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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Intertextual Dialogue with Marina Tsvetaeva

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Intertextual Dialogue with Marina Tsvetaeva THE FEMININE EROS AS THE MOTIVE FORCE OF RUSSIAN HISTORY: ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN’S INTERTEXTUAL DIALOGUE WITH MARINA TSVETAEVA BY ANNA YEVGENYEVNA ARKATOVA DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Slavic Languages and Literatures in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Richard Tempest, Chair Associate Professor David Cooper Dr. Judith Pintar, Visiting Assistant Professor Professor Aleksandr Urmanov, Blagoveshchensk State Pedagogical University Professor Alexis Klimoff, Vassar College ABSTRACT This dissertation focuses on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s historicized poetics of femininity, that is, his representation of women from a diversity of social classes and demographic groups, in specific oppressive or traumatic historical contexts, and the literary strategies he employs to that end. In Solzhenitsyn, World War I, the Russian revolution of 1917, and the Stalinist tyranny of the 1930s-1950s are treated as catastrophes not only for the country as a whole or particular social and cultural strata, but more specifically, for women in a variety of life and personal situations. Solzhenitsyn’s female characters invariably face a political and social environment that impels them to self-identify as survivors, victims, witnesses, or resisters, and in some cases even victors over the forces of historical chaos. The project focuses on the manner in which Solzhenitsyn’s narratives, most of which depict revolutionary collapse or state terror, cataclysmic events that take place in the public realm, configure the Feminine Eros, that is, the agglomeration of romantic, sexual, and family-related drives and behaviors, as represented in works of verse and prose, that constitutes part of a woman’s core identity and manifests itself in both the private and public sphere through her relationships, behaviors, and communication practices. The dissertation demonstrates how the various manifestations of the Feminine Eros function as textual and conceptual elements in Solzhenitsyn’s highly influential reconsideration of Russian history; and reconceptualizes the feminine characters and themes in his novels, stories, and historical/polemical writings by demonstrating their many connections on the level of themes, imagery, and formal devices to the poetry of the Russian Silver Age (1910–1923) and, especially, to the verse of the lyrical modernist poet Marina Tsvetaeva (poems dating from 1910–1923). As in the case of Solzhenitsyn’s narratives, in Tsvetaeva’s productions, the poetic subject’s erotic longings and her desire for fulfillment as a wife, lover, and mother are brutally thwarted by the events of the Russian revolution, civil war and ensuing decades of oppression. The tragic female experience in history, which was poeticized by Tsvetaeva as the events of the 1917-1922 unfolded, continued to escalate and took yet more extreme and traumatic forms in the period of Stalinist terror, as recorded in Solzhenitsyn’s texts and the memoirs of female survivors of the gulag. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for its support of my study of Russian literature and culture as well as my research, and for the help and encouragement I received from its faculty and graduate students. I am also grateful for the staff of the University of Illinois library who assisted me in using its magnificent collection for my research and were always ready to give advice when I had questions about difficult-to-come-by sources. Professors David Cooper and Dr. Judith Pintar were especially supportive as members of my dissertation committee and patiently and willingly read every page of the dissertation and commented on it at great length. I also truly appreciate the help I received from Professors Aleksandr Urmanov of the Blagoveshchensk State Pedagogical University and Alexis Klimoff, Professor Emeritus of Vassar College, who served on my committee as its external members. They generously shared with me their knowledge on Solzhenitsyn and Russian literature and culture. Finally, I must acknowledge the guidance of Professor Richard Tempest who supervised my research and helped in every way he could. It is he who first directed me towards the study of Solzhenitsyn and inspired me to persevere in my writing over all these years. His unfailingly good nature and professional expertise will always be appreciated. My family in Russia always gave me their love during my period of graduate study. Without their presence in my life this dissertation could never have been completed. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER WITH THEORETICAL PLATFORM. EROS OF LIGHT AND DARK EROS HISTORICALLY AND CULTURALLY CONCEPTUALIZED AND FRAMED. THE RUSSIAN TRADITION OF IMAGINATIVE INVESTIGATIONS OF THE EROTIC AND ITS PLACE IN THE NATIONAL CULTURE: VASILY ROZANOV, BORIS VYSHESLAVTSEV, GEORGII GACHEV. SOLZHENITSYN’S DIALOGUE WITH THE SILVER AGE .............................................................................................................................. …..1 CHAPTER 2: SOLZHENITSYN’S FICTIONALIZED RETROSPECTIVES OF THE SILVER AGE. THE FEMININE EROS IN HIS RECONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION (THE FIRST CIRCLE, THE RED WHEEL).THE CHARACTER OF LIKONYA IN THE RED WHEEL AS AN EXPONENT OF SILVER AGE, ANTI-POLITICAL FEMININITY ........................................................................................................................................... 22 CHAPTER 3: THE DARK EROS. AGGRESSIVE REVOLUTIONARY AND PUNITIVE MASCULINITY. THE FEMININE RESPONSE TO VIOLENCE AND OPPRESSION IN SOLZHENITSYN’S FICTIONAL AND NON-FICTIONAL WORKS AND TSVETAEVA’S AND BLOK’S POEMS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY AND CIVIL WAR PERIOD (1917-1922). THEMATIC AND TEXTUAL CONNECTIONS TO EVGENY ZAMIATIN AND MIKHAIL BULGAKOV ............................................................................................................................................ 49 CHAPTER 4: THE EROS OF LIGHT. ITS SPATIAL PARAMETERS. SOLZHENITSYN’S AND TSVETAEVA’S MOSCOW HEROINES AND THEIR TRIALS OF SEPARATION. DISAPPEARING MOSCOW. THE CHARACTER OF AGNIA IN THE FIRST CIRCLE AS THE LAST IN A SEQUENCE OF MONASTIC FEMININITIES IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE. AGNIA’S SECESSION FROM HISTORY ......................................................................................... 95 CHAPTER 5: THWARTED, UNREALIZED, AND TRAGIC MOTHERHOOD DURING THE REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY SOVIET PERIOD. CHILDREN AND THE TRAUMA OF HISTORY. THE REPRESENTATION OF MOTHERHOOD WITHIN SACRAL, SPATIAL FRAMES IN TSVETAEVA AND SOLZHENITSYN ................................................................... 139 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................................................... 197 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................................. 200 iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER WITH THEORETICAL PLATFORM. EROS OF LIGHT AND DARK EROS HISTORICALLY AND CULTURALLY CONCEPTUALIZED AND FRAMED. THE RUSSIAN TRADITION OF IMAGINATIVE INVESTIGATIONS OF THE EROTIC AND ITS PLACE IN THE NATIONAL CULTURE: VASILY ROZANOV, BORIS VYSHESLAVTSEV, GEORGII GACHEV. SOLZHENITSYN’S DIALOGUE WITH THE SILVER AGE One of the most striking passages in The Gulag Archipelago (1964-1968), that sprawling yet tightly structured tour de force that combines elements of the polemic, historical narrative, autobiography, and topical journalism, fused together into a towering, rhetorically powerful denunciation of twentieth-century evil, occurs in Part III, Chapter 8, which is entitled “Women in Camp.” This section of the work describes how male and female prisoners were rigidly segregated, lest they engage in unauthorized romantic or sexual relationships, or even simply tried to communicate with each other: “One has to picture to oneself the well- reasoned methodology of these employers who thought it entirely natural to divide the slave men from the slave women with barbed wire but would have been astonished if anyone had proposed that the same be done to themselves and their families. The walls grew – and Eros dashed back and forth” (Solzhenitsyn 1975, 248; my emphasis). To the starkest extent, inside these Soviet camps Eros becomes contingent on — the victim of — historical circumstance. In the original, the last sentence in this passage reads: “Стены росли – и Эрос метался1” (5: 195; my emphasis). The Russian verbal form рос (grew) is homonymically present in the Greek-derived noun Эрос, so that by means of this second-order semantic transfer Solzhenitsyn’s formula acquires a doubly denunciatory force. In addition, the sentence almost scans: if we were to read it as a line of poetry, we would have a pair of dactyls joined together by a semi-elided и. The passage in question carries considerable conceptual and stylistic weight. The history of twentieth-century communism is, in a sense, one of walls and barriers, both actual and metaphorical, with 1 Further references to Solzhenitsyn’s original works are to the same 30-volume edition and are identified by volume and page number only. Unless otherwise noted, translations of The Red Wheel are mine throughout. August 1914 and November 1916 are available in English translation by H. T. Willetts (Solzhenitsyn 1989; 1999). March
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