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