquestioned and traditionalist stereotypes in her writing.93 Despite any psychological or conceptual approach to her subjects, by accepting the sacrificial role of women as given by traditionalist Russian nationalism and by the Soviet system, and perhaps even by the Orthodox church, Tolstaia is unable to disrupt the patriarchal master narrative. Cixous describes “male writing” as writing that has been dominated by “a libidinal and cultural - hence political, typically masculine - economy,”94 and the clear integration of these economies into Tolstaia’s work perhaps explains why some of her female contemporaries - the Novye amazonki, perhaps - point to her as a masculine, even aggressively masculine, writer.95

However, though even a discussion of Tolstaia’s work in terms of feminism upsets her, her statements on the subject are contradictory and in some ways cannot help but call for a reading of her work that seeks engagement with the woman question. While she believes that the feminist theory that women don’t participate in more worldly pursuits because they’ve been driven into the kitchen is partly true, she denigrates so-called

93 Roll, 165-66. 94 Cixous, 879.

95 Skomp, 86. 225 feminist writing in her discussion of this dynamic: “[t]o me, the term ‘feminist literature’ is offensive because it relegates women to the kitchen and that’s very unpleasant … It irritates me that, in the name of emancipation, women are forced into the kitchen of feminist literature.”96 It seems there are two different concepts at play here; feminist literature as driver into the kitchen, and feminist literature as the kitchen itself. Her terms are not defined, but either way, it is clear that it is a kitchen that she would like to avoid.

Ironically, however, despite Tolstaia’s strong statements and the iron fist with which she molds her stories, she claims a sort of absent-minded ditziness. She relates, she says, to

Chekhov’s “Dushechka”, a guileless woman who has no opinions of her own and rather absorbs those of her parade of husbands, because she understands the sense of looking at something and not being able to make heads or tails of it; for Tolstaia, this confusion represents “the extreme degree of this feminine essence.”97

It is particularly strange, however, to examine this standpoint in tandem with others of Tolstaia’s statements on gender roles. In the 1990 essay “Women’s Lives”,98 a favorable review of Francine du plessix Gray’s book Soviet Women: Walking the

Tightrope, Tolstaia writes, in agreement with the women that populate Gray’s book, that

Soviet women, full of emancipation up to their ears, don’t need feminism. However, her explanation of this seems to contradict her earlier statements. She explains that the

Russian soul is essentially female, comprised of commonly accepted female characteristics:

96 Roll, 105.

97 ibid., 108.

98 First published as “Notes from Underground.” New York Review of Books 37.9, 31 May, 1990.

226 [s]ensitivity, reverie, imagination, an inclination to tears, compassion, submission mingled with stubbornness, patience that permits survival in what would seem to be unbearable circumstances, poetry, mysticism, fatalism, a penchant for walking the dark, humid back streets of consciousness, introspection, sudden, unmotivated cruelty, mistrust of rational thought, fascination with the word...99

This is a far cry from “Dushechka”, and even further is her description of Russian woman herself, who is in complete control, at times tyrannical and oppressive, and she declares that “[t]o imagine that Russian women are subservient to men, and they must therefore struggle psychologically or otherwise to assert their individuality vis-a-vis men is, at very least, naive.”100

Even while fighting against a static idea of feminism - a term that Goscilo writes has been “culturally overmarked” in Russia - Tolstaia’s works may lend themselves to nuanced critiques and a variety of readings, and one should not feel bound by her non- fictional statements in reading the stories; after all, Goscilo writes, “[s]ince the endless mediation intrinsic to fiction permits Tolstaia as prosaist to eliminate her own voice - recognizable from her interviews and journalism - the dogmatic imperatives of her nonauthorial persona dissolve in the amplitude of the fictional medium”.101 And it is true; one can only surmise from these conflicting statements that, to Tolstaia, a key characteristic of Russian women is a certain malleability, shape-shifting, even. A good thing, considering the fact that her characters inhabit shadowy, perestroika-parallel

99 Tolstaya, Tatyana. Pushkin’s Children: Writings on Russia and Russians. Trans. Jamey Gambrell. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2003. 6.

100 ibid., 7-8.

101 Goscilo, “Monsters”, 219.

227 worlds that walk the line between real and unreal, between the magically illusory and the simply unimaginable.

«Записки на краю стола»: Petrushevskaia’s Dark Interiors

Boris Yeltsin was elected to the office of President of the Russian Soviet Federative

Socialist Republic in June of 1991, and in December of 1991, became President of the

Russian Federation. He could not have become this if it had not been for Gorbachev’s reforms, and yet he was a strong opponent of Gorbachev; this strange disjuncture is representative of the chaotic decade that followed. There was an attempted coup in

August of 1991 in which Gorbachev was held in Crimea by anti-perestroika members of government (many of whom had been appointed by Gorbachev himself), and it was

Yeltsin in Moscow that was the face of resisting and putting down this coup. As Brown describes him, Yeltsin “combined a very partial acceptance of democratic values with the psychology of a Communist Party boss”; he was accepting of elections and some freedom of speech, but he was not interested in establishing independent systems of checks and balances or a judiciary that might oppose him on any level.102 This hybridity led to further confusion. Like Gorbachev, he facilitated the disintegration of the Soviet state, but in entirely different ways. Life expectancy had fallen during Brezhnev's years in office, and it plummeted yet farther under Yeltsin, with men's life expectancy reaching

57.6 in 1994 and rising to just under 60 by the turn of the century (and remaining close to

70 for women).103 Yeltsin remained in power until December of 1999. Though

102 Brown, Seven Years, 317.

103 Brown, Rise and Fall, 418. 228 perestroika and a restructuring of the Russian state didn’t finish certain key jobs (the results of which still have consequences today) such as making a full transition from a command economy to a market economy and dealing with separatism, there are so many ways in which Gorbachev’s project succeeded: the advent of glasnost’ and its push for freedom of speech; the release and rehabilitation of prisoners, past and current; freedom of religion; freedom of communication across borders; the instatement of elections; the creation and growth of civil society, which historian Archie Brown stresses was “a result of perestroika, not a precursor of it”104. It was against this chaotic background that

Liudmila Petrushevskaia (1938-) wrote her disarming and devastating 1992 short novel,

Vremia: noch’ (Time: Night).

Petrushevskaia, despite some of the thematic similarities with the writers that we have examined so far, has moved past realism, past magical realism, to a kind of hyper- realism. Her writing is sometimes referred to as chernukha (dark matter) or épatage, but her startling and unsettling worlds are not simply sensationalistic. Rather, her characters and the worlds they inhabit are huge, swollen by pain, blocking out light and thus superseding and casting a pall over motherhood, maternal devotion, and the morals of the so-called intelligentsia, representing with physical bodies the fact that inherited patterns of irreparably destructive behaviors may be unavoidably replicated.105 In

Vremia: noch’, perhaps the darkest of her oeuvre, the airlessness and rot is palpable throughout, and though Petrushevskaia never offers time frames or years for her works,

104Ibid., 328-29. 105 Woll, Josephine. “The Minotaur in the Maze: Remarks on Lyudmila Petrushevskaya.” World Literature Today 67.1 (1993): 125.

229 the nearly post-apocalyptic ruins of a crumbled culture imply themselves everywhere.

The novel begins by explaining its contents: “пыльная папка со множеством

исписанных листов, школьных тетрадей, даже бланков телеграмм. Подзаголовок

«Записки на краю стола». Ни обратного адреса, ни фамилии.”106 The reader does not know who is telling us this; we do not know where the papers came from, or from when.

They came, simply, from before.

The story that follows is told mainly from the point of view of one Anna

Andrianovna, a mother of a convict son and a wandering, disappointing, child-bearing daughter who has, however, given her mother the only light in her life: her grandson,

Tima. Together, Anna Andrianovna and Tima fend off starvation, seeking out warmth and comfort in other people’s flats; their own has neither. We learn that Anna Andrianovna fancies herself mystically connected to her near-namesake Anna Andreevna

Akhmatova,107 and though we cannot help but draw a connection between Akhmatova, who memorialized victims of the Great Terror through her status as a mother waiting for her son’s release from prison, in Anna Andrianovna's words, lain down for future generations, there is no memorial; there are only agonies and curses spit at her children.

When her daughter Alyona comes home with a second child, for instance, Anna

Andrianovna’s response to the child is devoid of warmth or devotion: “совершенно

некрасивый ребенок, не наш, лысенькая, глазки заплывшие, жирненькая и плачет

106 Petrushevskaia, Liudmila. Vremia Noch’: Povest’. Moskva: Vagrius, 2001. 5. [a dusty file stuffed with loose pages, children’s exercise books, blank telegram forms all covered in writing. The whole thing was subtitled ‘Notes from the edge of the table’. There was no name given, no return address – Trans. Laird, Sally. The Time: Night. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. 1.] 107 ibid., 13.

230 по-иному, непривычно.”108 There is here perhaps some deeply buried misogyny in her hatred for the new girl, but the pure hatred is certain: this new baby is not only Tima’s competition, but Anna Andrianovna’s as well: a rival for her daughter’s attention.

Her relationship with her daughter is partially illuminated by her reading of her daughter’s journal, and in her daughter’s daybook the grotesque body splits finally open, the body that has been waiting for decades to finally break:

Плакала под струей душа, стирая трусики, обмывая свое тело, которое стало чужим, как будто я его наблюдала на порнографической картинке, мое чужое тело, внутри которого шли какие-то химические реакции, бурлила какая-то слизь, все разбухло, болело и горело, что-то происходило такое, что нужно было пресечь, закончить, задавить, иначе я бы умерла. (Мое примечание: что происходило, мы увидим девять месяцев спустя.)109

During the era of enforced socialist realism, the grotesque had been an unacceptable mode in literature.110 Its fusion and destruction of the dual and primal halves of life and death was not compatible with the aims of socialist realism, which called for one linear narrative and no room for ambivalence or abstraction, not to mention a heavy-handed

Soviet morality present throughout. This fundamental focus on professional advancement

108 ibid., 22. [the child was hideous, nothing in her from our side, completely bald with bloated little eyes, fat all over and strangest way of crying, not normal at all. - Trans. Laird, 17.]

109 ibid., 23-24. [I wept under the shower, washing out my knickers and washing my whole body which had suddenly become alien too, as if I were watching myself in a pornographic movie, my stranger’s body where at that very moment some kind of chemical reaction was taking place, I was filled with seething slime, everything was swollen and sore and burning, something was going on that needed to be nipped in the bud, stopped, crushed, or I was going to die. [We’d see all too clearly nine months later what precisely was going on. - A.A. - Trans. Laird, 18.]

110 For elaboration on the concept of the grotesque, see Bakhtin, M.M. Rabelais and His World. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968.

231 and social heroics left no room for the bodily, for femininity, for a mess.111 Femininity itself, in fact, was degraded and erased, and in Petrushevskaia, it is rising up again, this time larger than realist life, a gaping angry maw. Natal’ia Ivanova claims that

Petrushevskaia creates a Bakhtinian “subjective grotesque”, in which byt (the everyday) intersects with birth, death, pregnancy, disease, and love, giving rise to not only despair but hope and joy,112 but in Vremia: noch’, this joy is not manifested; there is only a sick body, revealing itself despite shame. Again, from Alyona:

Он лез в кровавое месиво, в лоскутья, как насосом качал мою кровь, солома подо мной была мокрая, я пищала вроде резиновой игрушки с дырочкой в боку, я думала, что он все попробовал за одну ночь, о чем читал и слышал в общежитии от других, но это мне было все равно, я его любила и жалела как своего сыночка и боялась, что он уйдет, он устал. 113

And again, Anna Andrianovna cannot find it in herself to pity her daughter; she is only disgusted by her daughter’s promiscuity, her lack of good decisions, her inability to extend this same pity to her own children.

In this, we find, there is a not-insignificant amount of self-hatred; Anna

Andrianovna’s own life wasn’t so different from Alyona’s. She too found herself with two children at a young age, in love with a man who eventually left. Her bitterness at her

111 Ivanova, Natal’ia. “Bakhtin’s Concept of The Grotesque and the Art of Petrushevskaia and Tolstaia.” Trans. Helena Goscilo. Fruits of Her Plume: Essays on Contemporary Women’s Culture. Ed. Helena Goscilo. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1993. 22.

112 ibid., 24.

113 Petrushevskaia, 29. [He thrust himself into the bloody mess, the bloody shreds of my body like a pump, pumping my blood, the straw underneath me was wet, I was squeaking like a rubber toy with a hole in its bottom, and I was thinking: in one night he’s gone and tried everything he’s ever read about and heard about from the others in the hostel, but I didn’t care, I loved him and pitied him like my own little son and feared only that he’d leave me, he was quite worn out – Trans. Laird, 23.]

232 own life is manifested in hatred for her daughter, and this hatred is manifested in numerous and unpredictable ways: “женщина с жаждой разрушения, они многое

создают! Разрушится, глянь, новое зеленеет что-то разрушительное тоже, как-то по

костям себя собирает и живет, это мой случай, это просто я, я тоже такова для

других.”114 This is her daughter’s inheritance. Rosalind Marsh suggests that this bitter connection between mother and daughter “implicitly reflects the violence done to the female personality by the Soviet state, especially by poverty and cramped living conditions”115 and it is here useful to recall Anna Andrianovna’s immediate distaste for her granddaughter - the next generation is not safe.

Destruction is the status quo for Anna Andrianovna, and whether it is by her own hands or someone else’s, she is always the recipient. Her son, like her daughter, only brings disarray and physical decay: “Андрей ел мою селедку, мою картошку, мой

черный хлеб, пил мой чай, придя из колонии, опять, как раньше, ел мой мозг и пил

мою кровь, весь слепленный из моей пищи, но желтый, грязный, смертельно

усталый.”116 The same visceral disgust exists here, the same terrible reflection of sickness from body and soul, but it is noticeable that her son is fed; neither Anna

Andrianovna nor her daughter find any sustenance in food in this novel, and this is perhaps a reflection of the different treatment of women and men in Soviet society, by the 114 ibid., 72. [a woman with a thirst for destruction can accomplish a great deal! She’ll smash herself to pieces and then look what happens - it all starts afresh, some new destructive impulse gets going ... at least that’s what happens to me, that’s just how I am, just how I am with others - Trans. Laird, 62.]

115 Marsh, Rosalind. “New Mothers for a New Era? Images of Mothers and Daughters in Post- Soviet Prose in Historical and Cultural Perspective.” The Modern Language Review 107.4 (2012): 1208. 116 Petrushevskaia, 84. [Andrei came back from camp and ate my herring, my potatoes, my black bread, drank my tea and devoured my mind as always and sucked my blood, he was flesh of my flesh but yellow, filthy, tired to death. - Trans. Laird, 73.]

233 State and by each other.

One of the only times that the State is indirectly mentioned in the novel is in an exchange between Anna Andrianovna and her daughter; Alyona’s worries about an excess of protein in her urine during her third pregnancy lead to the only civilized conversation that the two women have with one another, as Anna Andrianovna advises her: “'Возьмут

на стол для обследования, ковырнут ложкой якобы на анализ, родишь прежде

времени, как я: пузырь то проткнули! Тем более им выгодно, чтобы рожали раньше

указанного срока, меньше платить по декрету, а какое дело врачам?'”117 The horrors of Soviet maternity care, we can only surmise, were so unimaginable that they may fit, undoctored, into Petrushevskaia’s nightscape.

The pain passed from one generation to the next is highlighted toward the end of the narration, when Anna Andrianovna’s mother is to be released from a geriatric home to a hospital for chronic psychotics; even Anna Andrianovna is horrified at this proposition, despite the fact that her mother, we learn, terrorized her in a way that has become by now familiar. But what can she do with her schizophrenic mother? Can she bring her home to a flat which is now all of a sudden also populated by Alyona and all (now three) of her children? The home, the distinctive chronotope for Petrushevskaia, is already, as Helena

Goscilo describes, “a claustrophobic environment of spiritual laceration, sadistic exposure and ceaseless emotional vampirism”;118 how can it contain yet more pain, a whole generation’s worth? By the end, however, this question is moot - Anna

117 ibid., 112. [They’ll have you on the table in a trice and start tinkering inside you with a spoon for their so-called analyses and then you’ll give birth prematurely like I did: they went and made my waters break! It’s to their advantage if you give birth ahead of time, they don’t have to pay so much maternity leave then, and what do the doctors care? - Trans. Laird, 97.] 118 Goscilo, “Women’s space”, 339.

234 Andrianovna is unable to save her mother from the asylum, and upon returning home, she finds that her daughter and grandchildren are all gone. She is left alone, a lifelike relic in the ruins of a destroyed yesterday with no idea of a tomorrow.

The decay seen in Petrushevskaia's novel arises not, perhaps, from direct abuse from the State or society, but from something much more insidious: disregard. The novel, published as it was in 1992, emerged at a time of great flux, and certain aspects of stability were taken for granted, namely motherhood and the dependability and resilience of the domestic sphere; in a time of great change, certain things didn't change at all.

Social economist Natal'ia Rimashevskaia, whose own studies of women's status socially and economically throughout the years of glasnost' found that, despite a declaration of interest in concerns related to motherhood and women in public and private, official action in this area, essentially, missed the point; the Institute of Economics, the Institute of International Economic and Political Research, the Institute of Forecasting, and the

Institute of Labor agreed that women in the workforce needed more maternity leave, more access to part-time work, and better working conditions, but Rimashevskaia's position was, simply, “against the traditional approach which assumed a differentiation of role functions between the sexes”, and for a more egalitarian approach.119

Rimashevskaia's understanding of this lack of attention recalls the inaction brought about by the belief in so-called non-antagonistic contradictions:

Discussion of ‘gender’ revealed that men realise the importance, in decision-making, of improving the status of women, the family, mothers and children, but preferred to do so on the surface without radically changing the situation … Public consciousness is still extremely

119 Rimashevskaia, Natal’ia. “The new women’s studies.” Perestroika and Soviet Women. Ed. Mary Buckley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 119-20.

235 patriarchal, especially among men … As theoretical and conceptual analyses of the ‘woman question’ develop, the need for praxis is increasingly pressing.120

Statistics on earning power, too, indicate a lack of attention and transition: in the two years prior to the dissolution of the USSR, due to what economist Constantin Ogloblin characterizes as “occupational segregation and discriminatory promotion practices” and a view of women as a “specific labor force”, women's earnings were 70% that of men, and by the mid-1990s, the differential had barely changed, with women earning closer to 67% of men's earnings.121 Some paradigms, it seems, survived even a total overhaul of the economic structure; the State pivoted around its stationary citizens, and in

Petrushevskaia, we see them being torn apart by the force.

The Torrents of Spring: Ulitskaia’s Mothers and Daughters

The short novel Sonechka by Liudmila Ulitskaia (1943-) was published in Novyi Mir the same year as Vremia: noch’, and while both novels deal with motherhood and sexuality in explicit terms, most of the similarities end there. Ulitskaia's novel is, in a way, a walk through Russian history from the 1920s to the last years of Communism, or at least parallel to history; in Sonechka, she has created a character who calmly observes the march of time as if it were the turning of pages, and her methods of both escapism from and involvement in the world at large cast a light on all that remains stable in a destabilized landscape.

120 ibid., 120.

121 Ogloblin, Constantin G. “The Gender Earnings Differential in the Russian Transition Economy.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 52.4 (1999): 603-04, 609.

236 Sonechka is in adolescence in the final years of the NEP, an unbeautiful bookwork with disproportionately large breasts who loses herself in nineteenth century novels and holds down a happy library job. The distance that Ulitskaia places between her protagonist and the historical events in which she lives recalls the Romantic tendency to get lost in epistolary novels and invokes a pre-Revolutionary Russia: “Сонечка, кое-как

выучив уроки, каждодневно и ежеминутно увиливала от необходимости жить в

патетических и крикливых тридцатых годах и пасла свою душу на просторах

великой русской литературы”.122 It is immediately obvious that apolitical Sonechka lives in the motherland as opposed to the fatherland. Ulitskaia's narrative voice is a musing voice, one that draws the reader in to recreating the memory of the past, rather than accepting the already-accepted narrative of what life was like. When Sonechka ducks her head to avoid thinking of or interacting with the war, we are invited to muse along:

Неясно, была ли это традиция, угнездившаяся с давних пор в нашем отечестве - помещать драгоценные плоды духа, как и плоды земли, непременно в холодное подполье, - или была это предохранительная прививка для будущего десятилетия Сонечкиной жизни, которое ей предстояло провести именно с человеком из подполья, будущим ее мужем, который появился в этот беспросветно тяжкий первый год эвакуации.123

122 Ulitskaia, Liudmila. “Sonechka.” Schastlivye. Moskva: Astrel’, 2013. 9. [Sonechka for her part, just about managing to struggle through the official school curriculum, did her utmost every minute of every day to wriggle out of having to live in the shrill pathos of the 1930s and let her soul graze the expanses of the great literature of nineteenth-century Russia. - Trans. Tait, Arch. Sonechka: A Novella and Stories. Ludmila Ulitskaya. New York: Schocken Books, 2005. 5.]

123 ibid., 10. [Was this a continuation of the long-standing Russian tradition of hiding away the precious fruits of the spirit, like the fruits of the earth, in dank underground places? Or was it an inoculation for the next decade of Sonechka’s life, which she would spend with an underground figure, the husband who appeared for her in this desperately difficult first year of evacuation? - Trans. Tait, 6.]

237 Historical events are invoked while allowing Sonechka to have her own history in their midst; she remains a quiet and separate force throughout the story. A natural being, an animal who eventually has an easy labor and nurses her daughter intuitively and unproblematically, Sonechka is solace to the dark Soviet years, a nurturing, sensuality- less figure for her husband, an artist who returned to Russia for unclear reasons at the height of his emigre popularity (having rubbed elbows with Gaudi and Apollinaire) and the rest of the nation as well, keeping them all safe in her gigantic and welcoming bosom.

The fact that she is a messenger from a different time is clear to her husband, Robert

Viktorovich, and to the reader, when he reveals to her a portrait that he has painted of her:

“Портрет был чудесный, и женское лицо было благородным, тонким, нездешнего

времени. Ее, Сонечкино, лицо”.124 She is being swept into a fantasy, immortalized and immortalizing at once. And again, though the harsh circumstances of history are presented as a background to their love and marriage, the narrator passes over their sure difficulties with contemplation and quickness: “Откуда взялись у истощенного Роберта

Викторовича и хрупкой от природы Сонечки силы, чтобы посреди бедственной

пустыни эвакуационной жизни, посреди нищеты, подавленности, исступленного

лозунга, едва покрывающего подспудный ужас первой военной зимы”?125 Though the reader is given sketches of their daily life, we are not explicitly told from where they draw their strength, but this is not simple deflection. It is, rather, an attempt to foreground

124 ibid., 16. [It was a wonderful portrait; the woman’s face was genteel and refined and belonged to a bygone age. And it was her, Sonechka’s, face. - Trans. Tait, 12.] 125 ibid., 18. [Where did emaciated Robert and naturally frail Sonechka find the strength to carve out their new life in the desolate circumstances of evacuation, amid poverty and depressing and the shrill sloganeering that barely managed to conceal the underlying horrors of the first winter of the war? - Trans. Tait, 14.]

238 individual existence in a tableau that is often filled with masses of the faceless and the nameless.

After their daughter Tania is born (quickly and painlessly and just out of the reader's sight), Sonechka all of a sudden becomes old, and yet she remains as robust as ever, seemingly ageless in relation to her much older husband:

Мотаясь в пригородных автобусах и расхлябанных электричках, она быстро и некрасиво старилась: нежный пушок над верхней губой превращался в неопрятную бесполую поросль, веки ползли вниз, придавая лицу собачье выражение, а тени утомления в подглазьях уже не проходили ни после воскресного отдыха, ни после двухнедельного отпуска. Но горечь старения совсем не отравляла Сонечке жизнь, как это случается с гордыми красавицами: незыблемое старшинство мужа оставляло у нее непреходящее ощущение собственной неувядающей молодости, а неиссякаемое супружеское рвение Роберта подтверждало это. И каждое утро было окрашено цветом незаслуженного женского счастья, столь яркого, что привыкнуть к нему было невозможно.126

Sonechka's ugliness is clearly presented, and yet this clear and unforgiving description does not carry with it the brutality of the bodies in Voznesenskaia's maternity ward or the rooms and rank darkness of Petrushevskaia's unassuming hell; rather,

Sonechka's body remains comfortable, an acceptable and even pleasing residence for her continued satisfaction. She has kept herself, somehow, from the cold and intrusive

126 ibid., 34. [Subjected to the vagaries of suburban buses and ramshackle suburban trains, Sonechka rapidly grew old and ugly. The soft down on her upper lip turned into a sprouting, unfeminine growth; her eyelids sagged, giving her a doglike expression; and the shadow of fatigue in the bags under her eyes no longer disappeared after her day of rest or, for that matter, after her two weeks’ holiday. But the bitter cup of aging did not by any means poison Sonechka’s life, as it does the life of proud beauties; her husband was immutably much older, and this gave her an unfailing sense of her own unfading youthfulness. Robert’s matrimonial vigor, which showed no sign of abating, confirmed as much. Her every morning was colored by undeserved feminine delight so brilliant it could never become a matter of routine. - Trans. Tait, 28-29.]

239 prodding of the State, and even in her sagging skin, she is content. A guest from the motherland, she is made herself untouchable.

By the early 1950s, Sonechka and her small family are living in an apartment that is large enough for them to care also for her ailing father, and she is perfectly happy. Her husband is even accepted into the artists’ establishment; things couldn’t be going smoother. Their daughter, Tania, a teenager by this point, is discovering her sexuality, and in opposition to her mother’s experience, finds that it is a colorful and bottomless well.

Her experiments with boys are enjoyable and plentiful. It is, however, a girl that changes everything in Tania’s life, and indeed in the life of the entire family; Jasia (a play on the

Russian word meaning “clear”), an 18-year-old Polish orphan who is the janitor at Tania’s school, becomes nearly an obsession for Tania. If Tania represents a desire to shuffle off the gray of the middle Soviet period in favor of a new modernity, Jasia is a chaos of modernity, and is, like Sonechka, an ambassador from a different world:

Она была тверда, сообразительна и действительно до не правдоподобия наивна: она мечтала стать киноактрисой [...] Она придумала себе новое прошлое, с аристократической бабушкой, имением в Польше и французскими родственниками, которые как черт из коробочки вынырнут еще в ее жизни в свой час.127

Jasia is saved by her imaginings of a geographical distance, while Sonechka is saved by her imaginings of a temporal one. Jasia, however, is not quite yet saved when she enters the story; Sonechka's kindness, Tania's obsession, and Robert Viktorovich's desire usher her closer to salvation. Soon after Robert Viktorovich engages in an illicit

127 ibid., 46-47. [She was hard, she was streetwise, and she was, in all honesty, naive beyond belief: she wanted to be a film star [...] She invented herself a new past, complete with aristocratic grandmother, a family estate in Poland, and relatives living in France (who will indeed by appearing like a deus ex machina at just the right moment) – Trans. Tait, 40-41.]

240 sexual encounter with the young girl (which is initiated by Jasia and goes down quite easily, as do all the other sexual encounters in the story), Sonechka decides that they must take Jasia in; her conviction regarding this matter is significant in several ways:

Ее молчаливое миловидное присутствие было приятно Соне и ласкало ее тайную гордость - приютить сироту, это была "мицва", доброе дело, а для Сони, с течением лет все отчетливей слышавшей в себе еврейское начало, это было одновременно и радостью, и приятным исполнением долга.128

This inclusion of a discussion about Sonechka’s Jewish identity further augments the argument that Sonechka is out of the reach of the Soviet authorities, that she is defining herself in secret, and the partially faith-based kindness which she extends to Jasia indicates a further introduction of a new world into their lives, into their era. The ways in which the three members of the family – Sonechka, Robert Viktorovich, and Tania – deal with this new world illustrate the different modes of life that they are meant to represent.

Sonechka, a relic from the old world with an unbending instinct to nurture, opens her arms and heart to Jasia even past her discovery of Jasia's affair with Robert Viktorovich;

Robert Viktorovich, an early-Soviet second-culture artist still possessing revolutionary ideologies, openly takes on Jasia as a lover, finding in her inspiration and fire; and Tania, for whom Jasia was the only friend that allowed her to think for herself,129 finding Jasia suddenly and inaccessibly engaged, seeks out her own new world in the bohemian flats of

St. Petersburg; Tania, having never known a non-Soviet existence, is ill-equipped to deal with the type of modernizing influence that Jasia represents.

128 ibid., 56-57. 129 ibid., 66.

241 Robert Viktorovich, for his part, begins painting a new series of still-lifes composed entirely of white objects, which becomes a series of still-lifes composed entirely of Jasia, and in the description of Jasia's image, camouflaged against a background of delicate whiteness, we may see how imperceptibly and yet how significantly the landscape was changing:

Он смотрел на нее долго-долго, пока она медленно пила свой сироп, а он всегда вдумывался в ее белизну, которая ярче радуги сияла перед ним на фоне матовой побелки пустой стены. И блеск эмали кухонной кружки в ее розовой, но все же белой руке, и куски крупного колотого сахара в кристаллических изломах, и белесое небо за окном - все это хроматической гаммой мудро восходило к ее яично-белому личику, которое было чудо белого, теплого и живого, и лицо это было основным тоном, из которого все производилось, росло, играло и пело о тайне белого мертвого и белого живого.130

The old life and the new are beginning to blend; the featurelessness of life, imbued with new possibilities, however dim, is becoming animated.

Though Sonechka is initially somewhat brokenhearted and displeased with the affair, which she discovers nearly at the same moment that she finds out that they must move from their apartment because of Khrushchev’s new housing plans, she retreats, into

Pushkin and other 19th century literary friends, and with their support, ultimately bears up. This geographical displacement of Sonechka and her family is one of the only

130 ibid., 62. [For a long, long time he watched her slowly sipping her syrup, and he analyzed the whiteness of her all the while, which shone more vividly before him than the colors of the rainbow against the matte whitewashed background of the blank wall. The gleaming enamel of the kitchen mug in her pink but ultimately white hand, the chunks of loaf sugar with their crystalline sections, and the watery white sky outside the window: All this could be meaningfully derived, like a chromatic scale, from her little face, which was the color of egg white, a miracle of whiteness, warmth, and vitality. The face was the keynote from which everything else developed and grew, playing and singing the secret of the whiteness of dead things and the whiteness of things alive. - Trans. Tait, 55.]

242 tangible effects of the trajectory of Soviet history that one may see in the story. Housing was in a terrible state in the mid-1950s, and part of the Seven-Year Plan of 1958 was to create mass housing for everyone; one effect of this was that thousands of households would have to be dismantled and rebuilt, and both housing committees and “informal neighborly surveillance” were put in place to make sure that order would be achieved and maintained.131 Patriarchal and paternalistic edicts reached into the home in a more effective way than a totalitarian government ever could, as evidenced by the fact that

Sonechka, usually dismissive of political events, is finally directly affected. Literary scholar Benjamin Sutcliffe suggests that, perhaps exactly because of its brutal totalitarianism, the Stalin era was perhaps the most placid for Sonechka; the outside world was so clearly something to be guarded against, and home was the only dependable constant.132 These quieter arms of social control, domesticated and therefore partially declawed, were very long arms, reaching where political control could not.

After the move to a new suburb and a new flat, after Tania has taken herself away to St. Petersburg, Sonechka, Tania, and Robert Viktorovich become something of a ménage à trois. Though the public looks for scandal in it, they either see none or must create it for themselves. And when, at the end of some April, “в середине сырой ночной

оттепели”,133 Robert dies in Jasia’s arms, she goes directly to Sonechka, and the two mount his funeral together. The uncompetitive support and understanding between the two women, possible rivals who are instead like mother and daughter, stands far apart

131 Reid, 163-65.

132 Sutcliffe, Benjamin. “Mother, Daughter, History: Embodying the Past in Liudmila Ulitskaia’s Sonechka and The Case of Kukotsky.” The Slavic and East European Journal 53:4 (2009): 618.

133 Ulitskaia, “Sonechka”, 73. [in the middle of a raw nocturnal thaw. - Trans. Tait, 66.]

243 from the resentful and reactionary women of the stories of Tolstaia and Petrushevskaia, and it is perhaps because they have stood their ground, held onto their identities.

Tania eventually moves to Israel and gets a job with the U.N.; after some investigating by Sonechka, Jasia is sent to relatives in Poland, where she meets a

Frenchman and enters into a Parisian fairytale life. And Sonechka remains alive, after mourning getting back to normal: “Толстая усатая старуха Софья Иосифовна живет в

Лихоборах, в третьем этаже хрущевской пятиэтажки [...] Вечерами, надев на

грушевидный нос легкие швейцарские очки, она уходит с головой в сладкие

глубины, в темные аллеи, в вешние воды”.134 The cycle has both moved on and turned back on itself, and in both trajectories sits an old woman who holds everything together, and who will continue to do so when society and the State seem to be conspiring to tear each other and themselves apart.

In Ulitskaia’s 1997 story “Pikovaia dama” (“The Queen of Spades”), whose title is an obvious reference to Aleksandr Pushkin’s 1834 story of the same name, the phenomenon of an ageless mother is again in play, and again, she seems to have more resilience than the following generations. The aim of the story's sharp point, however, has changed; perhaps the continuing uncertainty of the post-Soviet State, now in the late

1990s, has transformed the view of the past as much as it has transformed the views of the present and future. Mour, the mother of Anna, who is the mother of Katya, who is the mother of Lenochka and Grisha, is the oldest of the four generations of women who live

134 ibid., 78. [A fat whiskery old woman, Sophia Yosifovna still lives in Likhobory on the third floor of a five-story building dating from Khrushchev’s crash program of apartment-building [...] In the evenings, she perches a pair of lightweight Swiss spectacles on her nose shaped like a pear and plunges into blissful depths, returning to the shady avenues of Bunin or flinging herself headlong into the torrents of spring. - Trans. Tait, 71.]

244 in her house, and but for her, they have never had good luck with men. Anna, the central protagonist, is a serious woman of her times who looks best in suits, while Mour is always made up, always in high heels despite the fact that she now must get around with a walker, and yet despite these notable physical characteristics, Mour is almost otherworldly. She is described through the eyes of her daughter: “перед ней стоял ангел,

без пола, без возраста, и почти без плоти. Живая одним духом. Но каков был этот

дух, Анна Федоровна знала преотлично”.135 She is ageless and formless, a force of spirit, a guest from the past who may also steer the future. At one point, Anna’s ex- husband Marek made the claim that Mour was as immortal as the hold of Marxism-

Leninism, but he has been proven wrong; in point of fact, Mour outlived Marxism.136

Mour, who cut her teeth in the revolutionary era, stayed ahead of the wave of Soviet politics and now exists in the heady contemporary world, and, as in Sonechka, the narrative style reminds the reader that her path was far from pre-determined:

Отчего ей была дана власть над отцом, младшими сестрами, мужчинами и женщинами и даже над теми неопределенными существами, находящимися в узком и мучительном зазоре между полами? Кроме обыкновенных мужчин с самыми простодушными намерениями в нее постоянно влюблялись феминизированные гомосексуалисты и сбившиеся со скучной женской дороги решительные лесбиянки.137

135 Ulitskaia, Liudmila. “Pikovaia dama.” Veselye pokhorony. Povest’ i rasskazy. Moskva: Vagrius, 1998. 394. [An angel stood before her, without sex or age and almost without flesh, a being existing only in the spirit. What kind of spirit that was, Anna knew only too well. - Trans. Tait, 77).]

136 ibid., 402.

137 ibid., 395. [What was the source of the power Mour had been given over her father, her younger sisters, men and women, and even those ambivalent creatures who occupied the narrow and tormented margin between the sexes? Apart from ordinary men with completely unsophisticated intentions, she was constantly being fallen in love with by camp homosexuals and by robust lesbians who had struck out from the wearisome path of womanhood. - Trans. Tait, 78.]

245 Mour has found ways to remain dominant even amidst shifting trends in sexualities and sensibilities, while Anna, on the other hand, is under the tight control of her mother's judgment; her every move has seemingly been determined by Mour. An optical surgeon for a living, bestowing and fixing sight, Anna still cannot seem to get a grasp on her own outlook, muddied as it is by the constant harassment of her angry mother in whose mind roars a chaos old lovers and of history. The two of them couldn’t be more different: Anna is bereft of hope and vision, while Mour is obsessed with desire: “Все жизнь ей

нравилось хотеть и получать желаемое, истинная беда ее была в том, что хотение

кончилось, и смерть только тем и была страшна, что она означала собой конец

желаний.”138 Mour has retained, perhaps, in contrast to Sonechka's noble pre- revolutionary ideals, the brutal convictions of those revolutionaries whose dreams gave way to dictatorship. Mour, first riding her beauty to the top of the Soviet establishment, after becoming a widow, became a shrewd connoisseur of plastic surgery, showing once again that her talent for adaptability has not lessened with age.

When Anna’s ex-husband and the father of her by-now-grown daughter Katya – who is also possessed of an otherworldliness, this time delicate: “птичье очарование,

птичья бестелесность,”139 – comes for a visit for the first time in 30 years, Anna is resentful of the way that his appearance and his international life seems to dazzle her family. Fathers have not been a mainstay in their household; “как это часто бывает,

138 ibid., 400. [All her life she had enjoyed wanting and getting what she wanted. Her real misfortune was that she had ceased to want. She was afraid of death only because it meant the end of desires. - Trans. Tait, 84.]

139 ibid. [a birdlike charm, a birdlike incorporeality – Trans. Tait, 85.]

246 семейная традиция безотцовщины в каждом следующем поколении

усиливалась”,140 and Anna is used to this absence. Her own father she had adored, but her mother had taken her from him and given Anna the last name of her new husband, a prominent Soviet writer that Anna abhorred, and Anna’s daughter had not known her father much, if at all. The house has been and remains without men; Katya and Anna have given up on romance and Lenochka is yet too young.

In a discussion of Anna's sexuality, we see a great chasm between her near- frigidity and the unabashed discussions of sex and physicality that may be found in

Voznesenskaia, Tolstaia, and Petrushevskaia, even in others of Ulitskaia's works. Anna is a fairly sexless being, possibly owing to both internal and external influences, and the association for her between sex and shame is strong:

не было для нее ничего противнее, чем мурлыкающий голос, возбужденный смех и протяжные стоны из материнской спальни... вечный гон, течка, течка... На мгновенье она провалилась сильнейшее детское ощущение несмываемой грязи секса, когда неловка было смотреть на любую супружескую пару, потому что тут же возникал картинка, как они, потея и стеная, занимаются этой мерзостью... Как прекрасно быть монахиней, в белом, в чистом, без всего этого...141

Still wetly explicit, this approach to sexuality indicates a fear and a distance that the visceral and close-up examinations of the body that we have seen in previous works have

140 ibid., 407. [As often happens, a tradition of fatherlessness in their family had grown stronger with each succeeding generation – Trans. Tait, 92.]

141 ibid., 416. [She know nothing more repugnant than the purring voice, the sexually aroused laughter, and the drawn-out moaning proceeding from her mother’s bedroom. The eternal sex hunt, animals in heat. For a moment she relapsed into an immensely powerful childish sense of the irredeemable filthiness of sex, when it was an embarrassment to look at any married couple because you immediately imagined them, sweating and grunting, getting on with that dirt. How fine to be a nun, dressed all in white, pure, without any of this. - Trans. Tait, 103.]

247 pushed to destroy; this perhaps points to a retreat, a cowering in the presence of a new oppressor. Anna's ultimate and untimely end may be indication that her battle, weakly fought, is indeed lost.

Though Marek’s visit is the main action in the story, Anna's would-be transformation sits at its heart. She decides, despite Mour's stern opposition, to take her family to Greece to visit Marek, and she will do it surreptitiously, springing it on her villainous mother at the last second. When she runs out for milk for Mour’s coffee the morning of their departure, the promise of liberation hangs visibly in front of her:

“увидела вдруг как уже совершенное: она, Анна, размахивается расслабренной

рукой и наотмашь лепит по старой нарумяненной щеке сладкую пощечину... И

совершенно все равно, что после этого будет...”, but, before she is even aware of what happens, she is dead.142 When Katya runs out to find her dawdling mother, only to discover that her late mother is, indeed, her late mother, and returns home with Mour in an impatient and distressed uproar, it is Katya who finally delivers the long-overdue slap.143 Mour, still in the dark about Anna’s death, is undeterred, and our final glimpse of the household, now missing a middle generation, is Katya pouring milk into Mour’s cold coffee. We are left to wonder whether Anna’s near-liberation will be passed on and actualized by Katya, or whether the past's stranglehold on the present is enough to choke out any hopeful future.

Sutcliffe has opined that for Ulitskaia, “it is specifically the bodily and emotional relationships between mothers and daughters that give meaning to the quotidian and 142 ibid., 421. [she saw, as if it had already happened, herself - Anna - taking a long easy swing and giving that old rouged cheek a good hard long-overdue slap. And she didn’t care in the slightest what happened after that. - Trans. Tait, 108-109.]

143 ibid., 422. 248 constitute a new reading of Russian history”,144 and in “Pikovaia dama”, the reading is incomplete. From the time of its writing in the late 1990s, the perspective had widened, but observers were, perhaps, not yet able to make sense of the scene before them.

And it is here where we may finally stop and look back, and see that all these writers have been working along a steady trajectory. Though they are not working in the same styles, from Baranskaia on, they all work towards expressing a certain kind of physical and existential discomfort that can only arrive from disembodiment, from a disconnection between life and intent. They have looked back in longing at the dreams and experiments of the 1920s, and have become increasingly physically destroyed by the distance from what is to what could be. But what could be? They cannot hope to see this, or to rebuild, until they can manage to see the damage, up close, in all its blood and ragged edges, and they have moved intuitively to this site. The heroines of Russian literature have been engaged in steady evolution: in the 19th century, they were elegant beauties inside and out; during the Revolutionary era they gained strength, sexuality, and muscle; during the

Stalin years they gained voice even as they were forcibly stifled; and at the close of the

20th century, their language is marked by visible smears of “blood, semen, mucus, bile, urine, and alcohol”,145 and with these they challenge their readers to rethink women in literature and women in general. The body bursts from the page. Newer generations are continuing this tradition; as Helena Goscilo explains, if the 19th century male writers

144 Sutcliffe, 607. 145 Goscilo, Dehexing Sex, 89.

249 emerged from beneath Gogol’s overcoat, today’s female writers come from

Petrushevskaia’s skirts,146 and they are wearing the mess to prove it.

All of this grotesque experimentation, according to Ivanova, may represent the liberation of the species, or it may lead to ideological and emotional collapse with a vacuum in its wake.147 Clearly, by the mid-90s, if we may read the trajectory via female bodies, destruction and collapse were imminent; rebuilding was a long way off. The trope of mothers and daughters, however, and their uses in naming and expressing specifically female insecurities and portraying the grotesque through new subjects may point to impending regeneration. The nurturing image of Mother Russia or the Virgin Mary, the

“self-sacrificial, nurturing character whose virtues are taken for granted, but whose own voice is rarely heard”148 is turning around, finally showing her face, and while in

Petrushevskaia, she is beginning to roar and to wail, in Ulitskaia, she may be ready for the still-undefined task at hand. This primal and agonized scream in the face of claims by the post-Soviet Russian political establishment (and, indeed, by some of its female writers) that women have suffered from over-emancipation149 seems to be trying to say: do not tell us what we are suffering from. We will tell you how we suffer.

The existential violence of Petrushevskaia’s stories provoked such confusion and rage that at times they damaged her personal relationships, in addition to receiving harsh critique for their ugliness; this is, in some ways, extremely ironic, because it was this

146 ibid., 95.

147 Ivanova 31. 148 Marsh, 1194.

149 See Elder, Miriam. “Feminism could destroy Russia, Russian Orthodox Patriarch claims”.

250 exact ugliness which prompted her critics and contemporaries to think of her writing as masculine (and implicitly, therefore, “better” than women’s writing, and deserving of more latitude).150 How is it possible, we might wonder, that the essentialist view of femininity held by both the State and some of Russia’s most prominent female writers,

Tolstaia and Petrushevskaia among them, seems to be on hiatus when women sit down to write? Goscilo lays out the conflict in this logic:

No rhetoric can disguise the arbitrary premises or incongruous conclusions of the yoked syllogisms:

A. Woman is intrinsically feminine Petrushevskaia is a woman Petrushevskaia is inherently feminine;

B. Forceful prose is masculine Petrushevskaia writes forceful prose Petrushevskaia’s prose is masculine.

Logic compels the inference that the very process of writing (well?) mysteriously metamorphoses the feminine principle into the masculine and reverses the transmutation the moment creativity ceases.151

And these faulty logical inferences conspire to create yet another conundrum: at exactly the moment that the women of Petrushevskaia’s, Tolstaia’s, even Narbikova’s fiction are destroying the myth of the feminine, the image of some idealized femininity is being shored up, molded back into a Mother Earth trope in the service of rebuilding the nation.

Even in focusing on the most terrifying depiction of motherhood, Petrushevskaia's Anna

Andrianovna is reinforcing the idea of the all-powerful mother, the superhuman strength of the last woman standing, perhaps even more strongly than Ulitskaia's Sonechka, a

150 Goscilo, Dehexing Sex, 20.

151 Goscilo, Dehexing Sex, 21.

251 nurturing mother to the end. In some ways this is not surprising; even though it might seem paradoxical that the Mother Earth trope re-emerged during this troubled and uncertain historical moment, just as it did under Stalin and even, perhaps, during the pre-

Revolutionary Symbolist period, Goscilo points out that it is exactly at these times that

“the tendency to a conservative retrenchment of a traditional gender disposition is particularly pronounced.”152 Further, socio-cultural anthropologist Kathleen Kuehnast and political scientist Carol Nechemias write that, after 1991, some clear results of this retrenchment became quickly apparent: “neofamilial ideologies that sharply criticize

Soviet-style emancipation and advocate a return to ‘traditional families’; a gendered division of labor in the market economy... and a gendered division of labor in the political arena.”153 This seems to suggest that new structures and policies have made the situation for women in post-Soviet Russia similar to a Western neoliberal model, which strives with ever-increasing might for traditionalist families and gender performances. As with many transitional and postcolonial societies, Kuehnast and Nechemias write, the category and concept of “woman” is the battleground upon which traditionalism and modernization vie for power,154 though I would argue that this true in developed democratic and/or capitalist societies as well, and that this battleground unfurls on the path to capitalism. In chaotic times, this motherhood, this nurturing is a recognizable mode of normalcy, and in response to these chaotic times, these writers, from Baranskaia

152 ibid., 33.

153 Kuehnast, Kathleen and Carol Nechemias, eds. Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition: Nation-Building, Economic Survival, and Civic Activism. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 1-2.

154 ibid., 3.

252 to Ulitskaia, took the opportunity to take the recognizable and pull it up close; closer; close enough to see the tears and the blood and the fear and hence, the real face.

Feminism, as we have seen, always interacted uneasily with the late Soviet public, and a change in government cannot magically change that. The basic argument is this: in a country where oppressions are seen to be spread around equally and where no efforts of civil society or grassroots mobilization could be successful in changing conditions

(because of a lack of separation between civil society and institutional control), how could a feminist ideology take hold?155 It is necessary, however, to push beyond these simplistic explanations. For instance, Goscilo concluded after a series of interviews with female writers in the late 80s and early 90s that, in a country where ideology was handed fully-formed to the people, there was no mechanism by which people could begin to understand politically-constructed gender categories.156 And social philosopher Almira

Ousmanova points out that, in a country whose ideological basis was that of Marxism-

Leninism, where the impulse to historical materialism means a binarized approach to concepts (man/woman, spiritual/material), to trouble the binary of gender is a difficult undertaking marked by the “birth trauma” of arising from the ruins of Marxist-Leninist philosophy.157 Additionally, though Eastern Europe and the former USSR have by now incorporated Gender Studies in academic programs, institutions, and periodicals, because of its perceived Western origins, it tends to be seen as elitist, lacking necessary interaction with other disciplines and non-academic discourses, and so it becomes suspect, a possible

155 Kelly, 348.

156 Goscilo, Dehexing Sex, 10.

157 Ousmanova, Almira. “On the Ruins of Cultural Marxism: Gender and Cultural Studies in Eastern Europe.” Studies in Eastern European Thought 55.1 (2003): 38-39.

253 vehicle for capitalist endeavors and global political economies. Ousmanova, however, offers an attempt at positivity: in the best case, in Russia as elsewhere, feminism offers the tools to critique power and dominant political and national ideologies, such as capitalism, colonialism, and nationalism, and at least in the immediate term, “the readiness for criticism could reconcile feminism and Marxism - at least for a while.”158

The establishment of Gender Studies programs in universities and in other official institutions, the increase in women in publishing and journalism, and the creation of more independent women’s cooperative and civic organizations suggest that certain aspects of social and institutional traditionalism have loosened, but they have been accompanied by

(predictably) resultant exploitations, such as a preponderance of pornography, objectification of women in print and on film, and the growth of both prostitution and a casual acceptance of it.159 This trend is worsening in the 21st century. And, though female writers in the last two decades of the Soviet period such as Baranskaia and

Vozneskenskaia dealt directly with the politics of womanhood in their realist narratives, the women writing through perestroika and across the boundary of a new State turned their attention inwards, to the psychological and the somatic; though their works tear at the pretty picture of the feminine, they are only disruptive at some levels. As Goscilo writes, “[a] nakedly political system such as the Soviet Union’s appreciated all too well that the personal is political, but not in the sense theorized by feminists and other Western intellectuals”,160 and the personal here is kept close to the heart, wrapped up in desperate

158 ibid., 47.

159 Goscilo, Dehexing Sex, 12-14.

160 ibid., 17.

254 hands, consumed. In self-obsessed starvation, the personal turns away from the political.

Tat'iana Goricheva, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, has continued to write on religion and its interaction with society and gender. Though she maintains that woman is meant to nurture and sustain life, faith, and moral society, the world in which she now lives is much different than the world in which she lived in the 1970s, and she is not so sure that things have progressed in a positive direction, writing that the struggle against Marxism was perhaps easier than the struggle against the multiple and nefarious hierarchies of developing capitalism.161 In some ways, Goricheva's view has remained traditional – she dislikes pornography and commodity culture, but she speaks out against rigid gender roles that ask nothing more of people than to fall in line, and while she still reveres the strong family headed by a father and mother, she recognizes that in an age of alcoholism and rampant domestic abuse, divorce is often the only logical path; she remains highly critical, however, of American (read: bourgeois) feminism, feeling that only when a level of faith is present may women reach their true potential.162 The activity since the resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church, legally operating since 1990 under the direction of the Moscow Patriarchate, is not in line with Goricheva's visions of a faith-based movement toward greater equality; historian Katja Richters suggests that the

Church's proclamations of concern regarding the effects of poverty, particularly on women with children, is an anti-abortion and pro-natalist stance cloaked in benevolence that aligns well with the demographic concerns of the post-Soviet State, and as such may

161 Goricheva, Tat’iana. “Khristianstvo i zhenshchina.” Russkaia zhenshchina i Pravoslavie. Bogoslovie. Filosofia. Kul’tura. SPb: TO “Stupeni,” 1996. 81. 162 ibid., 84.

255 not be as supportive of women's welfare as it may first appear.163 Richters' compelling hypothesis – that the Church, priding itself on being a venerable institution with pre-

Communist morals, is directed entirely by men who were raised and educated in an ideologically and politically totalitarian Soviet system, and hence combines both the traditionalism of imperial Russia with the autocratic tendencies of Soviet Communism164

– may show that these two tendencies are not so different; the Church, rooted in tsarism and also in Soviet ideology, is able to continue to gain influence in the post-Socialist context by appealing to and blending these styles and systems. It seems that Goricheva may have both Marxism and the “democracy” of capitalism to contend with.

As Cixous has written, “[a] woman without a body, dumb, blind, can’t possibly be a good fighter. She is reduced to being the servant of the militant male, his shadow. We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing. Inscribe the breath of the whole woman”,165 and, though in very different ways, post-Thaw female writers have been orchestrating these desperate inhalations and poison exhalations, giving new breath and in turn new life. They are returning women to their bodies and minds, and what we are reading are the stages of the pain that arises from waking up after years of atrophy and moving again, of striking in self-defense and shaking off dead weight. Again, from Cixous:

When the ‘repressed’ of their culture and their society returns, it’s an explosive, utterly destructive, staggering return, with a force never yet unleashed and equal to the most forbidding of suppressions. For when the

163 Richters, Katja. The Post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church: Politics, Culture and Greater Russia. London: Routledge, 2013. 32-33.

164 ibid., 6-7.

165 Cixous, 880.

256 Phallic period comes to an end, women will have been either annihilated or borne up to the highest and most violent incandescence. Muffled throughout their history, they have lived in dreams, in bodies (though muted), in silences, in aphonic revolts.166

The destruction is fresh and the dust is still rising, is in fact still being kicked up. When it settles, we will see what sort of women, what sort of society the destruction has left. We may have to wait a bit longer to see clearly. In the meantime, people go about their days.

166 ibid., 886.

257 CONCLUSION

Or, Instead of a Conclusion

Catriona Kelly has written that the trajectory of Russian women’s writing in its early nineteenth-century beginnings is generally seen as following one of two models of development: the explosive and the progressive. The progressive view posits that the slow, incremental improvements to women’s circumstances in politics and in public and private life as the century wore on were accompanied by a parallel improvement in the quality of women’s writing, but Kelly sees a flaw in this model: while female writers and readers did of course often benefit from greater access to education, women’s writing

“could also, paradoxically, function as a substitute for these,” meaning that in the absence of particular opportunities, writing could serve as “compensation for powerlessness.”1

The explosive model is similarly problematic; it claims that the rise of Aleksandr Pushkin and the dawn of the “Golden Age” of Russian literature brought women’s writing all of a sudden to life, but while the Russian literary tradition solidified in this era, it did so by forming an “effective national literary ideology,” one in which the role of women was marginalized so that, as Kelly writes, “the new professional class of male littérateurs might concomitantly emerge with enhanced status.”2 The deficiencies in both models

1 Kelly, Catriona. A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 1820-1992. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. 21-22.

2 ibid., 23.

258 have been illustrated repeatedly; improvements in political and social opportunities waxed and waned, but the focused effort to continue to develop new language to name the woman’s experience continued, both despite and because of these extra-literary fluctuations in status and circumstance. And, while there have been a series of explosions that saw the canon expand quickly and colorfully, such as the rise of the Russian novel during the age of realism or the flowering of avant-garde literatures in fin-de-siècle movements, as we have seen, these explosions have often sidelined women’s writing.

Given the frailties of both of these models of development, I hope that my study has shown that the genealogy of women’s writing has followed its own independent path even as it has responded to the standard literary canon and sometimes-cataclysmic political changes.

The political stage is, of course, currently undergoing transformation. The dust that was kicked up during and after perestroika is indeed still settling, but it is also being rowdily kicked up again by rapid changes in the current political climate. Though leadership has been quite stable for the last fifteen years – Vladimir Putin has consistently been at the helm, as either President (from 2000 to 2008 and then again from

2012 to the current day) or Prime Minister (from 2008 to 2012), neatly switching places with Dmitrii Medvedev (President from 2008 until 2012 and Prime Minister since) – opposition to Putin’s leadership has been visible and vocal, and the geographical footprint of the nation is currently in flux. And in the midst of these eye-catching political machinations, there have been notable changes in policy and circumstance for women as well.

259 After 1991, the woman question began to center around whether or not the transition to a market economy and (some semblance of ) democracy was going to lead to positive or negative changes for women. Kathleen Kuehnast and Carol Nechemias point to some transitions that are already visible, particularly moves toward “neofamilial ideologies that sharply criticize Soviet-style emancipation and advocate a return to

‘traditional families’; a gendered division of labor in the market economy...; and a gendered division of labor in the political arena, with men dominating formal government structures and political parties and women dominating nongovernmental organization.”3

As with many transitional and postcolonial societies, Kuehnast and Nechemias note, the category and concept of “woman” is often the battleground upon which the struggle between traditionalism and modernization plays out,4 though I would argue that “woman” is a similar site of struggle in capitalist economies as well, and that this battleground unfurls on the path to capitalism, market-based competition, and commodity culture.

Highly sexualized images of women are on the rise, for instance, in service to both the market and consolidation of political power. Take, for example, the vying calendars that emerged in the fall of 2010, the first featuring scantily-clad female journalism students from Moscow State University, accompanied by pro-Putin captions,5 the second featuring fully-dressed female journalism students, this time alongside

3 Kuehnast, Kathleen and Carol Nechemias, eds. Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition: Nation-Building, Economic Survival, and Civic Activism. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 1-2.

4 ibid., 3.

5 “Podarok Putinu ko dniu rozhdeniia ot studentok zhurfaka MGU.” Echo.msk.ru. 6 Oct. 2010. Web. 12 Feb. 2015.

260 questions designed to put Putin in a different sort of hot seat.6 As political scientist

Valerie Sperling has demonstrated, both of these calendars, whether in favor of the dominant political party or against, are of a piece with other political campaigns and motions that perform traditional masculinities and femininities in order to display strength via the enactment of symbolic and gendered hierarchies of power.7 Sperling points to many further examples of highly heteronormative and sexualized political campaigns and actions, such as the 2008 pop song “Takogo kak Putin” (“A Man Like

Putin”), which glorifies and arguably sexualizes Putin’s strength and dependability,8 and the 2011 viral social media competition “Porvu za Putina” (“I’ll Rip it for Putin”), the initial video announcement for which features a young professional woman ripping open her white camisole and inviting others to rip something for Putin as well.9 In these instances and others, Sperling writes, “the effective use of femininity to enhance perceived masculinity hinges on a concurrent depreciation of any femininity deployed by the opposition,” meaning that the women involved in these campaigns – and, by extension, all women – are objectified and belittled as nothing more than attractive tools for bolstering the power and masculinity of their chosen hero; the more attractive the women, the stronger their leader.10 Women’s bodies are both battleground and rank and

6 “Studentki MGU podgotovili al’ternativnyi kalendar’ dlia Putina. Lenta.ru. 7 Oct. 2010. Web. 12 Feb. 2015.

7 See particularly Sperling, Valerie. “Nashi Devushki: Gender and Political Youth Activism in Putin’s and Medvedev’s Russia.” Post-Soviet Affairs 28.2 (2012): 232-261.

8 Anonymator. “Poiushchie vmeste - Takogo kak Putin.” Online video clip. YouTube. 3 Nov. 2010. Web. 12 Feb. 2015.

9 Publiciti.ru. “Putin’s Army.” Online video clip. YouTube. 19 July 2011. Web. 12 Feb. 2015.

10 Sperling, 246-47.

261 file.

The resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church has also been accompanied by new statements on the woman question. Patriarch Kirill has taken a stand against abortion, naming it as one of Russia’s central social problems and pointing to not only its negative effect on population growth, but the necessity to develop a new system of ethics that values the preservation of life;11 this latter moral component of an anti-abortion stance is relatively new to the Russian context. He has also issued warnings about feminism, calling it a very dangerous force in society; feminist values ignore children, the family, and family values, he claims, and argues that traditional gender roles do not in actuality subordinate women to men.12 On the other hand, women have become an increasing presence in the Orthodox Church; though they are not able to join the ranks in a liturgical capacity, in the laity they outnumber men by a ratio of four or five to one, and they are highly visible as unofficial spokespeople, such as in religious publications.13

Despite the fact that some of the stances of the Patriarch might appear to be anti-woman, the environment of the Church allows women to step away from an increasingly sexualized and commodified vision of woman and begin to discuss a new version of the woman question outside of the growing influence of capitalism.14

Since 1991, abortion has been widely painted as a relic from a backwards path,

11 “Patriarkh Kirill predlozhil zapretit’ aborty.” Lenta.ru. 22 Jan. 2015. Web. 23 Jan. 2015.

12 “Patriarkh Kirill: Feminizm svodit liubov’ i otvetstvennost’ k politike i raspredeleniiu vlasti i vliianiia..” Pravmir.ru. 10 April 2013. Web. 23 Jan. 2015.

13 Kizenko, Nadieszda. “Feminized Patriarch? Orthodoxy and Gender in Post-Soviet Russia.” Signs 38.3 (2013): 597-98.

14 ibid., 615.

262 and the response to it has varied; progressives and those with Western aid and influence have advocated for more education around family planning and more access to birth control, while the conservative and nationalist response has focused instead on population, arguing that abortion and its effects on population decline weaken the nation.

Policies regarding abortion access have become increasingly restrictive; in 2012, for instace, the criteria for second trimester termination was limited only to medical concerns and pregnancies arising from rape.15 Pronatalist benefits policies have arisen in tandem with growing restrictions on abortion. Putin gave a demographic speech in 2006 which introduced a pronatalist program in familiarly nationalistic terms, but with a notably anti-

Soviet stance. Citing Franklin D. Roosevelt and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, among others critical of Soviet politics, he set forth a new policy that would give greater benefits to mothers of two or more children, and thereby “positioned himself as an adherent of the

Russian traditions of a strong state, traditional patriotic values and gender polarization, and distanced himself from the Soviet past,” though in actuality, this nationalist distribution of “maternal capital”, as we have seen, is not so different from policies of the

Soviet era.16 The new program, which went into effect at the start of 2007, provides

250,000 rubles to a mother when her second child turns three, earmarked for either housing, a pension for the mother, or an education fund for the child.17 There are many

15 Rivkin-Fish, Michele. “Conceptualizing Feminist Strategies For Russian Reproductive Politics: Abortion, Surrogate Motherhood, and Family Support after Socialism.” Signs 38:3, 2013. 573-74.

16 Rotkirch, Anna, Anna Temkina, and Elena Zdravomyslova. “Who Helps the Degraded Housewife?: Comments on Vladimir Putin’s Demographic Speech.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 14.4 (2007): 350-51.

17 ibid.

263 critiques of these policies; the feminist response is that they do nothing to shift the paradigm that puts women in charge of all parenting and domestic chores, and that

“Russian women’s citizenship has once again been defined in terms of the working- mother contract.”18 The road for feminism is laden with obstacles, particularly when it attempts to question highly binarized gender roles that have been traditionally taken for granted.

Perestroika-era feminism wanted to reintegrate women into the public sphere and men into the family, positioning this greater accessibility to both spheres of life as universal emancipation from which everyone, not only women, would benefit, and they saw in the new discourses of the 1990s a push to naturalize the role of stay-at-home wife and mother, which was joined by a turn towards the aggressive sexualization of women.19

Sociologist and coordinator of the Gender Studies program at the European University in

St. Petersburg Elena Zdravomyslova provides a concise and clear summary of the trajectory of feminism from perestroika to the present day:

mass women’s mobilization did not (and could not) occur, but the cultural horizon of the intellectual public was broadened. Intellectual feminism has become the movement of a minority. Such issues as legitimacy of cultural differences; minority rights; masquerades of performative gender; complications of nomadic identity; intersection of social, political and cultural foundations of identity construction; and diverse gendered patterns of social exclusion are topics of feminist discourse … Androcentrism as open recognition of sexual double standards and the supremacy of activities marked as masculine became questioned. Feminists recognized that in order to overcome this cultural pattern it was necessary to de-centralize traditional masculinity and femininity, to

18 ibid., 355-56.

19 Zdravomyslova, Elena. “Perestroika and feminist critique.” Women and Transformation in Russia. Eds. Aino Saarinen, Kirsti Ekonen, and Valentina Uspenskaia. London: Routledge, 2014. 121-22.

264 transgress the core cultural canon. It is not an easy task.20

Zdravomyslova also points to the growth of feminist discourse during the perestroika period as pivotal in the development of women’s organizations since then.21 Many non- governmental organizations have sprung up, and it is not always a comfortable fit.

Anthropologist Julie Hemment has demonstrated that what she calls “gender mainstreaming,” or “the integration, or mainstreaming, of the feminist concept of gender into the agendas of development agencies,” ironically led to a climate in which “women’s empowerment projects were part and parcel of the very economic restructuring projects that undermined women’s status in the post-socialist period,”22 as new hierarchies and dependencies were created and entrenched. Political scientist Janet Johnson’s work on rape crisis centers is especially illuminating in this regard, highlighting the conservatism that weakens attempts of feminist civil society to truly shift gender paradigms. These crisis centers in their early days offered workshops, trainings, and programs aimed at self- defense, consciousness-raising, and education, as well as medical and legal advice and psychological support for survivors in a context where law enforcement is generally dismissive of allegations of rape and sexual abuse.23 While official statistics on reported rapes fell by nearly a quarter between 1991 and 1998, this is possibly due to the fact that 20 ibid., 123.

21 ibid., 111.

22 Hemment, Julie. “Gender Mainstreaming and the NGO-ization of Russian women’s activism.” Women and Transformation in Russia. Eds. Aino Saarinen, Kirsti Ekonen, and Valentina Uspenskaia. London: Routledge, 2014. 128.

23 Johnson, Janet Elise. “Sisterhood versus the ‘Moral’ Russian State: The Postcommunist Politics of Rape.” Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition: Nation-Building, Economic Survival, and Civic Activism. Kathleen Kuehnast and Carol Nechemias, eds. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 221-22.

265 women saw that allegations of rape would not be taken seriously and simply stopped reporting them; additionally, even conservative estimates suggest that only one in three rapes is ever reported, with more radical estimates putting it closer to one in ten.24 In the early 1990s, there was only a small number of grassroots organizations offering crisis support, but by 2004, there were as many as two hundred organizations of different sizes focusing on issues of domestic violence and rape crisis support, many with funding from transnational feminist groups and donors, but as Johnson writes, “forces pushing NGO- based mobilization” invasively undermined grassroots movements and initiatives.25

Transnational funding and models working in what Johnson calls the “democracy industry” began to slowly transform organizations that had been focused on direct and localized hands-on action into groups that used technical expertise to study governmental policy instead, which weakened their position as a part of a growing civil society.26

Additionally, at the height of these organizations’ operations, global funding earmarked for women’s rights decreased or disappeared following the events of September 11, 2001, with money redirected toward “new hot spots”; crisis centers were themselves all of a sudden in crisis, and though some groups were able to survive, almost all were forced to scale back by the middle of the decade, either in services offered or number of centers.27

Johnson points out, however, that though the movement itself was de-radicalized by the geopolitical interests of granting organizations, these centers have been “an unusually

24 ibid., 218-19.

25 Johnson, Janet Elise. Gender Violence in Russia: The Politics of Feminist Intervention. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. 43.

26 ibid., 45-46.

27 ibid., 60-67.

266 successful segment of Russia’s weak civil society,” especially given the fact that local and federal agencies began to create their own crisis centers in response to the clear need for such services that had been demonstrated by the success of the early non- governmental organizations.28 It is clear, however, that this governmental intervention does not represent a larger transformation of dominant paradigms of gender.

It is very difficult to see in real time how the tradition of women’s writing will fit into this shifting landscape – we must be able to see the connections between both predecessor and successor to see the tradition clearly. Tat’iana Tolstaia, Liudmila

Petrushevskaia, and Liudmila Ulitskaia are, of course, still writing, and they are likely predecessors for as-yet unknown successors, but the most popular works of fiction by women focusing on women’s lives do not, for the most part, engage explicitly with current manifestations of the woman question. Contemporary novelist Dina Rubina is one of the most widely-read and well-known female writers of our era, but her novels and stories tend not to deal with the woman question, and she herself is resistant to the idea of women’s writing; gender, she feels, has no place in discussions of quality of work, and she refuses the role of representative of any group, whether it is one of gender, nationality, or political affiliation.29

There are other popular writers, however, who seem to be interacting with the tradition of Russian women’s writing; as we have seen, the dominant trend in the tradition has been the search for subjectivity and self-definition, undertaken in various

28 ibid., 68.

29 Rubina, Dina. Pod znakom karnavala. Roman, esse, interv’iu. Ekaterinburg: U-Faktoriia, 2000. 438-39.

267 forms, and one form which this search has taken is that of the detective novel. There are several women writing in this genre, particularly the enormously popular Dar’ia

Dontsova, whose serialized novels often feature the recurring cases of a handful of female detectives, some of which have been turned into television dramas, and

Aleksandra Marinina, whose website offers a short personal biography that notes that her works reach millions of readers and that “она ненавязчиво внедряет в них идеи

демократии, умеренного феминизма и коррумпированности власти.”30 Her most popular protagonist, the detective Anastasiia Kamenskaia, has appeared in more than thirty novels over the last two decades and half as many television specials between 2000 and 2003. As Catharine Nepomnyashchy notes, though Kamenskaia is sparklingly intelligent and imaginative when solving crimes, she is “particularly lazy - and generally incompetent - when it comes to anything that might be termed ‘women’s work,’” and that in her refusal to conform to stereotypes and expectations of femininity in both aesthetics and behavior, “Kamenskaia is consistently classified as different from ‘normal’ Russian women.”31 In examining Kamenskaia against the suggestion put forth by Sandra Tomc in her essay “Questing Women: The Feminist Mystery after Feminism,” which states that

“it is a fundamental principle of feminist detective fiction to locate the origin of crime in patriarchal social structures,” Nepomnyashchy argues that Kamenskaia does not quite fit this paradigm, being that she is generally constantly surrounded and protected by the

30 “Biograficheskaia spravka.” Marinina.ru. Web. 17 Feb. 2015. [she subtly introduces them to ideas of democracy, moderate feminism, and institutional corruption. - my trans.]

31 Nepomnyashchy, Catharine Theimer. “Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem: Aleksandra Marinina and the Rise of the New Russian Detektiv.” Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev. Ed. Barker, Adele Marie. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. 170.

268 patriarchal structure of her institution and her respectful male colleague.32 The fact that

Marinina’s website highlights the gentle appearance of feminism alongside the fact of institutional corruption might suggest , however, that Tomc’s suggestion is applicable to

Kamenskaia’s situation, despite plot-based indications to the contrary. Though

Nepomnyashchy’s discussion of Kamenskaia was written in the mid-90s, her suggestion that the key to Kamenskaia’s popularity may hinge on “overt confrontation with the anxieties and threats posed by the instability of life in Russia today, which are thereby rendered manageable and therefore less frightening” is still clearly relevant, as charges of institutional corruption have continued to drive oppositional forces over the last decade.33

Particularly the televised versions of Kamenskaia’s stories, Nepomnyashchy argues, may be “an agent for the creation of ‘normalcy’.”34

And if this literary depiction of normalcy is meant, as literary depictions of discussions of the woman question in the nineteenth century were, to act as a substitute for what is lacking, we can expect to see more depictions of a fantasy normal. Though detective novels are often seen as nothing more than simple, plot-driven genre fiction, we have seen women’s writing be maligned and denied entrance to the canon repeatedly over the last two centuries, and this has not prevented female writers from devotedly engaging in the search for subjectivity or the struggle for the right to name the woman’s experience. From the early short stories of the nineteenth century and their sincere

32 ibid., 171. See Tomc, Sandra. “Questing Women: The Feminist Mystery after Feminism.” Feminism in Women’s Detective Fiction. Ed. Glenwood Irons. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. 46-63.

33 ibid., 182.

34 Nepomnyashchy, Catharine Theimer. “Televizing Aleksandra Marinina: The Representation of Crime in Post-Soviet Russia.” Die Welt der Slaven 48 (2003): 320.

269 response to denied opportunities, to the development of the new woman and the voices strengthened by heightened repressions, to the bodies struggling to bring themselves painfully to the forefront, Russian women have written women into existence, forming them into autonomous figures even against uncertain and unwelcoming landscapes, and though the landscapes have changed, the tradition has continued. And, like the young

Tsvetaeva retelling stories to herself to make sense of them and to make them hers, the tradition will continue, finding sense in new sounds and giving voice to new questions, to newly-formed aspirations, and to the uncertainties of the everyday.

270 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Akhmatova, Anna. Sochineniia. Vol. 3. Paris: YMCA Press, 1983.

---. Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh. Vol. 3. Moskva: Ellis Lak, 1998.

Alexandrova, Ekaterina. “Why Soviet Women Want to Get Married.” Tr. Rebecca Park.

Women and Russia: Feminist Writings from the Soviet Union. Ed. Tatyana

Mamonova. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. 31-50.

Amert, Susan. A Shattered Mirror: The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova. Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1992.

Anderson, Nancy K. Anna Akhmatova: The Word That Causes Death’s Defeat: Poems of

Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

Andrew. Narrative and Desire in Russian Literature, 1822-49: The Feminine and the

Masculine. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.

271 Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.”

Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Eds. Braziel, Jana Evans and Anita Mannur.

London: Blackwell, 2003. 25-48.

Attwood, Lynne. Creating the New Soviet Woman: Women’s Magazines as Engineers of

Female Identity, 1922-53. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1999.

Bailey, Sharon M. “An Elegy for Russia: Anna Akhmatova’s ‘Requiem’.” Slavic and

East European Journal 43.2 (1999): 324-346.

Bakunin, M.A. Filosofiia. Sotsiologiia. Politika. Moskva: “Pravda”, 1989.

Baranskaia, Natal’ia. "Nedelia kak nedelia." Novyi Mir 11 (1969): 23-55.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. 1949. Trans. H.M. Parshley. New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1971.

Berggol’ts, Ol’ga. Sobranie Sochinenii. 3 vols. Leningrad: “Khudozhestvennaia

literatura”, 1972.

---. Ekho. Moskva: Pravda, 1990.

---. Vstrecha. Dnevnye zvezdy. Moskva: “Russkaia kniga”, 2000.

272 Bergman, Jay. “The Political Thought of Vera Zasulich.” Slavic Review 38.2 (1979): 243-

258.

Berlin, Isaiah. Russian Thinkers. London: Penguin Books, 1978.

Bowlt, John E. Moscow and St. Petersburg 1900-1920: Art, Life & Culture of the

Russian Silver Age. New York: Vendome Press, 2008.

Broido, Vera. Apostles into Terrorists: Women and the Revolutionary Movement in the

Russia of Alexander II. London: Maurice Temple Smith Ltd, 1977.

Brown, Archie. Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2007.

---. The Rise and Fall of Communism. New York: Ecco Press, 2009.

Brown, Clarence. “On Not Liking Tsvetaeva.” London Review of Books 16.17 (1994): 13-

14.

Buckley, Mary. “Soviet Interpretations of the Woman Question.” Soviet Sisterhood. Ed.

Barbara Holland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. 24-53.

273 ---. Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

1989.

---. “The Untold Story of the Obshchestvennitsa in the 1930s.” Women in the Stalin Era.

Ed. Melanie Ilič. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. 151-172.

Carleton, Gregory. Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia. Pittsburgh: University of

Pittsburgh Press, 2005.

Cavanagh, Clare. “The Death of the Book a la russe: The Acmeists under Stalin.” Slavic

Review 55.1 (1996): 125-135.

Chatterjee, Choi. “Soviet Heroines and the Language of Modernity, 1930-39.” Women in

the Stalin Era. Ed. Melanie Ilič. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. 49-68.

Chukovskaia, Lidiia. Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi. Vol 1. Paris: YMCA Press, 1976.

---. Sof’ia Petrovna. Spusk pod vodu. Moskva: Moskovskii rabochii, 1988.

Ciepiela, Catherine. “Taking Monologism Seriously: Bakhtin’s and Tsvetaeva’s ‘The Pied

Piper’.” Slavic Review 53.4 (1994): 1010-24.

Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs

274 1.4 (1976): 875-893.

---. Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva.

New York/London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.

Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1981.

Clements, Barbara Evans. “Later Developments: Trends in Soviet Women’s History, 1930

to the Present.” Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation.

Eds. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 267-278.

---. “The Utopianism of the Zhenotdel.” Slavic Review 51.3 (1992): 485-96.

---. A History of Women in Russia: From Earliest Times to the Present. Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 2012.

Conze, Susanne. “Women’s Work and Emancipation in the Soviet Union, 1941-1950.”

Women in the Stalin Era. Ed. Melanie Ilič. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. 216-34.

Costlow, Jane. “Love, Work, and the Woman Question in Mid Nineteenth-Century

Women’s Writing.” Women Writers in Russian Literature. Eds. Toby W. Clyman

and Diana Greene. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. 61-75.

---. “The Gallop, the Wolf, the Caress: Eros and Nature in the Tragic Menagerie.”

275 Russian Review 56.2 (1997): 192-208.

DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of the Nineteenth-Century

Gothic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Engel, Barbara Alpern. “The Emergence of Women Revolutionaries in Russia.”

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 2.1 (1977): 92-105.

---. Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia.

Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1983.

---. Between the Fields and the City: Women, work, and family in Russia, 1861-1914.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

---. Breaking the Ties That Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia.

Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011.

Engelstein, Laura. The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-

Siecle Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.

Farnsworth, Beatrice. Aleksandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik

Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980.

---. “Conversing with Stalin, Surviving the Terror: The Diaries of Aleksandra Kollontai

and the Internal Life of Politics.” Slavic Review 69.4 (2010): 944-970.

276 Fedotov, G.P. The Russian Religious Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946.

---. The Russian Religious Mind. Vol II. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966.

Ferenczi, Caspar. “Freedom of the Press under the Old Regime, 1905-1914.” Civil Rights

in Imperial Russia. Eds. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson. Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1989. 191-214.

Field, Deborah A. “Mothers and Fathers and the Problem of Selfishness in the

Khrushchev Period.” Women in the Khrushchev Era. Eds. Melanie Ilič, Susan E.

Reid, and Lynne Attwood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 96-113.

Field, Karen L. “Communications. Alexandra Kollontai: Precursor of Eurofeminism.”

Dialectical Anthropology 6.3 (1982): 229-244.

Figner, Vera. Zapechatlennyi trud. 2 Vols. Moskva: “Zadruga”, 1922.

Fitzpatrick, Shiela. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet

Russia in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Fox, Maria Stadter. The Troubling Play of Gender: The Phaedra Dramas of Tsvetaeva,

Yourcenar, and H.D. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2001.

277 Funk, Nanette. “Feminist Critiques of Liberalism: Can They Travel East? Their

Relevance in Eastern and Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union.” Signs

29.3 (2004): 695-726.

Furman, Yelena. “‘We all love with same part of the body, don’t we?’: Iuliia

Voznesenskaia’s Zhenskii Dekameron, New Women’s Prose, and French Feminist

Theory.” Intertexts 13.1/2 (2009): 95-114.

Gan, Elena. “Ideal.” Russkaia romanticheskaia povest’ pisatelei 20-40 godov XIX veka.

Ed. V.I. Sakharov. Moskva: Izd. “Pressa”, 1992. 215-52.

Goldman, Wendy. “Women, Abortion, and the State, 1917-36.” Russia's Women:

Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation. Eds. Barbara Evans Clements,

Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1991. 243-266.

---. “Babas at the Bench: Gender Conflict in Soviet Industry in the 1930s.” Women in the

Stalin Era. Ed. Melanie Ilič. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. 69-88.

Goricheva, Tat’iana. “Khristianstvo i zhenshchina.” Russkaia zhenshchina i Pravoslavie.

Bogoslovie. Filosofia. Kul’tura. SPb: TO “Stupeni,” 1996. 77-84.

278 Goscilo, Helena. “Monsters Monomaniacal, Marital, and Medical: Tatiana Tolstaya’s

Regenerative Use of Gender Stereotypes.” Sexuality and the Body in Russian

Culture. Eds. Jane T. Costlow, Stephanie Sandler, Judith Vowles. Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1993. 204-220.

---. Dehexing Sex: Russian Womanhood During and After Glasnost. Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1996.

---. “Women’s space and women’s place in contemporary Russian fiction.” Gender and

Russian Literature: New Perspectives. Ed. Rosalind Marsh. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1996. 326-347.

Grant, Kevin. “British Suffragettes and the Russian Method of Hunger Strike.”

Comparative Studies in Society and History 53.1 (2011): 113-143.

Greene, Diana. “Karolina Pavlova’s ‘At the Tea Table’ and the Politics of Class and

Gender.” Russian Review 53.2 (1994): 271-284.

---. “Gender and Genre in Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life.” Essays on Karolina

Pavlova. Eds. Susanne Fusso and Alexander Lehrman. Evanston, IL:

Northwestern University Press, 2001. 99-117.

Heldt, Barbara. Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature. Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1987.

279 Hemment, Julie. “Gender Mainstreaming and the NGO-ization of Russian women’s

activism.” Women and Transformation in Russia. Eds. Aino Saarinen, Kirsti

Ekonen, and Valentina Uspenskaia. London: Routledge, 2014. 127-146.

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991.

London: Abacus, 1994.

Hodgson, Katharine. Voicing the Soviet Experience: The Poetry of Ol’ga Berggol’ts.

Oxford: British Academy and Oxford University Press, 2003.

Holland, Barbara and Theresa McKevitt. “Maternity Care in the Soviet Union.” Soviet

Sisterhood. Ed. Barbara Holland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

145-176.

Holmgren, Beth. Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time: On Lidiia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda

Mandelstam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

---. “For the Good of the Cause: Russian Women’s Autobiography in the Twentieth

Century.” Women Writers in Russian Literature. Eds. Toby W. Clyman and Diana

Greene. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. 127-148.

---. “Bug Inspectors and Beauty Queens: The Problems of Translating Feminism into

280 Russian.” Postcommunism and the Body Politic. Ed. Ellen E. Berry. New York:

New York University Press, 1995. 15-31.

Holt, Alix. “The First Soviet Feminists.” Soviet Sisterhood. Ed. Barbara Holland.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. 237-265.

Hubbs, Joanna. Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture. Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1988.

Ilič, Melanie. “Women in the Khrushchev Era: an Overview.” Women in the Khrushchev

Era. Eds. Melanie Ilič, Susan E. Reid, and Lynne Attwood. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2004. 5-28.

Ingemanson, Birgitta. “The Political Function of Domestic Objects in the Fiction of

Aleksandra Kollontai,” Slavic Review 48.1 (1989): 71-82.

Ivanova, Natal’ia. “Bakhtin’s Concept of The Grotesque and the Art of Petrushevskaia

and Tolstaia.” Trans. Helena Goscilo. Fruits of Her Plume: Essays on

Contemporary Women’s Culture. Ed. Helena Goscilo. New York: M.E. Sharpe,

1993. 21-32.

281 Johnson, Janet Elise. “Sisterhood versus the ‘Moral’ Russian State: The Postcommunist

Politics of Rape.” Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition: Nation-Building,

Economic Survival, and Civic Activism. Eds. Kathleen Kuehnast and Carol

Nechemias. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 2004. 217-238.

---. Gender Violence in Russia: The Politics of Feminist Intervention. Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 2009.

Kaminer, Jenny. Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian

Culture. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014.

Katz, Boris. “To What Extent is Requiem a Requiem? Unheard Female Voices in Anna

Akhmatova’s ‘Requiem’. ” Russian Review 57.2 (1998): 253-263.

Kelly, Catriona. A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 1820-1992. Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1994.

Khvoshchinskaia, N.D. Povesti i rasskazy. Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo

khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1963.

Kirschenbaum, Lisa. “Gender, Memory, and National Myths: Ol’ga Berggol’ts and the

Siege of Leningrad.” Nationalities Papers 28.3 (2000): 551-64.

282 Kizenko, Nadieszda. “Feminized Patriarch? Orthodoxy and Gender in Post-Soviet

Russia.” Signs 38.3 (2013): 595-621.

Knight, Amy. “Female Terrorists in the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party.” Russian

Review 38.2 (1979): 139-159.

Kollontai, Alexandra. Novaia moral' i rabochii klass. Moskva: Izd. Vserossiiskogo

Tsentral'nogo Ispolnitel'nogo Komiteta Sovetov, 1919.

---. “Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations.” Selected

Writings of Alexandra Kollontai. Trans. Alix Holt. London: Allison & Busby,

1977. Web. 19 Oct. 2014.

---. Bol'shaia liubov'. Povesti, Rasskazy. Spb: Izdatel'skii Dom “Azbuka-klassika”, 2008.

Kovalevskaia, Sof’ia. Vospominaniia detstva. Nigilistka. Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe

Izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennoi Literatury, 1960.

Kozlov, Denis and Eleonory Gilburd, eds. The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during

the 1950s and 1960s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.

283 Kuehnast, Kathleen and Carol Nechemias, eds. Post-Soviet Women Encountering

Transition: Nation-Building, Economic Survival, and Civic Activism. Washington,

D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

2004.

Lahusen, Thomas. “‘Leaving Paradise’ and Perestroika: A Week Like Any Other and

Memorial Day by Natal’ia Baranskaia.” Fruits of Her Plume: Essays on

Contemporary Women’s Culture. Ed. Helena Goscilo. New York: M.E. Sharpe,

1993. 205-224.

Lenin, V.I. Sochineniia. Vols. 28 and 30. Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo

politicheskoi literatury, 1950.

Levitsky, A. “ ‘Vesna’ Zvanskaya i Osen’ ‘Boldinskaya’, ili o poezii ‘Vne vremeni i

mesta’.” “On vidit novgorod velikoi...”: Materialy VII Mezhdunarodnoi

pushkinskoi konferencii ‘Pushkin i mirovaya kul’tura’. Velikii Novgorod, 31 May

- 4 June 2004. SPb: Rossiiskaya Akademiya Nauk, 2004.

Lokaneeta, Jinee. “Alexandra Kollontai and Marxist Feminism.” Economic and Political

Weekly 36.17 (2001): 1405-1412.

284 Mandel’shtam, Nadezhda. Vospominaniia. Moskva: Soglasie, 1999.

---. Vtoraia kniga. Moskva: Soglasie, 1999.

Mamonova, Tatyana, ed. Women and Russia: Feminist Writings from the Soviet Union.

Trans. Rebecca Park and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.

---. Russian Women’s Studies: Essays on Sexism in Soviet Culture. Oxford: Pergamon

Press, 1989.

Marsh, Rosalind. “Women Writers of the 1930s: Conformity or Subversion?” Women in

the Stalin Era. Ed. Melanie Ilič. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. 173-93.

---. “Travel and the Image of the West in Russian Women’s Popular Novels of the Silver

Age.” New Zealand Slavonic Journal 38 (2004): 1-26.

---. “New Mothers for a New Era? Images of Mothers and Daughters in Post-Soviet Prose

in Historical and Cultural Perspective.” The Modern Language Review 107.4

(2012): 1191-1219.

Matich, Olga. Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle.

Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.

Maxwell, Margaret. Narodniki Women: Russian Women Who Sacrificed Themselves for

the Dream of Freedom. New York: Pergamon Press, 1990.

285 McDermid, Jane and Anna Hillyar. Women and Work in Russia 1880-1930: A Study in

Continuity Through Change. London: Longman, 1998.

McNeal, Robert H. “Women in the Russian Radical Movement.” Journal of Social

History 5.2 (1971-72): 143-163.

McReynolds, Louise. “Reading the Russian Romance: What Did the Keys to Happiness

Unlock?” Journal of Popular Culture 31.4 (1998): 95-108.

Meyer, Alfred G. “The Impact of World War I on Russian Women's Lives.” Russia's

Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation. Eds. Barbara Evans

Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec. Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1991. 208-224.

Mirsky, D.S. A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900. Ed. Francis J.

Whitfield. New York: Knopf, 1964.

Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. New York: Doubleday and Co., 1976.

Monks, Pieta. “In Conversation with Natalya Baranskaya.” Trans. Pieta Monks. Writing

Lives: Conversations Between Women Writers. Ed. Mary Chamberlain. London:

286 Virago Press, 1988. 25-36.

Monter, Barbara Heldt. Introduction. A Double Life. By Karolina Pavlova. Trans. Barbara

Heldt Monter. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978.

Nagrodskaia, Evdokia. Gnev Dionisa. Moskva: Firma “Pokolenie”, 1996.

Naiman, Eric. “When a Communist Writes Gothic: Aleksandra Kollontai and the Politics

of Disgust.” Signs 22.1 (1996): 1-29.

---. Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology. Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1997.

Nakachi, Mie. “N.S. Khrushchev and the 1944 Soviet Family Law: Politics,

Reproduction, and Language.” East European Politics and Societies 20.1 (2006):

40-68.

Narbikova, Valeriia. Izbrannoe, ili shepot shuma. Parizh: Izdatel'stvo “Tret'ia volna”,

1994.

Neary, Rebecca Balmas. “Mothering Socialist Society: The Wife-Activists’ Movement

and the Soviet Culture of Daily Life, 1934-41.” Russian Review 58 (1999): 396-

287 412.

Nepomnyashchy, Catharine Theimer. “Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem: Aleksandra

Marinina and the Rise of the New Russian Detektiv.” Consuming Russia: Popular

Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev. Ed. Barker, Adele Marie. Durham,

NC: Duke University Press, 1999. 161-191.

---. “Televizing Aleksandra Marinina: The Representation of Crime in Post-Soviet

Russia.” Die Welt der Slaven 48 (2003): 313-320.

Ogloblin, Constantin G. “The Gender Earnings Differential in the Russian Transition

Economy.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 52.4 (1999) 602-627.

Ousmanova, Almira. “On the Ruins of Cultural Marxism: Gender and Cultural Studies in

Eastern Europe.” Studies in Eastern European Thought 55.1 (2003): 37-50.

Pachmuss, Temira. Intellect and Ideas in Action: Selected Correspondence of Zinaida

Hippius. Munich: Fink Verlag, 1972, 67

---. “Women Writers in Russian Decadence.” Journal of Contemporary History 17.1

(1982): 111-136.

Panaeva, A.Ia. “Stepnaia Baryshnia.” Dacha na Petergofskoi doroge: Proza russkikh

pisatel’nits pervoi polovinoi XIX veka. Ed. V.V. Uchenova. Moskva:

288 Sovremennik, 1986. 343-414. Web. 19 May 2014.

Panova, Vera. Kruzhilikha. Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi

literatury, 1956.

Pavlova, Karolina. Sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 2. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo K.F. Nekrasova,

1915.

---. “Za chainym stolom”. Serdtsa chutkogo prozren’em…: Povesti i rasskazy russkikh

pisatel’nits XIX v. Ed. N.I. Iakushin. Moskva: “Sovetskaia Rossia”, 1991. 294-

333.

Pavlychko, Solomea. “Marko Vovchok.” Russian Women Writers, Volume 1. Ed.

Christine D. Tomei. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999. 459-467.

Peterson, Nadya L. “Games Women Play: The ‘Erotic’ Prose of Valeriia Narbikova.”

Fruits of Her Plume: Essays on Contemporary Women’s Culture. Ed. Helena

Goscilo. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1993. 165-184.

Petrushevskaia, Liudmila. Vremia Noch’: Povest’. Moskva: Vagrius, 2001.

289 Pushkin, A.S. Sochineniia. New York: International University Press, c1944.

Pyman, Avril. A History of Russian Symbolism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1994.

Racioppi, Linda and Katherine O’Sullivan See. “Organizing Women before and after the

Fall: Women's Politics in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia.” Signs 20.4

(1995): 818-850.

Raeff, Marc. Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime. New

York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

Reid, Susan E. “Women in the Home.” Women in the Khrushchev Era. Eds. Melanie Ilič,

Susan E. Reid, and Lynne Attwood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 149-

176.

Richters, Katja. The Post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church: Politics, Culture and Greater

Russia. London: Routledge 2013.

Rimashevskaia, Natal’ia. “The new women’s studies.” Perestroika and Soviet Women.

Ed. Mary Buckley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 118-22.

290 Rivkin-Fish, Michele. “Pronatalism, Gender Politics, and the Renewal of Family Support

in Russia: Toward a Feminist Anthropology of ‘Maternity Capital’”. Slavic

Review 69.3 (2010): 701-724.

---. “Conceptualizing Feminist Strategies For Russian Reproductive Politics: Abortion,

Surrogate Motherhood, and Family Support after Socialism.” Signs 38:3, 2013,

569-593.

Roll, Serafima. Contextualizing Transition: Interviews with Contemporary Russian

Writers and Critics. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.

Rotkirch, Anna, Anna Temkina, and Elena Zdravomyslova. “Who Helps the Degraded

Housewife?: Comments on Vladimir Putin’s Demographic Speech.” European

Journal of Women’s Studies 14.4 (2007): 349-357.

Rubina, Dina. Pod znakom karnavala. Roman, esse, interv’iu. Ekaterinburg: U-Faktoriia,

2000.

Rudova, Larissa. “A Mindset of Present Russia: Valerija Narbikova’s Fiction.” Russian

Literature 39.1 (1996): 79-94.

---. “Paradigms of Postmodernism: Conceptualism and Sots-Art in Contemporary

Russian Literature”. Pacific Coast Philology 35.1 (2000): 61-75.

291 Ruthchild, Rochelle Goldberg. Equality & Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian

Empire, 1905-1917. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010.

Sandler, Stephanie. “Embodied Words: Gender in Cvetaeva’s Reading of Puskin.” The

Slavic and East European Journal 34.2 (1990): 139-157.

Scott, Joan Wallach. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University

Press, 1988.

---. The Fantasy of Feminist History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Shapir, Ol’ga. “Avdot’iny dochki.” Tol’ko chas: Proza russkikh pisatel’nits kontsa XIX -

nachala XX veka. Ed. V. Uchenova. Moskva: Sovremennik, 1988. 15-116.

Simmons, Cynthia and Nina Perlina. Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries,

Memoirs, and Documentary Prose. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,

2002.

Skomp, Elizabeth. “Russian Women’s Publishing at the Beginning of the 1990s: The

Case of the New Amazons.” Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 33.1 (2006): 85-98.

292 Solov'ev, Vladimir. Sobranie Sochinenii. Vol. 7. Brussels: Zhizn' s bogom, 1966-1970.

---. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Vol 2. Moskva: Nauka, 2000-2001.

Sperling, Valerie. “Nashi Devushki: Gender and Political Youth Activism in Putin’s and

Medvedev’s Russia.” Post-Soviet Affairs 28.2 (2012): 232-261.

Stites, Richard. The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and

Bolshevism, 1860-1930. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.

Stone, Carole. “Elegy as Political Expression in Women’s Poetry: Akhmatova, Levertov,

Forche.” College Literature 18.1 (1991): 84-91.

Stroganova, Evgeniia. “The Writing Experience as Emotional Trauma: The Case of Elena

Andreevna Gan.” Mapping Experience in Russian and Polish Women’s Writing.

Ed. Marja Rytkönen. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. 50-63.

Sutcliffe, Benjamin. “Mother, Daughter, History: Embodying the Past in Liudmila

Ulitskaia’s Sonechka and The Case of Kukotsky.” The Slavic and East European

Journal 53.4 (2009): 606-622.

Teffi. Iumoristicheskie rasskazy; Iz “Vseobshchei istorii, obrabotannoi “Satirikonom”.

293 Moskva: “Khudozhestvennaia literatura”, 1990.

Thomas, D.M. “Translator’s Preface.” Anna Akhmatova: Selected Poems. London/New

York: Penguin Books, 1988.

Thomson, R.D.B. “Tsvetaeva’s Play ‘Fedra’: An Interpretation.” The Slavonic and East

European Review 67.3 (1989): 337-52.

Thorslev, Peter. Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1962.

Tölölyan, Khachig. “The Nation-State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface.” Diasporas: A

Journal of Transnational Studies 1.1 (1991): 3-7.

Tolstaia, Tat’iana. Noch’. Rasskazy. Moskva: “Podkova”, 2001.

---. Pushkin’s Children: Writings on Russia and Russians. Trans. Jamey Gambrell.

Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2003.

Trotsky, L.D. Sochineniia. Vol. 21. Moskva/Leningrad, 1927. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.

294 Tsvetaeva, Marina. Teatr. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo “Iskusstvo”, 1988.

---. Polnoe sobranie poezii, prozy, dramaturgi v odnom tome. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Al’fa-

Kniga, 2010.

Ulitskaia, Liudmila. “Pikovaia dama.” Veselye pokhorony. Povest’ i rasskazy. Moskva:

Vagrius, 1998. 392-422.

---. “Sonechka.” Schastlivye. Moskva: Astrel’, 2013. 5-78.

Vasilenko, Svetlana Vladimirovna et al., eds. Novye Amazonki: sbornik. Moskva:

Moskovskii Rabochii, 1991.

Verbitskaia, Anastasia. Kliuchi schast'ia. 2 vols. SPb: Izdatel'stvo “Severo-zapad”, 1993.

Vovchok, Marko. Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh. Vol. 2. Kiev: Izdatel’stvo

khudozhestvennoi literatury “Dnipro”, 1983.

Voznesenskaia, Julia. Zhenskii dekameron. Tallinn: Tomas, 1991.

Wagner, William G. “The Trojan Mare: Women’s Rights and Civil Rights in Late

Imperial Russia.” Civil Rights in Imperial Russia. Eds. Olga Crisp and Linda

Edmondson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. 65-84.

295 Weidle, Wladimir. “Anna Akhmatova: In Memoriam.” Russian Review 28.1 (1969): 11-

22.

Weil, Simone. La pesanteur et la grâce. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1988.

Wells, David. “Akhmatova and Pushkin: The Genres of Elegy and Ballad.” Slavonic and

East European Review 71.4 (1993): 631-645.

---. Akhmatova and Pushkin: The Pushkin Contexts of Akhmatova’s Poetry. Birmingham:

University of Birmingham Slavonic Monographs 25, 1994.

Woll, Josephine. “The Minotaur in the Maze: Remarks on Lyudmila Petrushevskaya.”

World Literature Today 67.1 (1993): 125-30.

Wood, Elizabeth A. “Prostitution Unbound: Representations of Sexual and Political

Anxieties in Postrevolutionary Russia.” Sexuality and the Body in Russian

Culture. Eds. Jane T. Costlow, Stephanie Sandler, and Judith Vowles. Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1993. 124-135.

Zdravomyslova, Elena. “Perestroika and feminist critique.” Women and Transformation

in Russia. Eds. Aino Saarinen, Kirsti Ekonen, and Valentina Uspenskaia. London:

296 Routledge, 2014. 111-126.

Zhenshchina i Rossiia: Almanakh Zhenshchinam o zhenshchinakh. Paris: Des femmes,

1980.

Zhukova, Mariia. Vechera na Karpovke. Moskva: “Sovetskaia Rossiia”, 1986.

Zinov’eva-Annibal, Lidiia. Tridtsat' tri uroda: Roman, rasskazy, esse, p'esy. Moskva:

Agraf, 1999.

Zirin, Mary F. “Women’s Prose Fiction in the Age of Realism.” Women Writers in

Russian Literature. Eds. Toby W. Clyman and Diana Greene. Westport, CT:

Greenwood Press, 1994. 77-94.

297