Russian Literature (18 page)

The assumption of a hard-and-fast distinction between ‘literature’ and ‘everyday language’, ‘literature’ and ‘paraliterature’, effaced from view, in Formalist and post-Formalist criticism, the importance of mixed-genre texts in the work of women writers, such as the diary in verse (to be found in Rostopchina’s work as well as that of Akhmatova), and the significance in women writers’ work of paraliterary citations, such as references to everyday speech (for instance, the mundane comments of
‘An
an unfaithful lover in Akhmatova’s early poetry). And, while Formalist
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critics’ disdain for biography was helpful to the study of women’s writing in some ways (Eikhenbaum’s brilliant 1923 study of Akhmatova,
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for instance, eschewed clichés about ‘feminine poetry’ in favour of a
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close reading of literary devices in her work), it meant that women
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writers could not be studied as women. Therefore, questions about
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whether literary devices had a different resonance when located in a text that was linguistically marked as feminine (by the use of feminine adjectives and verbal forms, say) remained unasked. Equally, the importance of biographical realia for many women writers (and indeed for male writers such as Blok and Mayakovsky, for whom the tortured masculine self was a major theme) was ignored. Akhmatova’s
Poem
Without a Hero
, her great retrospective narrative poem about the ‘start of the twentieth century’ in 1913, is quite incomprehensible without some knowledge of the personalities in the poet’s circle, and the poet’s own experience, just as is Tsvetaeva’s
Poem of the End
; both Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva maintained personal cults of Pushkin not only as artist, but also as man, producing vehemently subjective and partisan accounts of his marriage to Natalya Goncharova. It is interesting to note as well that Tsvetaeva, in her essay ‘The Poet and the Critic’, mounted
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an open attack on Formalism, claiming that all her work was an attempt to represent the world and had nothing to do with ‘formal tasks’ in the abstract.

The ‘Big Four’ of Russian Poetry

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), Boris Pasternak (1890–1960), Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938), and Marina Tsvetaeva (1892– 1941) were four of the greatest poets of the twentieth century.

All four suffered persecution under the Soviet regime. Mandelstam died in a prison camp in 1938; Akhmatova’s first husband, Nikolay Gumilyov, was executed in 1921, and her son and third husband were imprisoned during the Great Purges, as were Tsvetaeva’s husband and daughter; Pasternak was subjected to vilification after the publication of
Dr Zhivago
, and the award to
ture
him of the Nobel Prize. At the same time, because all four
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(unlike, say, Nabokov) died in Russia, they could be discussed in
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public and republished during the post-Stalin era. In Western
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Ru

writings about Russian literature, the four are often grouped together as though they were members of a kind of informal but exclusive circle, something along the lines of the Bloomsbury group. Yet no group photograph or portrait of the four exists (in fact, there was never an occasion when all were in the same place at once). And while Akhmatova and Mandelstam were linked by lasting friendship, the same cannot be said about any of the others (Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam had a short-term affair, but lost contact after Tsvetaeva’s emigration; Tsvetaeva and Pasternak’s relationship was intense, but carried on by letter, and most of the emotion was on Tsvetaeva’s side; Akhmatova and Pasternak felt at most wary respect for one another; Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva’s relations were decidedly strained). On the other hand, there were several other figures
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who were close in one way or another to at least one of the group – for example, Vladimir Mayakovsky, a major influence on Tsvetaeva and the addressee of a tribute by Akhmatova. The association, then, is as much a matter of myth as fact, helped along by a line of Akhmatova’s, ‘There aren’t many of us, three or four, maybe’, and also, perhaps, by the musical parallels in this combination of two male and two female voices, all with their own distinct timbres – like a four-part ensemble in one of Mozart’s operas, with Akhmatova playing mezzo to Tsvetaeva’s soprano, and Mandelstam tenor to Pasternak’s bass-baritone.

‘An

Women writers, then, did not necessarily fit any better into the
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analytical paradigms of Formalism than they did into politically engaged perceptions of writers as ‘masters of minds’. Since Formalism was, from
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the early 1960s, once again to be the single most dominant trend in the
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serious study of Russian literature, among Western critics as well as
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Russian ones, the rise of gender-oriented criticism in Britain, America,
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France, and Scandinavia during the 1970s at first had little impact on critical practices or on university courses, even in the West. However, in the mid-1980s, a few Western Slavists, mostly in America, started to make a systematic attempt to recover work by women writers. Barbara Heldt’s
Terrible Perfection
(1987) contrasted male writers’ suffocating view of women’s innate moral superiority with women writers’ own struggle to represent a richer and more challenging understanding of female identity. The
Dictionary of Russian Women Writers
(1994), edited by Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal, and Mary Zirin, brought hundreds of forgotten authors back to scholarly attention. By the late 1990s, the work of these and other writers had managed to create something approaching an alternative canon of Russian literature, one made up of women writers and shaped by a strongly individualist stress on self-assertion and self-examination (that is, on various forms of
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autobiography or fictionalized autobiography). Newly discovered or rediscovered writers included Karolina Pavlova, the early nineteenth-century poet Anna Bunina, the twentieth-century lesbian poet Sofiya Parnok, and the nineteenth-century prose writer Nadezhda Durova, author of the transvestite memoir
The Memoirs of a Cavalry
Maid
. The priorities of gender criticism also inspired important rereadings of established writers, especially Tsvetaeva, who emerged as a pioneer of writing by Russian women about the female body.

At times, to be sure, a new kind of critical elision took place, this time of writers who could not easily be presented as proto-feminist rebels. A case in point was Rostopchina: one American feminist critic, for example, wrote of her ‘inordinate preoccupation [with] parties and dancing’ and her frivolous attitude to literature (‘writing for her [ . . . ]

had the appeal of an agreeable hobby’). Yet there are grounds for arguing that Rostopchina’s pose of female dilettantism and modesty
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was in fact a way of facilitating entry to the potentially ‘immodest’

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world of writing. In circumstances where the publication by women of literary work (as opposed to the production of poems, stories, and
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memoirs for circulation among close family and friends) was seen as tantamount to sexual exhibitionism if not prostitution, the adoption of a modest mask (a mask that was sometimes misleading in terms of a writer’s actual character) was a form of social insurance, and one that could sometimes allow women to write with impunity on ‘unfeminine’

subjects.

At the same time, the historicist argument should perhaps not be pressed too far: a critical reading that limits itself to working within the intellectual universe of a given literary text
as consciously expressed
, rather than attempting to explore deeper shades of meaning and nuance, can turn into a tautologous paraphrase and runs the risk also of smoothing out aberrant or dissonant elements. If one sees Rostopchina’s ‘Pushkin’s Notebook’ as nothing more than a docile recognition of feminine inferiority (albeit one that was expedient,
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because it allowed Rostopchina to speak in the first place), one might miss the fact that, in describing women as ‘bound’ (
skovany
) by modesty, Rostopchina uses an adjective that was customarily applied to Prometheus, whose rebellion against patriarchal control had made him a model for pre-Romantic and Romantic young men, from Goethe to Shelley. It is perhaps unlikely that Rostopchina
intended
to compare herself to Prometheus; however, it is possible that her choice of vocabulary unconsciously took issue with the prevailing view of tortured genius as necessarily masculine. Obviously, it would be foolish to base an entire interpretation of the poem on this one word, but the example illustrates that even a studiedly conventional text may on occasion ‘deautomatize’ language. Wrenched from its customary context, a cliché is not necessarily a cliché.

‘An

It is this variety of feminist criticism, one sensitive to linguistic nuance in
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Formalist tradition but also to historical and biographical context, that began to be practised among some Russian and Western critics in the
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late twentieth century. By the late 1990s, too, there were beginning to
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be signs of a shift in the standing of women writers in their homeland.

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They still might not (with the exception of Akhmatova) have their
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monuments, or (with the exception of Tsvetaeva, or again Akhmatova), their museums, but writers were beginning to be republished in Russia, as well as outside: Sofiya Parnok, Adelaida Gertsyk, Alla Golovina, and Zinaida Gippius were only four of the writers who now had book-length editions to themselves. To be sure, suspicion of
feminizm
remained widespread, a hangover from the Soviet Union’s cultural isolation (Russian writers and critics, unlike some of their counterparts in Poland, Yugoslavia, or the German Democratic Republic, had little direct access to Western cultural theory of any kind before the late 1980s), but also a result of ingrained suspicion of psychobiography; the feeling that
feminizm
was alien was not helped by the crudity of some early Russian attempts to propagandize it (blundering attacks on
Lolita
as pornography and the like). But as increasing familiarity with new kinds of cultural theory began to enliven and enrich the study of Russian
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literature inside Russia, which had endured something of a conceptual stasis for the last two decades of the twentieth century, and as the spread of post-Modernist ideas made the expression of a particular and partial, eccentric and individual, perspective a reputable choice for all writers, not just biographically female ones, a greater tolerance for women’s ‘marginal’ explorations of the self became possible.

Symptomatic was the appearance of a serious and careful discussion of Western scholarship on women’s writing in the liveliest Russian literary-critical journal,
New Literary Review
, in 1997. All in all, the posthumous monument for which generations of Russian women writers had longed, an intellectual rather than a stone one, was beginning to seem, for at least some of them, a real possibility. Unlike some of the critical approaches discussed in this book, gender-aware criticism had never pretended to be the only proper or legitimate approach to literary texts, to offer final answers. It did not rank writers in terms of their ‘progressivity’ in feminist terms. But it could reasonably
ture
claim to have raised a new and interesting set of
questions
, and to have
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demonstrated (something that writers themselves had always known) that masculine and feminine identity was no more obvious or easy to
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understand than any other aspect of the human self as reflected in literature.

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‘Every tribe and every

tongue will name me’

Russian literature and

‘primitive culture’

The ‘Russians’ are no more than a group of specialists in the Russian language.

(M. L. Gasparov, 2000)

‘Monument’ envisaged that Pushkin’s name would be known not only in Europe, but in Asia. The poet predicted a readership from among Russia’s subject tribes: the Poles (‘proud descendants of the Slavs’), the Finns (the Grand Duchy of Finland had been added to Russia in 1800), the Tungus (now known as the Evenki, an indigenous people of Siberia), and the Kalmyks (from the area north of the Caucasus, on the shores of the Caspian Sea). Had Pushkin been gifted with the powers of geopolitical prophecy, he might have added the Uzbeks, the Kazakhs, and the Kyrgyz, since during the Soviet period compulsory Russian teaching in schools throughout the Soviet Union meant that the vast majority of citizens, whatever their ethnic affiliation, had heard the name of Pushkin.

The fact that the peoples of Central Asia are not included in Pushkin’s list of ‘tribes’ is easy to explain: the first Russian conquests there took place only in the mid-nineteenth century, and the region was not fully subjugated until the 1880s. But the list was not exhaustive even in terms
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of the Russian Empire of Pushkin’s day. ‘The Finns’ stand also for the Balts (Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians), and the Georgians and Armenians are not mentioned. This selection of ethnic groups is not at all accidental. Reference to the Georgians and the Armenians, literate peoples with a long history of Christianity, would have unsettled Pushkin’s representation of his poetry as a means of transmitting civilized values to savage peoples (the adjective ‘savage’ is in fact applied to the Tungus in ‘Monument’). Entertaining a Byronic fascination with Oriental exoticism in his early twenties, Pushkin had, from the point at which he wrote
The Gypsies
(1824), taken an ironical view of this, seeking to play down picturesque differences of ethnicity. The conclusion of
The Gypsies
stresses the universality of moral problems: And everywhere are fatal passions, And there is no salvation from destiny.