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Elizabeth Bishop, Ou La Lumière De L'ordinaire French and British Female Intellectuals and the Soviet Union. The Journey to the USSR, 1929 – 1942 Angela Kershaw (Aston University) The question of why intellectuals between the wars were fascinated by the USSR has been extensively debated by intellectual historians of both France and Britain. According to Neal Wood, “the ‘ultimate explanation’ of the appeal of communism is forever concealed from rational inquiry in the minds and hearts of many diverse individuals” (9), but rational inquiry can reveal a collective, cultural fascination through analysis of individual textual residues. Paul Hollander argues that pro-Soviet enthusiasm amongst Western intellectuals in the 1930s had its roots not in knowledge about the Soviet Union but in Western intellectuals’ changed – that is, more negative – attitudes towards Western Europe (103-104). Disenchanted with their own society, they were predisposed to find the Soviet regime to their liking and, furthermore, were fearful that if they returned with negative reports they would be labelled reactionaries (104, 109-110). Such “negative” fascination was doubled in both France and Britain by a more longstanding and primarily cultural “Russophilia”, which predated the 1917 revolution and had rather more to do with the faith, grandeur and resignation of the “Russian soul” supposedly depicted by Dostoievsky and Chekov than with the political realities of either Tsarist or Soviet Russia (see Northedge & Wells, Britain and Soviet Communism, 137-157 and Schor, L’Opinion française et les étrangers, 152-161). In France, Russophilia became complicated by the close relationship between the “mode russe” and the community of expatriate anti-Soviet Russian dissident intellectuals resident in Paris after 1917, which made a clear distinction between “authentic” Russian culture in exile and the Soviet “perversion” of Russian traditions (see Livak, How it Was Done in Paris). In Britain, Russophilia was contested by a politically- and economically-based Russophobia as the inter-war landscape shifted, but with the Soviet intervention on the side of the allies in 1941, Russophilia hit an all-time high and “[c]riticism of the USSR became tantamount to treason” (Northedge & Wells, 151). Narratives composed in the 1930s on the theme of the retour de l’URSS are simultaneously part of this Russophilia/Russophobia and of the broader phenomenon of 1930s travel writing. Charles Burdett and Derek Duncan note that, between the wars, the rise of differing ideologies across Europe motivated “politically curious travellers” to visit a variety of locations (4). Charles Forsdick speaks of “a complete renewal in the field of travel writing in France” in the 1930s because of a constellation of particular factors: the wider availability of travel coincided with the period before the collapse of empires, and a “crisis of European civilization” and a “sudden reconfiguration of relations between Europe and its others” caused intellectuals to travel (29-32). Samuel Hynes argues that the journey is “the most insistent of ’thirties metaphors” and therefore that “the travel books simply act out, in the real world, the basic trope of the generation” (229). Paul Fussell, like Hollander, finds that 1930s travel writing dramatises a rejection of the “modern” and the “Western”: To the degree that literary travel between the wars constitutes an implicit rejection of industrialism and everything implied by the concept “modern northern Europe”, it is a celebration of a Golden Age, and recalling the Ideal Places of Waugh, Auden, and Priestley, we can locate that Golden Age in the middle of the preceding century. (210) In retour de l’URSS narratives, the rejection of “modern northern Europe” is achieved by a dual celebration of both the utopia promised by the new Soviet Russia and of the image of “traditional” Russia on which the myth of the “Russian soul” was based. This dual celebration is of course paradoxical, since it was precisely the “traditional” Russia the Soviet regime sought to demolish. That the “Golden Age” in these narratives is indeed the nineteenth century is indicated by the cultural references through which the writers describe Russia’s difference: the Russian soldiers’ greatcoats remind Elisabeth de Gramont of Gogol’s The Overcoat (135); Ethel Mannin experiences “a sudden feeling of it all being like a scene out of Chekov, with the vague melancholy of evening invading the afternoon” (South to Samarkand, 83); frustrated by Russian bureaucracy, Ada Elisabeth Chesterton and her travelling companion “began to feel like Kershaw, Angela. “French and British Female Intellectuals and the Soviet Union. The Journey to the USSR, 62 1929–1942.” EREA 4.2 (automne 2006): 62-72. <www.e-rea.org> Tchekov’s three sisters, who spent their lives trying to get to Moscow and never even started” (My Russian Venture, 27). The effect of such references is potentially reassuring – the Soviet Union is certainly different, but it is different in the same way that Russia has always been different. Whilst there may be political rupture, there is cultural continuity. Gender Such examples demonstrate the mediating role of culture in an individual’s access to reality. Gender also functions as a cultural mediator, both in the production and the reception of texts, and in the experience of travel. Charlotte Haldane remarked that women are unlikely to be tempted by seafaring, since “the lure of the sea appeals basically to a certain psychological restlessness in men which is and probably should be rare in women” (Russian Newsreel, 197). Mary Morris notes that “[i]t has been said that women don’t have what Baudelaire referred to as the ‘gout du gouffre’, the taste for the abyss” (xvi) and that “for centuries, it was frowned upon for women to travel without escort, chaperon, or husband” (xv). Clearly, travel is not part of the stereotype of conventional femininity, and inter-war women travel writers must have known themselves to be exceptional. However, in the case of the women who travelled to the USSR, this exceptionality was cloaked by class: they were either financially independent intellectuals for whom travel was already a habit, or they were workers delegates whose presence in Soviet Russia was justified by their proletarian identity and communist commitment. Factors other than gender must then be taken into account. Bibliographical sources suggest that far fewer women undertook such a trip than men. However, it appears that female intellectuals in the 1930s were not explicitly prevented from travelling to the USSR because of their gender. They travelled in mixed groups which included other single women as well as couples. French newspapers sent female journalists to the USSR in the 1930s: Rachel Mazuy notes that L’Œuvre sent Geneviève Tabouis and Candide sent Odette de Pannetier (240). Naomi Mitchison’s Fabian Society party, briefed in advance by Beatrice Webb, included female members such as Kitty Muggeridge and Christina Foyle (You May Well Ask, 187-188). Charlotte Haldane says that she was one of only five British journalists in Russia in the Autumn of 1941, and the only woman, and had to fight gender prejudice to get the job (Russian Newsreel, 49; Truth Will Out, 191). French journalist Eve Curie (daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie) was in Russia in January 1942, also as a war correspondent, for the Herald Tribune Syndicate, New York and Allied Newspapers, London. With the exception of Curie, who was very aware of her gender, the writers generally report only passing comment as regards their identity as female travellers. They seem not to have been prevented from going where they chose. Did women then perhaps see different aspects of the Soviet Union once they arrived? There is no doubt that those female intellectuals who chose to undertake the journey were a self-selecting group of women who had an interest in “the woman question”. British women on the left were likely to have been involved in the suffrage movement and thus to see themselves as “feminists” of one persuasion or another. This is certainly true of Mitchison, Haldane and Mannin. Elisabeth de Gramont’s links with the Paris-Lesbos circle – she had begun a lifelong relationship with Natalie Barnay before the war – indicate her less-than-conservative interest in female identity and emancipation (see Rapazzini and Souhami, 72-75). Chesterton devotes a full chapter in both My Russian Venture and Salute the Soviet to the situation of Soviet women. Writers often comment favourably on the progress in female emancipation in the USSR, compared with the situation in France and Britain, even if they admit that absolute equality has not yet been achieved. They describe visits to institutions specifically devoted to the care of women, including the institution where prostitutes are interned and “cured”, children’s theatres, clubs and crèches, and the town hall where marriages are celebrated and divorces concluded. Mannin visited a museum of “mother craft” and birth control, and Mitchison visited an abortion clinic. In her novel We Have Been Warned, Mitchison describes an abortion being performed, which was one of the reasons why she found it difficult to secure a publisher for the work (You May Well Ask, 172-180). While women writers clearly do relate such visits to their own Kershaw, Angela. “French and British Female Intellectuals and the Soviet Union. The Journey to the USSR, 63 1929–1942.” EREA 4.2 (automne 2006): 62-72. <www.e-rea.org> experiences and interests, their texts do not suggest that they visited these institutions to the exclusion of others, such as farms, factories, the Moscow Metro, the Dnieper dam, theatres, museums, art galleries, or that men were not also welcome there. By contrast, Rachel Mazuy’s research suggests that the Soviet authorities did expect women visitors to experience the USSR in a fashion specific to their sex, indeed, that they attempted to impose such an experience on them, since “[o]n ‘spécialise’ tous les délégués en fonction de leur profession d’origine et de leur sexe” (208).
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