Passion, Humiliation, Revenge: Hatred in Man-Woman Relationships in the 19th and 20th Century Russian Novel

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LAPIDUS

Literature | Slavic Studies

Lapidus shows how the man sees himself as a highly spiritual being and finds it difficult to come to terms with his sexual nature. She argues that this denial of desire leads the man to take out his frustration with himself on the woman, projecting all of his faults and guilt onto her. When the woman brings the male protagonist low, his thirst for revenge becomes a powerful driving force in his life that eventually brings about his downfall. This book will be of interest to those studying in the areas of Russian literature, psychology, and gender studies. Rina Lapidus is associate professor of comparative literature at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

Passion, Humiliation, Revenge

Passion, Humiliation, Revenge reveals the phenomenon in Russian prose in which a male protagonist finds himself perpetuating a cycle of passion, humiliation, and revenge in his relationships with women. By examining the mental and emotional state of the male protagonist who finds himself in a sexual situation, Rina Lapidus explores how his passion for a woman leads the man into an encounter that causes him humiliation and ends up eliciting a powerful desire on his part to punish the woman who initially arouses his erotic feeling. The male protagonist directs his fury at the woman, seeking vengeance because of the shame he has suffered.

Passion, Humiliation, Revenge

Hatred in Man-Woman Relationships in the 19th and 20th Century Russian Novel

RINA LAPIDUS For orders and information please contact the publisher Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 1-800-462-6420 • www.lexingtonbooks.com

ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2747-6 ISBN-10: 0-7391-2747-0

Passion, Humiliation, Revenge

Passion, Humiliation, Revenge Hatred in Man-Woman Relationships in the 19th and 20th Century Russian Novel

Rina Lapidus

LEXINGTON BOOKS A divison of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2008 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lapidus, Rina. Passion, humiliation, revenge : hatred in man-woman relationships in the 19th and 20th century Russian novel / Rina Lapidus. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2747-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7391-2747-0 (cloth : alk. paper) eISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2998-2 eISBN-10: 0-7391-2998-8 1. Russian literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Russian literature— 20th century—History and criticism. 3. Man-woman relationships in literature. 4. Sex in literature. 5. Revenge in literature. I. Title. PG3011.L29 2008 891.73'3093543—dc22 2008016333 Printed in the United States of America

⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American

National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

This Book Is Dedicated to My Mother, Henrietta Lapidus, and to My Daughter, Anna Lapidus

Then Amnon hated her [Tamar] with an intense hatred. In fact, he hated her more than he had loved her. (2 Samuel 13:15)

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: The Aim and Structure of the Book

1

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

The Evolution of Attitudes towards Female Characters in Russian Literature: An Historical Overview

11

Spiritual and Physical Murder between Man and Woman: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov

27

Woman as Sexual Predator in Russian Literary Tradition: Tolstoy, Zoschenko and Trifonov

41

Woman’s Infidelity as the Cause for Man’s Devastation: Tolstoy, Flaubert, Leskov, Turgenev, Kuprin, and Chekhov

53

Anxiety about the Strong Woman: Turgenev, Leskov, and Bulgakov

83

Surrogate for Man-Woman Relations in Post-War Soviet Literature: Vasilyev, Grossman, and Rasputin

99

The Eunuch as Hero in Late-Soviet and Perestroika Literature: Dovlatov, Nagibin, and Polyakov vii

115

viii

8

Contents

Man as an Object in Literature by Women: Shcherbakova, Rubina, Ulitskaya, Petrushevskaya, and Grekova

131

Conclusion: Sex as an Animal Act beyond Comprehension

153

Bibliography

157

Index

167

About the Author

171

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Rabbi Jonathan Chipman for his devoted assistance in the linguistic editing and preparation for press of this book.

ix

Introduction: The Aim and Structure of the Book

Gender and man-woman relationships issues in Russian literature have been studied frequently over the past thirty years, and a wide range of important studies have been written in the field. Nevertheless, the study of the psychological dimension of these issues is far from exhausted, and there is room for further innovation and development.1 This book reveals a phenomenon in Russian literature—methodologically, one located in the area between Russian literature, gender studies, psychology, and sociology—hitherto unexplored or unacknowledged by literary research. The phenomenon referred to is a particular aspect of misogyny: namely, the mental and emotional state of the male protagonist who finds himself in a sexual situation or dealing with erotic feelings—whether these involve attraction to a woman or his repulsion from her, the woman desiring him, or her rejection of his sexual interest. The sexual situation or erotic feeling causes the man humiliation, eliciting a powerful desire on his part to restore his dignity by taking revenge and punishing the person who, in his perception, caused this humiliation—the woman who aroused (or, alternatively, put down) his erotic feeling—against whom he directs his fury and vengeance.2 The nature of the humiliation is immanent, deriving from sexual activity as such. Sexual relations are a physiological act that in civilized society bears shameful associations, much like urination and defecation, as well as negative 1

2

Introduction

moral and cultural connotations relating to prohibition, sin, contamination, and disgust. But in the case of sexual relations, unlike elimination of waste matter, the male also greatly desires to engage in this shameful activity. The sexual organs, both male (erect) and female, seem frightening, disgusting, gross, fleshly, non-aesthetic, sub-human. The man is ashamed of his desire for such a female organ.3 While engaged in sexual relations, the man and the woman become animals. Sexual activity concretizes the fact that man is no different from or superior to animals. The man, who sees himself as a highly spiritual human being, finds it difficult to accept his descent to this level as an integral part of himself. Only an infantile man whose male ego is insufficiently developed fails to feel humiliation and to experience difficulty in reconciling his spiritual and his animalistic side. In the wake of the sexual act and the humiliation that accompanies it, the man is unable to respect either the woman or himself as he had previously.4 Instead, he attempts to purge himself of shame and to restore his personal dignity by casting the guilt for sexual relations and his transformation into an animal upon the woman, and by his wish to take revenge and punish her for this.5 The woman, by contrast, accepts both the animalistic side and the spiritual side as integral parts of herself. She does not need to conceal the physiological side of her life from herself, nor does she require reinforcement of her own dignity. She is in harmony with these two aspects of herself and is able to move easily from spiritual activity to physiological activity and back again. Thus, the sufferings of the man, who feels humiliated by his biologicalanimal functions, are alien to her.6 The reason for this gap in self-perception is that civilized society as such is male-oriented. Men head the institutions of state, society, culture, and religion, while the number of women heading such institutions is miniscule compared to that of men. The very presence of a woman at the head of a religious institution—of any religion—is liable to be perceived in society as an insult, a provocation, an error, an absurdity, or a grotesque joke. Man is seen as the symbol of mankind’s spirituality and intellectuality. Whenever one wishes to draw a contrast between humans and animals, one refers to the man, not the woman. In the literature describing the evolution of man from the monkey, the illustrations always show pictures of a man for, in contrast to the animal, the human is always male. The man is shown as wise and inspired, chosen and beloved of God, and capable of achieving the greatest closeness to God possible for a mortal human being. The “sons of God,” the prophets and the apostles, were men; Moses, the prophets of early Judaism, Jesus and his disciples, the Church fathers, the popes in Rome, the Christian theologians and philosophers, the prophet Muhammed, the great imams and ordinary kadis and muezzins of Islam—all these were and still

The Aim and Structure of the Book

3

are men, not women. Columbus, Karl Marx, Jung, Einstein, Freud, and many other great world figures were men, not women. When, in a civilized society, a son is born to a family, he is its pride and joy, while when a daughter is born reactions vary between imposing blame or punishing the mother and her daughter, to ignoring the birth altogether. The man represents humanity, as opposed to all other beings in the world. Woman is understood as less intelligent and less spiritual than man, she is not the chosen of God, and she is certainly incapable of closeness to Him. She is perceived as less human than the man, as being located somewhere between man and the beasts. It is therefore considered more natural and expected that she perform animal-like physiological activities: that she discharge urine and excrement, engage in sexual relations, bear progeny, and die. The man has another option besides death: he can ascend heavenwards, like Elijah the prophet or Jesus. No woman, according to the tradition of any civilized culture, has ever ascended to heaven; rather, her physical death is also her final death, croaking like the animals. The man is the human spirit, while the woman is the human body. Man stands in the place of God, while the woman is in the place of the animals. The man is thus “forbidden” to engage in physiological functions that expose his animal nature, including sexual relations, while the woman is “allowed” to do so, as such is in any event her nature. Women became accustomed to their inferior position in society and do not feel humiliation as a result of sexual relations.7 The man’s feelings of humiliation are even stronger if the woman mocks him, flaunts her power over him, and attempts to dominate him, thereby preventing him from imposing his own guilt upon her.8 In such a situation, his anger towards her becomes even stronger. Moreover, there are cases in which the woman attempts to add to the man’s feeling of humiliation and to exploit it for her own benefit. She is likely to behave towards the man with aggressiveness and with arrogance, demonstrating towards him those qualities that are traditionally attributed to the man himself, and thereby causing him, in addition to his immediate humiliation, feelings of rape, castration, being turned into a woman. In that case, his desire for revenge may go the extent of wishing to kill her.9 One must remember in this context the cases of murder of prostitutes by their clients after sexual relations with them.10 The man is only fully satisfied when he takes revenge upon the woman for the humiliation resulting from sexual relations, for the shame which he feels after the woman has seen him in this animal situation. He may also be jealous of her ability to move back and forth with relative ease from a situation of gross animality to that of a human being having dignity in her own eyes.11

4

Introduction

Conditions do not always allow him to take revenge upon the woman and to kill her in practice, so that his desire for revenge may conclude simply in manifestations of hatred towards her, in suicide, or in his own psychosomatic illness that precipitates his premature death. Alternatively, there may be external factors that outweigh his desire to kill her—for example, fear of a totalitarian regime and suppression of his impulse for revenge by means of this regime. In such a case he must accept the humiliation, leading in turn to the diminution of his own masculinity. This revenge may assume numerous different forms. The man is not always able to take revenge against the particular woman who evoked his erotic feeling or with whom he had sexual relations. There are thus cases in which he will “get back” at her through a surrogate who, in his eyes, represents the essence of female sexuality. There are other cases in which the man will forego the possibility of sexual relations and the subsequent revenge out of suspicion that the satisfaction he will feel will be limited. In any event, the man’s attitude towards the woman is guided by the ambivalence elicited by sexual feelings which, while they may be expressed in various different ways, always involve humiliation in his own eyes and the desire to take revenge upon her for it. The man who fails to find any substitute for revenge against the woman will end up unsatisfied, which may in turn lead to his mental, emotional, and physical destruction. The situation differs with regard to the works of female authors, in which the heroine finds satisfaction more easily than does the male hero in the works of male authors. As noted above, the woman more readily accepts the humiliation involved in the sexual experience, and does not require demonstrations of respect from the man in order to restore her personal equilibrium. The woman enjoys a wide variety of other options from which to receive satisfaction: pursuing tangible benefits from man-woman relations, intrigues, self-sacrifice. Only rarely does the woman view the man’s relationship to her as an integral element in her own emotional balance; when she does so, such a relationship is perceived by the female author as a negative example to be avoided. The present study cites a variety of fictional works in Russian prose that concretize this phenomenon and its forms of expression. These include works of prominent authors and of minor ones, of classical and modernist works, works belonging to different historical periods, and novels of different kinds and genres. This selection is meant to demonstrate that the phenomenon exists on all levels of Russian literature, notwithstanding the gaps among the works; it does not belong to any particular type of literature.12 The book is concerned with the analysis of texts with the intention of uncovering this phenomenon and showing its multi-sided expressions. It is to

The Aim and Structure of the Book

5

this end that references to earlier studies are brought. It refrains from polemics with earlier gender studies, as this is not its purpose, nor does it engage in theoretical or conceptual polemics regarding other gender-related issues. On the other hand, the uncovering of that phenomenon may in retrospect also affect the existing conceptions in contemporary literary research, gender studies, and psychology. In addition to the discovery of this phenomenon, the book contains some new analyses and interpretations of various literary works, such as the interpretation of Bulgakov’s novel “The White Guard” as a parody of fairy tales, or the interpretation of the affair between the protagonist and his motherin-law in Nagibin’s “My Golden Mother-in-Law” as a concretization of the metaphor “to screw the Soviet regime.” The study contains eight chapters, showing various possible developments of the above described “passion-humiliation-revenge” syndrome. Chapter One presents a brief historical overview of the evolution of attitudes towards women in Russian literature from its earliest days to the present, tracing the changes in the presentation and perception of female characters in the course of the development of this literature. Chapter Two discusses the case of a man subjected to emotional violence and psychological abuse on the part of a woman. This situation is the subject of several classical works: Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Tolstoy’s “The Devil,” and Chekhov’s comic story, “Drama.” In these works an intelligent and inspired man falls into dependence upon a sordid but strong woman who treats him as if she were the man and he the woman, making him feel raped and castrated. The man perceives no way out but to kill her in utter despair. Chapter Three deals with portrayals of woman as a sexual predator who devours the man. This theme is illustrated by Lev Tolstoy’s “Father Sergius,” Mikhail Zoschenko’s “The People,” and Yuri Trifonov’s “The Exchange.” The appealing and seemingly naïve appearance of the young woman in these works disguises a tough, strong-willed monster—one who robs the man of his self-esteem and, consequently, of his masculinity, for her own benefit. At times this is done merely for the sake of sport, much as a cat enjoys the agony of a mouse. This chapter demonstrates what happens to a man when he fails to murder the woman who attempts to dominate his life: namely, that he descends to a state in which his death is preferable to life. Chapter Four examines adultery on the part of a woman, as represented in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Leskov’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtzensk District,” Turgenev’s “The Torrents of Spring,” Kuprin’s “The Duel,” and Chekhov’s “The Grasshopper.” In these works, the wife or beloved mistress insults and humiliates the man who is her husband or lover. In the final analysis, the betrayed man ends up as a victim of her actions: he is either killed physically or

6

Introduction

destroyed spiritually and emotionally. The betrayal exposes the woman’s true nature: her aggressiveness, her masculine qualities, her fleshly lusts that bring about the castration of the man. In the author’s eyes, from this point on she is lower and more disgusting than the animals; she is the opposite of a human being. From an ethical viewpoint, this metamorphosis is seen as tantamount to an act of the devil. Chapter Five treats classical Russian works focused on women of extraordinary spirit. These include the remarkable women appearing in Turgenev: Natalya Lasunskaya, Elena Stakhova, Anna Odintsova. Each of them is wise, strong, practical, energetic, resourceful, and dominant; as a result, the man feels a sense of inferiority in her presence. There are cases in which he flees from such a woman, as in the case of Rudin, or where he uses her to achieve his own goals, as in the case of Insarov. But in every instance of this type the woman possesses masculine characteristics that threaten to reduce the masculinity of the man by her side. Another wonderful woman is Leskov’s Domna Platonovna in his “The Battle-Axe,” a vivid image of a kind-hearted woman, albeit portrayed with derision and even grotesqueness. Here the aggressive and nosey woman who considers herself smart and strong is presented in ironic light, as are her fleshly desires. In Bulgakov’s The White Guard we meet Elena Turbina, a woman of extraordinary spiritual power and bravery, a symbol of Mother Russia, who is described in superlative, nearly iconic terms. She prefers her brothers over her husband and “adopts” them, thereby making them infantile. But in the final analysis, each of the brothers finds another “adoptive mother” who is even more devoted. She is thus eventually victimized and abandoned; her spiritual power remains unwanted and she only suffers on its account. Chapter Six reviews the attitude towards women in Soviet literature of the post–World War II era. The relations between man and woman in this literature reflect the official Soviet line of ideology. In Boris Vasilyev’s “The Dawns Here Are Quiet . . .,” the relations between the sexes occur within the framework of the values sanctified by the Soviet ideology, such as love of the homeland and shared parenthood. In Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, the relations between the sexes take place through intellectual and ideological sublimation. In Valentin Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora, the relations between man and woman are replaced by thoughts about death and other existential questions. In the literature of this period, the Soviet man is castrated, not by a powerful woman, but by the Soviet regime itself. Chapter Seven relates to literature of the late Soviet and early Perestroika periods: Dovlatov’s “The Zone: A Prison Camp Guard’s Story,” Nagibin’s “My Golden Mother-in-Law,” Polyakov’s “Paris Love of Kostya

The Aim and Structure of the Book

7

Gumankov.” In these works one sees a critical and rebellious attitude towards the relations between the sexes as dictated by the Soviet regime. In Dovlatov’s work relations between the man and woman are humiliating, as each is trod down by the regime. The only solution for the Soviet man in such a situation is to refrain from relations with women altogether, as his own personal protest against the regime and the distortions of personality which it imposes upon its citizens. The figure of Tatyana Alekseyevna, in Nagibin’s “My Golden Motherin-Law,” serves as a repulsive personification of the Soviet regime. The protagonist initiates a stormy romance with her, while holding a cynical and contemptuous attitude toward her. Sexual relations with her hold a curious fascination for him, as he feels like someone visiting a Soviet zoo, who has voluntarily chosen to behave like one of the animals. Their relations give him satisfaction in the sense that he feels that he thereby takes vengeance against the Soviet regime that is hateful to him, but it is clear that these are not honest personal relationships between man and woman. The figure of Vera Genadievna, in Yuri Polyakov’s “Paris Love of Kostya Gumankov,” serves as a symbol of the Soviet regime that causes the repression of the hero’s male ego, while by contrast Alla serves as a symbol of the free world that allows the man to realize his masculinity. However, the Soviet man can only dream what that masculinity could have been had he been born and spent his entire life in the free West. Chapter Eight is devoted to an examination of the relationships between the sexes from a feminine perspective. Like the men, who see themselves as subjects and the women as objects, the women also see themselves as subjects and the men as objects, but their way of behaving towards men is different. The woman places the man in the center of her world, but nevertheless does not see him as an integral element in her personality, and his attitude towards her in no wise determines her attitude towards herself. Galina Shcherbakova’s novel “The Year of Tangerines, or: The Ideal Opportunity” is illustrative in this respect. Dina Rubina’s novel “On Upper Maslovka” offers a rather idealistic and utopian solution to the interrelation of sexes: the equilibrium of forces in each pair is achieved individually by each partner’s merits. In Ludmila Ulitskaya’s “Medea and Her Children,” the man is the object of struggle and jealousy between women. The heroine of “The Time: Night” by Ludmila Petrushevskaya speaks of scenes from her family life filled with utter squalor, hunger, rancor, and despair. An inevitable conclusion comes to mind: that the daily struggle for one’s relative well-being, of men as well as women, is not worth the efforts. Would we prefer unending suffering to death? Petrushevskaya’s answer is ambiguous, and death may be a preferable answer.

8

Introduction

“The Hotel Manager” by Irina Grekova mocks the traditional Russian woman’s submission to the man. A woman who innocently accepts a man seriously, just as he presents himself, is simply stupid. The present study deals with the actual texts of literary works, from which there emerges a hitherto unidentified phenomenon. While the book is organized in a simple methodological format, this does not prevent it from being innovative and original.

NOTES 1. See the studies of Esther Boserup, such as her book Women’s Role in Economic Development (London: George Allen, 1970), or the works by George Levinger studying the differences between the sexes in marriage, published in the 1960s. One should also note one of his later books, in the field of gender research: G. Levinger and J. D. Snoek, Attraction in Relationship: A New Look at Interpersonal Attraction (Morristown, New Jersey: General Learning Press, 1972). See also Annette Baxter, “Women Studies and American Studies: The Uses of the Interdisciplinary,” American Quarterly 26:1 (1974), 433, where she states that gender studies began in the 1970s. See also the similar statement in Linda Edmondson’s Introduction to Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1. 2. On the connection between passion and anger, see Debora Cameron and Elizabeth Fraser, The Lust to Kill: A Feminist Investigation of Sexual Murder (CambridgeOxford: Polity Press, 1987), 96 ff.: “Male heterosexuality is more likely than female’s to contain strong elements of fear and envy, fantasies of role reversal and revenge against women”; see also Cameron and Fraser, 102. 3. Albert Moll, Perversions of the Sex Instinct: A Study of Sexual Inversion, trans. Maurice Popkin (Newark, N.J.: Julian Press, 1931), 212. 4. About a man’s inability to honor a woman he is having intercourse with and about his feelings as inferior, see Natalie Shainess, “Nymphomania, Hostile Sex, and Superego Development,” in Sexual Dynamics of Anti-Social Behavior, ed. Louis B. Schlezinger and Eugine Revitck (Springfield Illinois: Charles C. Thomas Publisher, 1983), 57. 5. See Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: The Free Press, Macmillan, 1988), 9: “A man sees intercourse as animal, as opposed to a woman who tends to see marriage and love as not only human but even elevated.” 6. See also Dworkin. Dworkin describes intercourse as an action humiliating women. It turns her into an object exploited by men. She doesn’t speak about the revilement of the animalistic nature of the act by the man himself and his humiliation as a result of it (Dworkin, 10–12). 7. About a man’s feelings as inferior subsequent to the sexual act, see Natalie Shainess “Nymphomania,” esp. 57. On the tendency of the man to murder the woman during intercourse or just after it as a typical psychotic phenomena, see Cameron, The Lust to Kill, 89–91.

The Aim and Structure of the Book

9

8. See Shainess, “Nymphomania,” 61: “Arrogant confidence on the part of a woman triggers castration fears in a man.” 9. Killing is male violence taken to its logical extreme; see in detail in Cameron, The Lust to Kill, 164. 10. See: Evgenii Ravitch, Louis B. Schlesinger, “Murder: Evaluation, Classification, and Prediction,” in Violence: Perspectives on Murder Aggression, ed. Irwin L. Kutash, Samuel B. Kutash, Louis B. Schlesinger, et al. (San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass, 1978), 138–164. The authors mention several cases of murder committed because of the man’s frustration, as well as due to issues of a psychosomatic nature (155–160). 11. About a man killing a woman with whom he is erotically involved, see Dworkin, Intercourse, 7: “Only when the husband kills his wife [in “Kreutzer Sonata” by Lev Tolstoy] he awakens from his hatred for her and starts seeing her dead body as human.” 12. The quotations brought in this work from literary works and studies in the Russian language were translated by the author into English, unless otherwise noted. These passages are relatively brief and few in number, and special care was taken in their subsequent translation.

Chapter One

The Evolution of Attitudes towards Female Characters in Russian Literature: An Historical Overview

The evolution of attitudes towards women in Russian literature is as old as the literature itself. One of the first female characters to appear in Russian literature was Yaroslavna,1 daughter of Yaroslav Vladimirovich Osmomysl Galitskii,2 who appeared in The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, an account of Prince Igor’s 1185 campaign against the Polovtsy.3 The appearance of a female protagonist in medieval Russian literature is particularly remarkable, because the principle characters in such works were male.4 In the wake of Yaroslavna’s heroic deeds, she was perceived for a long time either as her husband’s savior or as a victim sacrificed on his behalf.5 Many centuries later, Empress Katherina II6 won broad recognition in politics, as well as playing an instrumental role in the process of European-type enlightenment of Russia.7 But notwithstanding her own progressive views, she was unable to alter the traditional attitude toward the status of women. Indeed, she herself identified with the patriarchal system; so long as the laws decreed by Peter the Great remained in force, this system constituted an allembracing way of life in Russia.8 The customary attitude towards women altered with the emergence of Romanticism in Europe.9 Women were adored as a concept, the initial image of woman being that of an ethereal, heavenly creature. The idea of love for a woman was of primary importance, because through love of her man could merge with God. Love was associated with spiritual liberty; it was 11

12

Chapter One

conceived in terms of equality with God or with other spiritual values. But the actual earthly woman was seen as secondary. She was represented as a fallen creature enveloped in sin unworthy of serious consideration, as a lowly terrestrial reflection of the lofty celestial ideal. An explicit example of such a perception was described in Odoyevsky’s satirical novels,10 Princess Mimi and Princess Zizi, written in 1834 and in 1839, respectively, which were popular at the time. Princess Mimi is depicted as a heartless and devilish intriguer.11 Her example shows how Russian Romanticism12 sublimated love, but not the woman herself. Women were compelled to seek satisfaction in emotional experiences that were beneath the attention of writers at the turn of the nineteenth century. Women writers had hardly arrived upon the Russian literary scene during the first half of the nineteenth century, so that throughout this period they and their problems were only presented to the reader from the male point of view. Thus, Alexander Pushkin continued the convention of deification of women, but when he described female characters realistically, they were plain, superficial, and lacking in character, albeit pure, such as Olga in Evgenii Onegin.13 The regnant assumption was that a bright woman could not be spiritually pure, and must be depraved. Nikolai Gogol14 depicted his feminine characters in an unusual way. His whores, Cossack girls, and noble young ladies do not resemble actual living persons, but approximate typical icons of traditional beauty: white-skinned, black-haired, fine-looking, monotonous, and boring. His female characters are ideal, but impersonal and generally negative figures. In his Viy or Spirit of Evil (1835), the woman serves the evil one, while in Taras Bulba (1835) she is the cause of treason. Ostrovsky’s15 plays incorporate a more realistic and human gallery of female characters, endowed with authentic and individual traits. They are mostly unfortunate and distressed, a point that serves to accentuate the author’s social criticism. Katherina, of Ostrovsky’s masterpiece The Storm (1860), is sensitive and suffers from despotic domestic customs, and would rather die than submit to her pig-headed and stupid husband. Her tragic social situation drives her to suicide, as a protest against male violence and the spiritless conformity of women in the family. Thus, The Storm may be regarded as a watershed between the romantic and realistic representation of woman in Russian literature. Ostrovsky’s female characters include “kept women,” whose social, financial, and familial position was one of utter humiliation. In Without a Dowry (1879), he depicts the circumstances that brought the play’s protagonist, Larissa, to the status of a “thing” or toy in men’s hands. Paratov wanted to fool around with her and then abandon her, Knurov and Voshevatov wanted to

Attitudes towards Female Characters in Russian Literature

13

make her their mistress, and even Ogudalova wished to “sell” her. She is an object to be bought and sold, belonging to whoever can win her. Hence death is the only way for Larissa to protect her honor. Ostrovsky’s ideas have much in common with those of Turgenev.16 The latter’s protagonist Vera Nikolaevna, from his novel Faust (1856),17 fancies equality. She bitterly remarks that a woman must be useful to others, as this is the only way for her to gain a certain status in life. During the nineteenth century Russian society became more open to Enlightenment ideas from the West. Women began to become aware of their status and prepared to stand up for their social rights.18 During this period there was a profound gap between the higher and lower classes, not only economically, but also socially and culturally. Until mid-century, the lower classes, who were the majority of society, lived in abject poverty, and were considered as being of almost no spiritual worth. One of the first characters from the lower social strata to appear in literature was Darya, in Nekrasov’s19 epic poem Red-Nosed Frost (1861–1864). She was described as being “adroit at any work,” beautiful and ruddy, but, like the other peasants in this poem, was depicted in a stereotyped and idealized manner. A realistic description of a peasant woman’s life may be found in Sleptsov’s20 “Foster-Girl” (Russian: “Pitomka”), which describes the harsh lot of a peasant mother who has to go to work as a cook and sends her daughter to an orphanage, from where the girl was given to a wealthier peasant family. The story describes the reversals of the girl’s fortune and includes scenes of extreme poverty.21 It was Gorky22 who really succeeded in presenting an unembellished picture of the simple people, including women, with their hardships and inner world. From the second half of the nineteenth century, the problems of upper- and middle-class women as such gradually began to attract attention. However, notwithstanding the new democratic tendencies, this had no significant affect on their status, and neither society at large nor literature was prepared for greater independence on the part of woman. In What Is to Be Done?, which resembles an essay more than it does a novel, Chernyshevsky23 openly raised the “woman problem” as a facet of the social order, but rather than search for a solution, he substituted propaganda for a new social order. Ideas about the desired future social transformations were expressed by the protagonist, Vera Pavlovna, but she could only fantasize about improving reality without any implementation of those wonderful ideas. Hence, the female problem and the role of woman in the family did not receive sufficient prominence in the novel. Women’s active engagement in the social life of Russia only began in the second half of the nineteenth century. Women’s voice in letters, though as

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Chapter One

yet rather feeble and incommensurable with that of men, had already begun to be heard. The first female “study group” was formed in Petersburg in 1896; its main participants were Trubnikova,24 Stasova,25 Filosofova,26 and Belozerskaya.27 The main topics of their contributions to periodicals were the problems of feminine equality and education, as well as ways to abolish prostitution.28 The first women writers, including Marko Vovchok,29 Lesia Ukrainka,30 and Khvoshchinskaya-Zayonchkovskaya31 also appeared in print. During the 1860s and 1870s the “Woman Problem” was addressed by many writers, but few were prepared to take a stand on behalf of equal rights for women in social life, culture, and literature. Disputes ensued over this subject, the first to raise such questions being Turgenev, Saltykov-Shchedrin,32 Dostoevsky,33 Chernyshevsky and Nekrasov, all of whom agreed that the problem of the humiliated status of women must be solved. Many new female characters emerged in literature, showing women seeking ways to achieve happiness, such as Tolstoy’s34 Anna Karenina and Vera from Goncharov’s35 The Precipice. One of the first novels to appear during the period of radical social change in the 1860s and 1870s was Goncharov’s The Precipice (1859), whose protagonist Vera was prepared to follow her chosen man even to Siberia. She thinks independently, but is constantly in doubt, so her spiritual quest comes to a dead end. By contrast, Goncharov portrays Marfinka who, following in her grandmother’s tradition, is self-confident and quiet. Against this background Vera seems like a mocking picture of contemporary youth, whose endeavors are not so much transformative as they are destructive. A female character utterly lacking in spirituality appears in Osipovich-Novodvorsky’s story, “A Sketch of Life of Neither Peahen nor Crow” (1877),36 in which he continues a gallery of “superficial people”: already known literary characters, such as Onegin, Pechorin, Rudin, Bazarov, from works of such authors as Pushkin, Lermontov and Turgenev. Although not an opponent of the social independence of women, he believed that the struggle for women’s rights was based on a nihilism that had been imported from Western Europe and corrupted the Russian soul. A different kind of female character is presented in Dostoevsky’s Netochka Nezvanova (1846-1849, uncompleted). Already in this early novel the author creates an antithesis between two characters, Netochka and Katya, by means of psychological analysis. Here he propounds his theory of the “weak heart,” of the person who cannot fight for his/her own rights or withstand trials, and breaks under the strokes of ill fortune. In his later masterpiece, Crime and Punishment (1866), Dostoevsky gives a fallen woman a chance for a new life. Just as Raskolnikov turns from the path of the greatest sinner, Judas Iscariot, to that of a person who resembles Jesus, through repentance and acceptance

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of sufferings, Sonya too undergoes a female counterpart to that way, following the road of the sinner Mary Magdalene, who at the end was graced with redemption and could approach Christ. Sonya redeemed her sin by convincing Raskolnikov to surrender himself to the police, by reconciling him with the world, and by her personal acceptance of suffering. A mirror image of the same theme appears in The Idiot (1881), where Prince Myshkin sacrifices himself to the demonic nature of Nastasya Philippovna, giving her a chance to break away from the circle of “fallen women” and return to normal society. But Nastasya Philippovna found no way out of vice and evil, as feminine devilry seemed to be at the very core of her nature. Nevertheless, she was not to blame for her tragic fate: rather, she was a victim of circumstances. In her childhood she had been seduced by Totskii and become a wanton woman, used by scoundrels for their own pleasure. Throughout the novel she attempts to rid herself of the stigma of a fallen woman, but the people around her believe that she was innately depraved. The attitude towards woman of Lev Tolstoy, a central pillar of Russian literature, was entirely different. For him, woman represented the very incarnation of evil. This attitude was largely due to his personal situation and his love-hate relationship with his wife, Sofia Andreyevna. Thus the female protagonist of Anna Karenina (1873–1877) is portrayed as an upper-class woman who nevertheless lost herself, making herself into a pitiable creature, rejected and disapproved of by polite society. Tolstoy believed his heroine’s death to be inevitable. In The Resurrection (1889–1899), Katya Maslova becomes the judge of morality, but here too Tolstoy refuses her an opportunity for redemption. She won’t accept Nekhludov’s sacrifice and becomes instead the fiancée of a Jewish political prisoner—meaning that she rejected the path towards repentance. In his story “The Devil” (1889–1890) he examines the hypocrisy of marriage. The story is autobiographical: Tolstoy identified himself with Irtenev, and his wife Sofia Andreyevna with Lisa. Sofia Andreyevna’s traits also entered the characters of Anna Sherer, Julie Kuragina and Helene Bezukhova in War and Peace (1863–1869). Woman is also the cause of the upset of the global order in his novel, “Father Sergius” (1890–1898), in which a vicious, sinful woman undertakes to seduce the hermit Father Sergius. In the 1890s a new generation of writers, whose ideas on the social position of women were quite different, came to the fore in Russian literature. Among these was Anton Chekhov, who presented a gallery of longing “brides” prescient of forthcoming changes in the Zeitgeist: the sincerity of feeling between man and woman was waning, giving way to material calculations. This in turn brought about a change in relations within old-style families. Woman began to liberate herself from patriarchal rules. On the other hand, nihilism

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was still popular in the circles of Russian people of letters, which held woman back from active engagement in social and family life. Remarkable woman characters also appear in the works of Kuprin.37 Shurochka Nikolayeva from “The Duel” (1905) is scornful of “ladies’ society” for its infirmity. Nor does “men’s society” prove sufficiently strong in her eyes. In her opinion, the army generates weak people: everyone is subordinate to someone else above him and lays responsibility for his fate on the army. Kuprin outdoes his contemporaries in attributing to Shurochka such traits as pride, ambition, and the ability to pass her verdict on the “stronger sex.” The onset of the twentieth century was marked in Russia by the heyday of the “silver age,” which began in the nineteenth century, and whose forebears were the symbolists. Woman was again deified. Love, as the most sublime of all feelings, became a favored subject of writing. Aleksandr Blok,38 in his Songs to the Beautiful Lady (1904), revives the chivalrous ideal of devoted worship of a woman, when love overshadows the real woman. “The silver age” begot such outstanding women poets as Akhmatova,39 Tsvetayeva,40 and Gippius,41 who lived in the world created by their poetry.42 However, in real life society continued to treat women as second-class individuals. If a woman had ambitions of success in society and in her creative life, she needed to estrange herself from her feminine nature and imitate men’s ways. Andrey Bely,43 in his novel Peterburg (1913–14), portrayed a whimsical and shallow fool, Sofia Petrovna Likhutina, a great reader of novels à la mode, mockingly presented as an overly emotional and dull person due to her excessively feminine nature. Such characters can be frequently found in the writings of Gorky, Andreyev44 and Sasha Cherny45 as well. Although a number of women poets and prose writers did emerge in this period, the prevailing opinion remained that to be a woman poet was an oxymoron. *** The Great October Revolution of 1917 changed the traditional course of Russian literature. Following the introduction of the new tenets of socialist realism, the masterworks of earlier Russian writers came to be seen as incompatible with the Soviet way of thinking. For many years Russian literature had to conform to the “social order,” thereby deforming even the most talented writers: those who failed to conform with the new regime were either persecuted or had to emigrate.46 A narrow circle of readers and the lack of material means soon led to an erosion of the Russian literary circles outside the USSR. Few writers found a new place abroad, and some returned to Russia, only to be persecuted upon their return. Among the more successful and notable authors were Ivan Bunin,47 Merezhkovsky,48 Gippius, and Nabokov.49 Tsvetayeva and

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Akhmatova symbolized the tragic lot of “the silver age” women writers in Russia.50 Anna Akhmatova lived a tumultuous life, most of it in the USSR. Her literary success and popularity prior to the Revolution contrasted with the harsh years of official ignoring and harassment by the Soviet authorities thereafter. As a young woman she was married to Nikolai Gumilev,51 who was executed in 1921 for allegedly plotting against the Soviet regime. Her son was imprisoned several times, and during one such imprisonment disappeared without a trace. Akhmatova’s poems were no longer published and her name was banned from the press. Unlike Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva emigrated after the Revolution, returning to Russia in 1939, either out of naïveté or love for her husband, who insisted on returning. Her husband and daughter were soon arrested, and former friends shunned her. Under the pressure of constant surveillance, she committed suicide. Both Akhmatova and Tsvetayeva are examples of talented women whose lives were destroyed by the Soviet regime. Another such example is Teffi,52 albeit she never returned to the Soviet Union but remained abroad until her dying day. After the October Revolution she left Russia for Paris, where she shared the harsh lot of many other Russian emigrants. Zinaida Gippius, a talented poet, enjoyed a similar destiny—for want of readers she could not fulfill herself outside Russia and lived all her remaining life in Paris. But Russian intellectual emigrants failed to integrate into French cultural life and found themselves outside of the new literary developments, while their names remained generally unknown to readers in Soviet Russia. Against this background, Vladimir Nabokov’s literary success stands out. He moved, first from the Soviet Union to Berlin, and thereafter to the United States. Once in America, he began to write in English. One of his first English novels was Lolita (1955), which won him world renown. When the book was published it triggered a major literary scandal due to its theme, and was labeled a highly immoral, shocking novel, which only added to its popularity. Lolita is a story of dark human passions about the sexual interest of its protagonist, Humbert, in the young girl who is the eponymous heroine of the story. Lolita is shown as a vulgar and perverted schoolgirl, an impudent and shameless plotter, whose attitude to the surrounding world is utterly cynical. For Humbert she is a nymph, but a wicked and ugly one. He is a slave, both to his own sick, addictive passion for her, and to the caprices of the sadistic girl as such. But at the time, Soviet Russia was far removed from the problems raised by Nabokov in Lolita. The Soviets wanted an engaged literature suitable to the regime’s ideology, with an idealized Soviet hero.

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There were writers who remained in Russia after the Great October Revolution of 1917 and tried to find their way in the new Soviet literature. In Babel’s The Red Cavalry (1926),53 the feminine subject is strikingly distinctive in that love is presented there naturalistically, as a fierce passion. His “revolutionary woman” was thus the modern embodiment of a sexually free woman. During the years of collectivization of agriculture and the cult of Stalin, woman tilled the earth and worked in factories on a par with man. In literature, woman was depersonalized, and the distinctions between her and man tended to be obliterated. Thus Platonov,54 in his novel Chevengur, attempted to present an idyll of future Communism, where friendship must substitute for sex because, according to the Communist concept, the latter were base and dirty acts. Accordingly, Soviet woman was taught to engage in sex for its reproductive function alone, thereby fulfilling her duty as a Communist. Platonov preferred to depict “fatherly and brotherly” relations on the part of men, and “motherly and sisterly” ones on the part of women, rather than relations between the sexes. But notwithstanding Platonov’s efforts to support the Soviet ideology, the women depicted by him are unhappy. Woman is racked with envy and jealousy and is never satisfied. The general tendency in Soviet literature was to present woman as a positive hero, eliminating both her individual personal features and her gender distinctiveness. The doctrine of Social Realism implied an idealized, almost utopian presentation of Communists, in which the characters resembled the heroes of a mythical epic. Such were the heroines in Fadeyev’s55 Young Guard (1945), Lubov Shevtsova and Ulyana Gromova. We find there a new interpretation of love, “socialist love,” serving the common cause. The cult of woman-mother in Soviet literature owes much to Gorky’s novel, Mother (1906–1907).56 The two key Soviet symbols, that of Motherland and that of Moscow (both grammatically feminine in Russian), were likened to the image of mother, Stalin being presented as the mother’s father. On the one hand, in Communist society woman achieved equality: she played two major roles, as homemaker and as a full member of socialist society, giving her strength to the common cause. She had to carry out her motherly functions for as many children as possible as well as to make her career on a par with man. At times she was torn apart by these contradictory demands, and broke down under social pressure. Marina Shamanova, in Arbuzov’s57 play Tanya, may be regarded as an ideal of the Soviet woman. She forfeited relations with her dear man to her career, was devoted to her social work, but was a failure in her private life. On the other hand, Simonov’s58 character Katya, from The Common Tale [“Obyknovennaya istoriya”], sacrifices her life for her family and her husband. She follows him throughout the vicissitudes of his life, she denies her-

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self the joys of motherhood, accepting her husband’s life as her own—much like Dasha in Gladkov’s59 novel Cement (1925), whose little daughter dies because her mother disregards her family duties. In light of the hardships women had to endure and cope with during the Second World War, woman’s role in Soviet reality changed. Soviet writers started to portray her in a rougher and tougher light—a type that persisted in their works until Stalin’s death in 1953. From the mid-1940s on, the state policy was to strengthen the family ties. An unfaithful wife was presented in a negative light as damaging her husband’s work record—as in, for example, the novel The Happiness by Pavlenko60 (1947), which was written on an ideological basis. According to that new policy, love was to be presented in literature as the “prescription” for a healthy family, known as “the small family,” while society as a whole was considered “the big family.” A husband ought to devote himself to work, to serve the goals of the “big family.” Alongside these great goals, the problems of “the small family” paled into insignificance, concerning only his wife. Nevertheless, it was imperative that the woman-wife be involved in the interaction of both “families.” In such a situation, her inner world was regarded as of little importance, as she was expected to feel satisfied with the significance of her social role. A typical family in such novels was treated schematically: love was a mere formality, and the inner life of the characters was ignored. But after Stalin’s death in 1953 and the denunciation of the “cult of personality,” unofficial works that deviated from the Soviet literary principles began to force their way through. But this period of so-called “thaw” under Khrushchev was short-lived, and thereafter some freedom-loving writers had to leave the Soviet Union. One such writer was Solzhenitsyn61 who, having served eight years in camps as a political prisoner, saw the dark side of “Soviet humanism” with his own eyes. As described in his anti-Soviet works, a woman in prison camps would be treated somewhat indulgently only if she “laid herself under” some camp boss; otherwise, she would be doomed to death by starvation or used in inhumanly hard work. Women in prison camps were deprived of a friendly environment, family, and motherhood. Another outstanding writer of the “stagnation period” was Dovlatov.62. His books were never published in the USSR, even though he was recognized in unofficial literary circles as a talented writer. In 1978 he was forced to emigrate. Women’s issues appear often in his writings, mostly in a tragi-comic light. Like many other writers, Dovlatov identified Russia with a woman, though portraying her as one who had to bear the burden of history. According to the Russian cultural tradition, Russia was conceived, both by Dovlatov and by others, as a female figure—first ravished by the Mongols and later raped by the Communists.63

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*** During the era of Perestroika under Gorbachev, society gradually began to alter, even though women continued to be treated as second-class people. During that period, for the first time in Russian social and cultural life, a question was raised about the difference between “feminine” and “masculine” literatures. Before the Perestroika there was hardly any reflection as to whether women writers really existed, nor on the way in which they regarded the world. After the collapse of the “Iron Curtain,” women’s issues came into prominence, and feminism, which was already well-developed in the West and had taken deep roots in the public conscience, inundated Russia.64 Even before the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the first feminine organizations and literary societies began to spring up, “The New Amazons” group among them. This came into being in 1988 as a radical feminist opposition to “masculine literature.” The group’s manifesto was based upon traditions of both world and Russian women writers, such as George Sand, Virginia Wolff, Agatha Christie, and Anna Akhmatova. In 1988, as the Perestroika was growing apace, literary magazines began to be circulated in large numbers, opening formerly forbidden works of Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov,65 Voinovich,66 and Andrey Platonov to the reader. Alongside these, the works of alternatives to the socialist realism writers, such as Venedict Yerofeyev,67 Evgenii Popov,68 and Yuri Poliakov69 became available to the reader. Nevertheless, as during the years of stagnation, feminism remained outside the scope of these magazines’ interests. Prior to the Perestroika, the word “feminism” evoked the same steadfast aversion in the Soviet man as the word “bourgeoisie,” for which reason the manifesto of “The New Amazons” could be regarded as a bold step in women’s struggle for their rights. How did a group like “The New Amazons” appear in the post-Soviet period? The very idea of creating a women’s cultural and social group had been brewing for a long time. But despite the Perestroika and the general atmosphere of liberation, women were still badgered and suffered discrimination. There was a need for them to organize and to unite those who were ready to struggle for their rights. For this reason one of the first female unions in Russia was initiated by women writers. Those who joined “The New Amazons” were unable to fulfill themselves within the existing framework of Soviet literature, but needed to create for themselves a new, friendly environment. Shortly after the creation of “The New Amazons,” their first collection of writings, entitled The Forgiving (Ne pomnyaschie zla), was published. The book hit the mark regarding women’s problems in Russia and publicized the

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names of several women writers, who then gained popularity. Among these was Narbikova,70 whose avant-garde prose reflects a quest for the ideals of the silver age. Works of Vaneyeva71 and Sadur72 were also published. This was a fresh breath of freedom for Russia. Modern women writers took a new look at the role of woman in history. Many stereotypes associated with the depravity and weakness of women were rejected. Now that such stereotypes had been shattered, men became more willing to concede to women more active roles in the society. Such conclusions were proven by the tremendous popularity of such female authors as Tatiana Tolstaya,73 Aleksandra Marinina,74 and Ludmila Petrushevskaya.75 The characters in romantic prose also changed, so that women were no longer shown as gutless toys for men, but as heroines presenting a new and specifically feminine view of relations between man and woman. It is worthy of note that the women themselves were not always willing to agree that their writings were specifically “feminine,” still believing that women had to deny their feminine nature in order to be accepted in the man’s world. Thus, Tatiana Tolstaya sometimes expressed her belief that there is no difference between “feminine” and “masculine” literature, but that there are two worlds, one feminine and the other masculine, each having its own self-perception. Today, woman’s creative potential has a far greater chance to be fulfilled. Consequently, we witness a blooming of literature activity by women writers in Russia, as in such powerful masterpieces as Petrushevskaya’s play, Three Girls in the Blue (“Tri devushki v golubom”), in which she portrays a woman in an outspoken manner that a male author would hardly be able to do. Her protagonist Ira is mercilessly swindled, and has to pay a high price for her fleeting love for an undeserving man. Her novel “Time: Night” (“Vremya: noch”) is written as the diary of a dying woman, whose confessions do not conceal even the most revolting revelations about her inner world, as well as naturalistic details of her life. These details are used to portray an ordinary person, to show the sorry spectacle that such a beggarly and wretched creature presents. The protagonist of Petrushevskaya’s “Our Crowd” (“Svoi krug”), driven by her maternal instinct, makes a superhuman effort to rescue and protect her son after her anticipated death. Petrushevskaya is sympathetic with women’s issues, realizing at first hand how difficult it is for them to survive in the cruel and complicated modern world. She draws a true picture of present-day society and its attitudes to the world of women, and hence to herself. Thus, the theme of woman’s role in Russian literature is an intricate and ambiguous one, deserving of deeper insight and full and proper research.

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NOTES 1. Yaroslavna is referred to by her patronym, after her father, Yaroslav Galitski. In old Russia a woman was not addressed by her own name, but always in relation to a male figure, whether father, husband or master. Yaroslavna entered history as the savior of her husband. 2. Yaroslav Vladimirovich Osmomysl Galitskii (1130–1187, Galitskii Duke: 1153–1187) called Yaroslav the Wise, was Yaroslavna’s father and Igor’s father-inlaw. 3. Polovtsy were armed tribes headed by Khan Konchakh. In 1170 Khan Konchakh began to expand his rule over more Russian territories. In a battle in 1185 he defeated the Russian prince Igor Sviatoslavich, thereby establishing his regime over all of Russia. 4. See Teresa de Lauretis, “The Violence of Rhetoric: Consideration on Representation and Gender,” in The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (New York: Routledge, 1989), 239–258, esp. 251. Some Russian literary critics claim that The Lay of Igor’s Campaign was a later forgery, but even assuming that it is correct, The Lay of Igor’s Campaign is still regarded as one of the earliest addresses for a significant female figure. 5. In this context, regarding other outstanding women in ancient Russian history, cf. N.L. Pushkariova, Women of Ancient Rus’ (Moscow: Mysl, 1989), 12 ff. Note also the remarks of Rozalind McKenzie, “Women’s Image in Russian Medieval Literature,” in A History of Women’s Writing in Russia, ed. Adele M. Barker and Jehanne M. Gheither (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002), 20: “With great spread and entrenchment [ . . . ] of misogyny the spheres of influence women had enjoyed in pagan Russia were drastically curtailed, and women were forced to adapt to a system in which their role was always secondary.” 6. She was born as Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst (1729–1796), a descendant of a provincial German duke, and married Petr Fedorovich, who later became Emperor Peter III. From 1762 on she was the empress of Russia. 7. For example, her correspondence with Voltaire was a notable contribution to the development of social ideas in Russia. 8. See Marcus Levitt, “Katherina the Great (1729–1796),” in Russian Women Writers, Christine D. Tomei, ed. (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999), I:3–28. 9. On the changes in Zeitgeist stimulated by the ideas of the European romantics concerning women in traditional society, see Barbara Alpern Engel, “Transformation versus Tradition” in Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, ed. Barbara Evas Clemeuts, Barbara Alpern Engel, Christine D. Worobec (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991). 135–147, in particular 137 ff. 10. Prince Vladimir Fyodorovich Odoyevsky, (ca. 1803–1869), Russian writer, music critic, editor, educator, was a central figure in nineteenth-century Russian culture. 11. Nevertheless, Princess Mimi was still written within the tradition of Russian Romanticism.

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12. Russian Romanticism differed from that of Europe, even though it was also affected by the great French Revolution. The later development of Russian Romanticism was in particular affected by the Franco-Russian War of 1812 and by social and ideological movements within the Russian nobility during the period 1812–1840 as a consequence of that war. Among the most eminent figures of Russian Romanticism were Zhukovsky, Batiuskov, Pushkin, Lermontov, Ryleev, A. I. Odoevsky, and Baratynsky. 13. Aleksander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799–1837), nineteenth-century Russian author, often considered his country’s greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. His verse novel, “Evgenii Onegin” (1833), is considered one of the great masterpieces of Russian literature. 14. Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol (1809–1852), great Russian novelist, dramatist, satirist, founder of so-called critical realism in Russian literature, best-known for his novel Dead Souls (1842; Russian: Mertvye Dyshi). 15. Aleksander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky (1823–1886), Russian dramatist. His plays mostly deal with the mercantile or petty-official classes and the conflicts within their patriarchal families. 16. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818–1883), novelist, poet, and playwright. Turgenev was among the major figures of nineteenth-century Russian literature. 17. “Faust” is a philosophical novel by Turgenev, consisting of a correspondence of nine letters exchanged between Pavel Alexandrovich and Semen Nikolaevich. The main theme of the novel is the contradiction between the individual’s creative goals and the social and ethical concepts of the community. This novel paved the way for Turgenev’s later and famous “Nest of the Nobles.” 18. See Jane McDermid, “The Influence of Western Ideas on the Development of the Woman Question in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” Irish Slavonic Studies 9 (1988), 21–36. 19. Nikolay Alekseyevich Nekrasov (1821–1878), writer, poet, editor, and publisher, sought to improve social conditions in Russia. 20. Vasily Alekseyevich Sleptsov (1836–1878), Russian writer. 21. See references to this plot in Joe Andrew, “Mothers and Daughters in Russian Literature of the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Slavic and East European Journal 73 (1995), 37–60. 22. Aleksey Maksimovich Gorky, pen-name of Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov (1868–1936), Russian writer, novelist, autobiographer, and essayist. He formulated the central principles of Socialist Realism, which became doctrine in Soviet literature. 23. Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (1828–1889), journalist. In 1862 Chernyshevsky was arrested and imprisoned for criticizing the established order in Russia. While in prison, he wrote the utopian novel, “What Is to Be Done?” The novel became a popular book, which influenced the founding of the “Land and Liberty” group. 24. Maria Vasilievna Trubnikova (neé Ivasheva, 1835–1897), writer and champion of education for women. In 1862 she founded, in collaboration with Stasova, a society of women translators which saw its goals as creating a system of higher education for Russian women.

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25. Nadezhda Vasilievna Stasova (1822–1895), a public figure. Alongside other women, she was the head of the incipient movement for female higher education. 26. Anna Pavlovna Filosofova (nee Diagileva, 1837–1912), public figure and champion of higher scientific education for women. She was among the founders of several societies aimed at improving the educational and social status of women. 27. Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Belozerskaya (neé Guen, 1838–1912), writer, student of Russian history and letters, translator. 28. On the Russian women’s movements, see Encyclopedia of Russian Women’s Movements, eds. Norma Corigliano–Noonan and Carol Nechemias (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001). 29. Marko Vovchok; real name Maria Aleksandrovna Markovich (neé Velinskaya, 1834–1907), Ukrainian (then Malorussian) writer, translator, editor. See Solomea Pavlychko, “Marko Vovchok (1833–1907)” in Russian Women Writers, ed. Tomei, I. 459–480. 30. Lesia Ukrainka; real name Larisa Kosach-Kvitka (1871–1913), poet, translator, and dramatist, wrote in both Russian and Ukrainian.. 31. Nadezhda Dmitrievna Khvoshchinskaya-Zayonchkovskaya, pen-name V. Krestovsky (1825–1889), Russian writer and poet, also literary critic and translator. 32. Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov, pen-name N. Shchedrin (1826–1889), Russian writer and satirist. 33. Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), one of the most important Russian writers. 34. Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910), one of the greatest of Russian writers, dramatist, publicist, and philosopher. His social, religious, and philosophical quest resulted in his original religious and philosophical system, known as “Tolstoyism.” 35. Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov (1812–1891), a novel writer and literary critic. His novel Oblomov (1859) was the subject of acute critical debate. 36. Andrey Ospovich Novodvorsky, pen-name Osipovich-Novodvorsky (1853– 1882), prose writer. 37. Aleksander Ivanovich Kuprin (1870–1938), Russian writer and publicist. In 1919 he emigrated with his family to Paris, and in 1937 returned to Russia. 38. Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok (1880–1921), Russian and Soviet poet. 39. Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova (real name Gorenko; 1889–1996), poet, translator, literary critic, was married to Nikolay Gumilev, together with whom she was an adherent of Acmeism, a movement in twentieth-century Russian poetry that reacted against the practices of symbolism and advocated clarity and sensory vividness. 40. Marina Ivanovna Tsvetayeva (1892–1941), poet and prose writer, was married to Sergey Efron. She left the Soviet Union with her family in 1922 to live in various European countries, but returned in 1939. She committed suicide in 1941. 41. Zinaida Nikolayevna Gippius (1869−1945), poet, prose writer, and literary critic. Wife of D. Merezhkovsky, who was a leader among the symbolists of the early 1900s. They both emigrated to France in 1920. 42. Jeffrey Brooks, “Readers and Reading at the End of the Tsarist Era,” in Literature and Society in Imperial Russia: 1800–1917, ed. William M. Todd III (Stanford:

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Stanford UP, 1978), 97–150. On the rise in popularity of women’s fiction after 1905, see Brooks, 116–117. 43. Andrey Bely (real name Boris Nikolayevich Bugayev; 1880–1934), poet and writer, leading theorist of the second wave of Russian Symbolism. 44. Leonid Nikolayevich Andreyev (1871–1919), prose writer, dramatist, reporter, satirist, and essayist. The October Revolution occurred while he and his family were living in Finland, where they remained. 45. Sasha Cherny (real name Aleksandr Mikhailovich Glikberg; 1880–1932), one of the most prominent authors in Satiricon magazine. After the October Revolution, he left for Vilna. 46. On the other hand, with regard to the gains of the woman’s movement under the Bolsheviks, see Clement Evans, “The Birth of the New Soviet Woman” in Bolshevik Culture, ed. Abbot Gleason, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985), 220–237. Evans concludes that, notwithstanding the changes in women’s lives during the Bolshevik era, the Soviet woman was subservient to the regime (233). 47. Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin (1870–1953), Russian nobleman, writer, symbolist poet, and translator. He left Russia in 1920, wrote ten prose books in France, and in 1933 received the Nobel Prize for Literature. 48. Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky (1866–1941), poet, writer, critic, and religious thinker, was married to Z. Gippius (see above, note 41). 49. Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (pen-name Sirin; 1899–1997), poet and writer. The Revolution necessitated the family’s emigration to England; Nabokov moved to America in 1940. 50. Regarding this period see Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, ed. Marina Ledkovskaia-Astman, Charlotte Rosenthal, and Mary Fleming Zirin (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994); Catriona Kelly, ed., A History of Russian Women’s Writing: 1820–1992 (New York: Oxford UP, 1994). 51. Nikolay Stepanovich Gumilev (1886–1921), poet, dramatist, husband of Anna Akhmatova (see above, note 50). In 1911–1912 he assembled a group known as the “Guild of Poets,” which was the cradle of acmeism. In 1921 he was arrested and executed. 52. Teffi (real name Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Lokhvitskaya, neé Buchinskaya; ca. 1870–1952), humorous writer, poet, and topical satirist, participated in Satiricon. 53. Isaak Emmanuilovich Babel (1894–1940), short story writer and playwright. Babel’s fame is based on his stories of the Jews in Odessa and his novel The Red Cavalry (1926). In 1939 he was arrested, and in 1940, he was executed. Babel was the first major Russian Jewish writer to write in Russian. 54. Andrey Platonov (real name Andrey Platonovich Klimentov; 1899–1951), writer. 55. Aleksander Fadeyev (real name Aleksander Aleksandrovich Bulyga; 1901– 1956), writer and Communist Party functionary. 56. See Richard Freeborn, The Russian Revolutionary Novel; Turgenev to Pasternak (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982), 40 ff. 57. Aleksey Nikolayevich Arbuzov (1908–1986), Soviet dramatist.

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58. Konstantin (Kirill) Mikhailovich Simonov (1915–1979), Soviet poet, writer, and dramatist. 59. Fedor Vasilievich Gladkov (1883–1958), Russian writer, a devoted communist. His novel Cement shows how personal and social realities combined in postrevolutionary Russia. 60. Pyotr Andreyevich Pavlenko (1899–1951), Soviet writer and brigade commissar (1941); Stalin’s favorite. His novel The Happiness embodied the key theme of his writings, that of the Communist Party. 61. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (born 1918), anti-Soviet writer, spent years in labor camps. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1970. In 1974 he was exiled from the Soviet Union; returned to Russia in 1994, lives in Moscow. 62. Sergey Donatovich Dovlatov (1941–1990), an anti-Soviet writer. Dovlatov was drafted into the Soviet Army and served as a military guard in a strict security prison camp. From this experience he wrote his novel The Zone: Notes of a Camp Guard. 63. See Hubbs. The main idea of that study is that Russia is described in Russian literature as a feminine image, primarily as Mother. 64. At the same time it should be noted that feminism as a theoretical outlook did not have a profound effect on Russian literature and literary criticism. Compare, e.g. Katherina Besley, “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text,” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhole and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991), 593–603, esp. 597; Susan S. Langer, “Toward a Feminist Narratology,” ibid, 610–629. 65. Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov (1907–1982), anti-Soviet writer and poet. In 1929 he was arrested and spent years in camps; in 1956 he was rehabilitated. 66. Vladimir Nikolayevich Voinovich (born 1932), writer, left the USSR in 1956. His main work is The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (1969), a novel parodying books of war heroism. 67. Venedict Vasilyevich Yerofeyev (1939–1990), writer. Yerofeyev’s work, Moskva-Petushki (1968), the story of a tragic drunken train journey, is regarded a unique masterpiece of its genre. 68. Evgenii Anatolievich Popov (born 1946), writer. Popov’s work combines humor, irony, social and political satire. 69. Yuri Polyakov (born 1954), satirist, lives and works in Moscow. 70. Valeria Spartakovna Narbikova (born 1958), writer, started writing in 1988. 71. Larisa Vaneyeva, writer, lives at Pichtitsk Sviato-Uspensk nunnery. 72. Nina Nikolayevna Sadur (born 1950), writer, has written since the late 1970s. 73. Tatiana Nikitichna Tolstaya (born 1951), a writer published since 1983, belongs to a “new wave” in literature, distinguished by burlesque, buffoonery, and the eccentricity of the author’s “self.” 74. Aleksandra Marinina (real name Marina Anatolyevna Alekseyeva, born 1957, Lvov), writer. 75. Ludmila Stephanovna Petrushevskaya (born 1938), prose writer and dramatist..

Chapter Two

Spiritual and Physical Murder between Man and Woman: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov

In this chapter I shall present a theme that appears repeatedly in classical Russian literature. The protagonist, with whom the author identifies, confronts an ultimate decision: to be the victim of spiritual murder by a corrupt, malevolent, and primitive woman, or to save himself from her by murdering her. The woman in question either excessively arouses him sexually or, alternatively, represses him and deprives him of satisfaction. In either event, she takes away his control over his own sexuality, and in doing so humiliates and pressures him, destroys his personal dignity, and threatens to steal his masculinity and to castrate him. The miserable protagonist is frustrated, feels desperate and persecuted, and finds himself in a quandary, seeing no other option but to attack her first so as to prevent her from attacking and defeating him. Even though the protagonist acts impulsively and violently, the author understands his heart. The protagonist’s fears, like those of the author, reflect his inner emotional and psychological state. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT BY FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY— MURDER AS A WAY OUT OF A CROWD OF WOMEN WITCHES Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky (1821–1881), an eminent Russian novelist, short story writer, and journalist, has had a profound and universal influence 27

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on the twentieth-century novel. The first of his major novels, Crime and Punishment, was published in 1866. Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment, lived surrounded by women: his mother and sister; Katherina Ivanovna and Sonia Marmeladov; the old pawnbroker and the landlady; the streetwalkers at Sennaya Square; and the madams who ran the brothels—all of them, whether intimate friends or non-entities, touched the raw nerves of his masculine dignity and self-esteem as a male.1 The women in Raskolnikov’s—and probably the author’s—worldview are divided into those who are “good”: that is, attractive and feminine—and those who are “bad,” meaning asexual, masculine, and thus repulsive. The “good” women are few: probably only Sonia and Raskolnokov’s mother and sister. The “bad” ones are numerous: they rule the world, profiting from the misery of others and from the destitution of the “good.” Their feminine nature is dead within them, replaced by masculine graspingness, aggressiveness, hatred, and ruthless pursuit of their goals—they are beasts of prey without mercy. They insolently intervene in the life of Raskolnikov, turning him into a helpless eunuch.2 Thus, Raskolnikov’s landlady, the widow Zaritsyn, painfully humiliates him: he is overcome by feelings of oppression and shame at the mere thought that he might encounter her. 3 Moreover, Raskolnikov was not a complete stranger to her, as he had been engaged to her late daughter. Nevertheless, she has no pity or compassion for him, nor does she honor the memory of her own departed. A middle-aged woman who had buried her husband and a marriageable daughter, she remains bashful, prudish, and fiercely chaste. It could not have been easy for a young educated man to be dependent upon such a woman. Raskolnikov’s manly self-esteem was infuriated, but he was unable to change anything. 4 Raskolnikov is surrounded by strong, masculine women of this type.5 From Marmeladov’s story he learned about “Darya Frantsovna, a woman of evil character” (17), who visited the Marmeladovs on many an occasion, trying to get her hands on Sonia. Raskolnikov later met a similar person at the police station: Luise Ivanovna, mistress of a brothel. Her appearance alone was enough to cause aversion, her huge brooch and sumptuous clothes symbols of her riches and power, which she emphasized, humiliating the threadbare Raskolnikov.6 The group of “bad” women includes Amalia Lippevechsel, the landlady of the Marmeladovs’ flat. A foreigner, a clamorous and merciless German, she intends to turn the widow Marmeladov and her children out into the street. The group of “bad” women also includes the repulsive, hard-headed Gertruda Karlovna Resslich, who tries to match Svidrigailov with a sixteen-year-old girl, daughter of ailing parents, knowing full well that as soon as that villain would

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get sick of her “she’d get hold of her and make a profit out of her” (368). Such masculine women encourage “free” sex, which in their opinion is related to pleasure and money—in other words, power. By contrast, Raskolnikov is more “feminine” than they: for him, sex means emotional commitment, responsibility, entrusting his self-confidence to the hands of a beloved woman. Raskolnikov found it intolerable to watch those scenes—such as those at Marmeladov’s place—or to hear the confessions, such as those of Svidrigailov—that reveal the social, moral, and personal violence done to “good” women by “bad,” masculine women. He found himself in the midst of a struggle between two groups of women—the “bad” women who acted in a rudely masculine, abusive way towards the “good,” feminine women, whom he found attractive and even desirable, and who needed his help. But he was incapable of rescuing them, and was thus forced to admit to himself that the “bad” women were more masculine than himself and that they had overcome him. He repeatedly felt like a powerless eunuch castrated by the masculine women.7 The old pawnbroker Alana Ivanovna provokes disgust by her very appearance. Her attitude toward Raskolnikov is masculine, powerful, almost sadistic: painfully humiliating, expressed in an abusive and scathing tone. His pride shudders, for he felt powerless against this rich and ugly old witch, who shamelessly and fearlessly determined people’s fates.8 The way out of this oppressive and degrading situation seemed obvious: to kill this “louse,” who had overstayed her life-span, to liberate the world from that evil, and thereby to protect the worthy, “good” women and validate his own status as an authentic man. 9 The relations between Raskolnikov and Sonia were unique: for him she was the symbol of feminine self-sacrifice, humility, and reckless devotion; she was explicitly a “good” woman. She became the dearest and the closest person for him, especially after the murder. Sonia, a pale and frightened girlwoman, evoked his desire to protect her from the cruel world ruled by such “bad” women as Darya Frantsovna. But his affection and love for her only deepened his feeling of being a castrated eunuch, for every other man in the world but he would have had sex with her. Her miserable room was the only place where she could receive guests. It was not for naught that Raskolnikov avoided sitting upon her bed, because that same bed may have been used by anyone who could pay for it—apart from himself. It was depressing for him to realize this fact, but he was powerless to prevent it. Nor could he have sex with her like her clients —such a thing would be too humiliating, bitter and painful. So he stumbled about, losing his masculine dignity yet again. Ironically, he could only visit her in her room, gaze at her bed, and imagine what it had been used for, while discussing Bible and moral values with her. 10

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Raskolnikov’s mother and sister are further vivid examples of “good” women. The author idealizes them: his mother, Pulcheria Alexandrovna, was not yet old, only forty-three, and “her face still retained traces of her former beauty; she looked much younger than her age” (158). She was sensitive, but not sickly-sweet; shy, yielding, and modest. She was particularly attractive because her femininity was elevated and dignified.11 Raskolnikov’s relationship with his mother also involved an Oedipal element. He was her firstborn, most loved, and all her hopes were pinned to him. It drove her to black despair when she learned that he had left the university “for lack of means to keep himself” (157). So she borrowed money and lived on the brink of starvation, her only intention being to help him. She accepted her daughter’s sacrifice unreservedly, only begging Raskolnikov to value this gift. Had she been confronted by a choice like that faced by Dounia or even by Sonia, she would have sacrificed herself for Rodion, as she now accepted her daughter’s sacrifice for him. In such a case, he would have become the pimp for his own mother.12 Raskolnikov’s sister Dounia was a fine and attractive young lady, whose striking appearance matched her brilliant individuality. Her main virtues were greatness of mind, firmness, moral purity, and chastity. She was yet another idealized “good” woman. Just as Raskolnikov felt Oedipal feelings towards his mother, so too was there an incestuous element in his relationship to Dounia. Dounia, after being ignominiously turned out of Svidrigailov’s house by Marfa Petrovna, was forced to accept Luzhin’s proposal to marry him, even though she despised and feared him. It was not easy for her to renounce her future, and to accept Luzhin’s proposal. She told her mother that she had taken the decision by which she wrecked her life, but saved—so it seemed to her—her brother’s. But how did Raskolnikov himself accept the news of his sister’s marriage? He was torn apart by the feeling of pity for his mother and Dounia, mixed with anger for them, so that “he felt cramped and stifled” (35). He understood that Dounia was prepared to suffer in her marriage only for his sake. She was about to become a prostitute, albeit within wedlock. It was the same thing as for Sonia, only possibly “worse, viler, baser,” because in Dounia’s case it was “a bargain for luxuries, after all, but with Sonia it was simply a question of starvation” (38).13 Dounia’s sacrifice was probably more painful for Raskolnikov because she was also closer to him than Sonia. Dounia and Sonia shared many features in common in Raskolnikov’s life.14 Raskolnikov felt himself emasculated in his relations with Sonia. After his father’s death he remained the only man in the family, the titular head of the family, supposed to protect his “good” beloved women, namely his mother

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and his sister. But he was unable to fulfill this masculine mission and redeem them from their harsh feminine lot, making him feel the same impotence as he did with regard to Sonia. Raskolnikov was thus forced to become a pimp for his own sister, while Luzhin would be her client. This situation was humiliating to his pride and dignity, both as the man of his family and as one who was attracted to Dounia. It added further to his feelings of emasculation, which were as terrible for him as death. In despair he cries out to his sister and mother: “I won’t have your sacrifice, Dounia, I won’t have it, mother! It shall not be, so long as I am alive, it shall not, it shall not!” (38). He cannot accept the sacrifice because he anticipates his own future in such case: he would turn into an abject Marmeladov, an alcoholic pimp for his own daughter, having lost all his masculine traits.15 Raskolnikov is poised as the antithesis to Luzhin, who is able to sustain his masculinity thanks to the financial resources available to him. Not only does Raskolnikov lose Dounia to him, but Luzhin also harms and slanders Sonia, while Raskolnikov stands by, unable to protect her. Luzhin’s entrance into the Raskolnikov family also causes suffering to his mother, as Luzhin, capable of any wickedness, would not tolerate his mother-in-law in his house, and she has a premonition of having to part from her daughter. By Dounia’s marriage, the mother also sacrifices herself for the sake of her son. All of the women whom Raskolnikov loved are hurt before his eyes by other men, while he, as a man, is unable to protect them. Humiliated and castrated, he is on the verge of descending to the state of a degraded eunuch like Marmeladov.16 In his eyes, he has no choice but to revolt by killing the pawnbroker, the focus of evil, the antithesis to his “good” women, for whom he is forced to pimp. This is his way of fulfilling the mission of being the savior of his beloved weak women and thereby maintaining his masculine honor. To summarize, Raskolnikov is attracted towards “good women,” but is unable to sleep with them. He cannot sleep with Sonia, because she is a prostitute, and he cannot make himself resemble one of her customers. He cannot sleep with his sister or mother, because that would be incestuous, but they are constantly being spiritually and emotionally raped by other men before his eyes, thereby turning him into their pimp. He suffers, is humiliated, and feels castrated. On the other hand, “bad women” dominate his life, force him to behave according to their will, humiliate him, spiritually rape him, castrate him, and he is unable to free himself of them. Under the influence of these frustrations and humiliations, Raskolnikov arrives at a state where he commits murder, thereby breaking out of the circle of women—both weak and wicked—in which he is imprisoned. Murder also involves an element

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of restoration of his masculine self-esteem, an alternative realization of his masculinity. Murder also entails flight from reality and from suicide, as in the wake of the murder he will be imprisoned for life, thereby escaping the world in which he is daily subject to renewed castration.17

“THE DEVIL” BY LEV TOLSTOY AND THE ATTEMPTED DEGRADATION OF A MAN BY A WOMAN Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828–1910) was one of the most important authors, reformers, and moral thinkers in the history of Russian culture. His religious and ethical system were well-shaped by this time, as was his attitude towards the relationship between the sexes. His influence on Russian and world culture is incalculable; numerous monographs and studies have been written and published about him and his oeuvre. “The Devil” is a story inspired by an episode in Tolstoy’s life. The novel tells of a decent nobleman who cannot overcome his lust for a pretty peasant girl. Tolstoy didactically argues that carnal desires lead a man to an abyss and ruin him, first spiritually and then physically. Woman, as, in his opinion, a primordially corrupt creature, does not suffer such moral distress related to forbidden sexual joys. Evgenii Irtenev, a young brilliant man, is presented as an ideal person with all of the finest attributes: appearance, descent, education, values. The author is unsparing in the words used to praise his hero in all possible respects: socially, spiritually, morally, and ideologically (220).18 His future is also described in ideal terms. Even the central problem of the story, based upon Evgenii’s only vice—his strong sexual drive—testifies to his perfect health and proper physical and spiritual development. Evgenii represents a genuine Russian nobleman, the future of Russia, its hope and its stay. After his father’s death, Evgenii has decided to settle down in his village and to become an efficient landowner (215). He chooses to sacrifice his career in order to build a bright future for the Russian peasants in the country. After a few months of hard work over his household affairs, there is one thing that distracts him from his business—his involuntary sexual incontinence. Evgenii was reasonably experienced with women, and always closely controlled this side of his life. Sex, as he used to say, was admissible “in so far as was necessary for physical health and to have his mind free” (217). With the help of a confidant, he found a suitable woman in the village, nicknamed Stepanida, seeing her merely as a tool for his physical wellbeing. At first it did not embarrass him that the woman was married (her husband stayed in a town) and, best of all, after being with her he “felt at ease, tranquil and vigor-

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ous” (219). He did not even look at her closely during the fifteen minutes he spent with her. When “after some time the same restlessness again overcame him,” it was no longer so impersonal, but he suggested the same woman (222). Gradually he became involved with her and even sexually addicted to her, even though he tried in vain to assure himself that he could control his desires in regard to her. Although he was aware that she was a wayward, blithe, frivolous tart, almost a whore, he could not rein himself in regard to her. He realized that the peasant women in the village knew about his shameful addiction to her and mocked him, but he could not alter his carnal desire for her. Eventually he even became jealous of her husband. In the meantime Evgenii became acquainted with Liza Annenskaya, his future fiancée, a suitable woman from his own social circle, whom he later married. He held family life sacred and could not even contemplate profaning it by continuing his relations with Stepanida. But a year after the marriage, Evgenii again met Stepanida, by chance. His desire, unsatisfied by marriage, flared up again. It was as if Stepanida were triggering him and challenging him, exciting and stimulating him, inspiring desire in him. The more attractive she appeared, the more he coveted her, and the duller, more withered and feeble his wife seemed to him. Torn between his passion and his duty, Evgenii felt disgusting and humiliated, despising himself. He would give up all that he valued—his honor, his wife, his family, his occupation—for one touch of Stepanida. He was defenseless in the struggle with his sexual drive; he lost his self-control. He was in need of sensible advice. All of Evgenii’s ideals and virtues were in danger of being destroyed because of the women surrounding him. As in the case of Raskolnikov, so too in that of Evgenii, there were “bad” women like Stepanida and the peasant women who strived to dominate over him, and there were “good” women, such as his wife, his mother, and his mother-in-law, who failed to support him in his struggle. They saw themselves as weak women and him, as the head of the family, responsible for them. His wife Liza, having neither wit nor beauty, herself turned his attention to the sprightly Stepanida, thereby worsening his situation. His mother had gotten used to relying, first on her husband, and then on her son. The presence of his mother-in-law, who lived in their house along with them, made the situation worse. He was overcrowded by simpleminded and irresponsible women who, by their nonsense, pushed him into the abyss. They spent their lives engaged in endless petticoat gossip. They did not understand him, but still felt certain that they could have solved his troubles in his place. They were unintelligent and barely coherent creatures, unattractive and asexual. Moreover, to his chagrin, they forced themselves

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upon him, thereby making his situation even more unbearable. Eventually it turned out that their presence in his life at that period contributed to the tragic consequences of the situation. He felt that only a man could really help another man to mend matters, and in this case perhaps it should have been Stepanida’s husband, whose return would restrain her. But like any man, including Evgenii himself, her husband was preoccupied with the serious business of real life, earning money in the town. Evgenii remained powerless in face of all these women. Only a man could provide him with support, only a man could be trusted to be a real human personality, as opposed to the woman, a harmful creature seeking to ruin the man by seducing him and thereby degrading him to her bestial level. An old uncle lodging with them gave Evgenii sound advice: to leave for a holiday break in the Crimea and do away with his anguish. A man was capable of understanding his spiritual pressure and needs and was able to help him to find a solution to his desperate situation. Two months spent in Yalta seemed to have cured Evgenii, and he returned home restored and happy. He was now a successful estate owner accepted in high society, a lucky husband and proud father. He had assumed control over his life and restored his selfrespect. But one day, he again unwittingly noticed the black eyes and red kerchief of Stepanida, and the whole thing began again: “Again those torments! Again all that horror and fear, and there was no saving himself” (252). Destroying all that had only a short time earlier been dear to him, unable to control himself, he walked to her house. The peasant women who saw him on the road ridiculed him. Once again his happiness was publicly ruined by that woman, who played a sadistic game with him and enjoyed seeing his spiritual agony. She seemed to have been the one to initiate the sexual relationship between them for her own pleasure and he had to defend himself from her. He was seduced against his will, surrendered to her, and got hurt by her. In the end, he was treated as a laughingstock. Unlike the stupid aristocratic women at his home, the malicious village maids were able to understand his sexual impulses—but they used the situation to make him their equal or even gaining some power over him. Stepanida and the other village women reduced his masculine self-esteem to naught, depriving him of self-control, let alone control over them. He was robbed of his spiritual dignity as a man and felt like a castrated eunuch, as though he had been raped and used by Stepanida and castrated after she was satisfied. He could see no way out of this terrible situation. How could he continue such a life? Evgenii faced the dilemma to continue in a humiliating existence which was worse than death, or to die—which meant to kill Stepanida as a punishment and to kill himself.19 Entirely ex-

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hausted, he arrived at thoughts of murder: “Kill? . . . for it is impossible to live like this” (253).20 Tolstoy believes that if a man is attracted to a woman against his will and cannot help his desire for her, she is responsible for his defeat in his internal struggle. In the first version of the novel Evgenii kills himself. But the author was evidently not happy with such an outcome because, in his opinion, the truly guilty one, Stepanida, remained unpunished. Ten years later he wrote another version of the ending, in which Evgenii shoots Stepanida to death. Stepanida simultaneously arouses within Evgenii’s heart feelings of sexual passion, anger, and desire for vengeance because of the humiliation she had caused him. He wants to destroy her, to erase her existence. After satisfying his lust, he also satisfies his anger, much like the murder of prostitutes by their clients after sleeping with them. The jury found him insane, and he was sentenced only to perform church penance. In both versions Evgenii ultimately dies, for in Tolstoy’s view moral decay amounts to death. His death also symbolizes the doomed future of Russia, as he was one of its best sons, and all that—because women uninhibited by morality caused this situation.

“DRAMA” BY ANTON CHEKHOV: SUCH A FUNNY MURDER OF A WICKED WOMAN Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904), a major Russian playwright and master of the modern short story, described Russian life of his time; he is regarded as the outstanding representative of the late nineteenth-century Russian realist school. The theme of the spiritual threat presented to man by woman is depicted in grotesque terms in Anton Chekhov’s story “Drama.” A certain Madame Murashkina comes to visit the landowner and writer, Pavel Vasilievich. The lady admires him for his literary talents; it is the sixth time she comes, she waits for him for hours, and he feels that he has no choice but to let her in. She is scandalously unattractive, bespectacled like an intellectual. She forces Pavel Vasilievich to listen to her play “Drama” in order to make up his mind about her talents. Pavel Vasilievich feels her very presence in his life to be an act of violence against him. Her ambitions as a writer, however ridiculous, are a threat to him: “Pavel Vasilievich liked only his own articles, but the writings of others which he had to read or listen to, had on him the effect of a cannon barrel aimed right at his face” (531). 21 The forced presence of this unspiritual person combined with her power to dominate seemed to detract from his self-esteem.

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But while he finds her sexually repulsive, he is unable to wrest himself free of her. Instead she imposes herself upon him by force, so that he feels as if he were trapped and raped. There is a long, dull, and ostentatiously dramatic reading of her huge play, to which he was a suffering victim. He yawns in hopeless despair, his spiritual dignity belittled and his masculine self-esteem downtrodden by her. The very fact that a woman could consider herself an author worthy of comparison to him led him to question his assessment of his own spirituality. He feels that she is turning him into a passive creature devoid of human dignity or even of the human image. Just as Rodyon Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and Evgenii Irtenev in The Devil found themselves surrounded by a herd of wicked women who dominated them and stole their masculine and human dignity, so too did Pavel Vasilievich find himself threatened by this woman. In the same way as Rodyon Raskolnikov confronted a threat to be turned into a Marmeladov, and Evgenii in Tolstoy’s work would be reduced to Stepanida’s level if he fails to murder her, Pavel Vasilievich faced a dilemma of choosing either spiritual degradation in the presence of this lady, or of murdering her. Just as the two above-mentioned protagonists rebelled against the brute force and victimization of a man by a woman, Pavel Vasilievich refused to accept the fate of a beast which the presence of this woman held out for him: Pavel Vasilievich yawned and his teeth generated a sound like that of a dog catching flies. He startled at this unbecoming sound, sat up, uttered a cry in an unnaturally rich throaty voice, grasped from the table a heavy paper-weight and, beside himself with rage, hauled off and struck her a blow right in the head (533–534).22

In this story, as in the two earlier ones, the protagonist kills a loathsome woman in order to preserve his personality, his spiritual significance, his masculine dignity, and even to brace himself morally: “‘Tie me up, I have killed her!’—he said after a minute to the servants who came rushing into the room” (534). In contrast to the works noted earlier, Chekhov treated this subject with humor: “He was acquitted by the jury”—a jury composed, we must assume, exclusively of men.23 In this humorous short piece, as in the writings discussed above, it is the woman who creates an unbearable atmosphere surrounding the man, threatening his spirituality, and filling his entire space. Man detests her, she is intrusive, he does not want her in his world, and the violation of his spiritual ego drives him to a state of despair and a sense of imminent danger to his entire being and self-esteem. One should also note the psychological dimension: her sexual power over the man is either too strong and allows her to manipulate him, as in the above

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story by Tolstoy in which she pulls down his masculine ego or, to the contrary, she is lacking in any sexuality, thereby also depressing his sexual drive, as the pawn-broker in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or Murashkina, in this Chekhov story. In either case it is the woman who dominates his masculine ego—either by inspiring his desire for her beyond his power and self-control, or by forcing him to accept her presence in his world against his will. In Chekhov’s story, an asexual woman who dominates the hero rouses the offense to his masculine dignity and turns him against herself. Unlike Dostoevky’s Crime and Punishment or Tolstoy’s The Devil, Chekhov’s “Drama” treats this subject from an anecdotic angle. But beyond its humorous surface we find the same loss of self-esteem and desire for revenge on the part of the protagonist.

SUMMARY In this chapter we have considered a recurrent theme in Russian literature: a woman who coerces a man to accept her physical and spiritual existence in his life. Such a woman can be outrageously asexual and utterly disgusting to him or, on the other hand, extraordinarily sexual, to the extent that she oppresses and enslaves him. In either case she deprives him of his self-control and his control over his surroundings, rapes him, humiliates him, and in the final analysis creates a feeling of castration within him. The woman forcibly intrudes upon the man’s world; his compulsory submission rouses his indignation and threatens to reduce him (in both the personal and masculine sense) to her level. She has no respect for him; on the contrary, she mocks him. He loses his masculine dignity and fears that he will become a castrated eunuch because of that woman. He finds himself in desperate panic and a hopeless situation, which is no better for him than death. In all of the above-discussed stories, the man and woman “change sexes”: he satisfies her wishes, while he feels abused and raped. Even when they have sexual relations at his request and at his initiative, she enjoys them rather than suffering them as he would expect. The woman is not violated or humiliated by him, as he would probably wish, but rather feels herself his equal, or even patronizes him, making him feel emasculated. A man’s emotional self-esteem is rooted in the psychological satisfaction he derives from seeing the woman weakened, reduced, conquered by him against her will. But in the works discussed above, the strong woman, to the contrary, forces herself on the man. He feels that in such a case failure to murder her would lead to his spiritual and masculine, and consequently also physical, suicide. She is the cause of his predicament. His dilemma is whether

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to allow her to destroy him or to murder her, and he naturally chooses the second option. 24 NOTES 1. On Dostoevsky and his female protagonists, see Harriet Murav, “Reading Woman in Dostoevsky,” in A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature, ed. Sona Stephan Hoisington (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1995). Hoisington, 44–57, especially with regard to Crime and Punishment, 56. See also Nina Pelikan-Straus, Dostoyevsky and the Woman Question: Re-Reading at the End of a Century (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994); Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987), esp. 30 ff. 2. On the irrational in Raskolnikov’s actions, see T. R. Edwards, Three Russian Writers and the Irrational: Zamyatin, Pil’nyak and Bulgakov (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982), 34–35. 3. F.M. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, in his Collected Writings, vol. 6 (Leningrad: Nauka Publishing House, 1973), 5. All quotations are from this edition. 4. On the landlady as an evil and mean person who deserved to be murdered, see Edna C. Florance, “The Neurosis of Raskolnikov,” in Crime and Punishment and the Critics, ed. Edward Wasiolek (Belmont, California: Wardsworth, 1961), 57–76, at 59–60. 5. On the hatred of a strong woman, see Lina Lubomirsky, “‘The Militant Woman’ in the Lithuanian-Polish Union,” in Women on the Age of Europe, ed. Elena Gapova (Minsk: The European Humanistic University, 2003), 33–44. 6. Dostoevsky, 6. 7. On the women’s role in Raskolnikov’s conduct and his way of thinking, see Nina Pelikan-Straus, “Why Did I Say ‘Women!?’: Raskolnikov Reimagined,” Diacritics 23:1 (1993): 54–65. 8. See: Fritz A. Henn, “The Aggressive Sexual Offender,” in Violence: Perspectives on Murder Aggression, ed. Irwin L. Kutash, Samuel B. Kutash, Louis B. Schlesinger, et al. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1978) 301–316. Raskolnikov wanted to kill the pawnbroker because she repressed his male ego. During this period of frustration he wanted to rape her in order to punish her, to take control over her. Henn states: “The profile of the rapist is similar to that of a felon involved in crimes against persons or property. He is a young, poor male, [ . . . ] may well merit the diagnostic label of antisocial personality, but he is unlikely to suffer from a psychotic disorder.” (309) 9. See Gary Cox, Crime and Punishment: A Mind to Murder (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 6–7: “[Crime and Punishment] lays out a new map of the human personality, with irrational drives bubbling beneath the surface of behavior, and it outlines Dostoyevsky’s view of the fundamental problem in human interaction: the inability to interact with others except through domination. Each of the large novels of Dostoyevsky’s mature years may be seen as an attempt to resolve this problem.” On the attempt to find a suitable solution for human interaction other than domination, see

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Dina Rubina’s On the Upper Maslovka, cited in the last chapter of this study. Rubina claims to have found a solution, not through domination, but rather by ideal platonic love between the sexes. On the other hand, such an approach appears naïve, idealistic, and utopian—in other words, unrealistic and inapplicable in practice. 10. On murder as a substitute for a forbidden or impossible sex act, see Florance, “Neurosis of Raskolnikov”: 74–77. 11. Raskolnikov’s mother agreed that Dounia should marry Luzhin, even though she disliked him, thereby in effect becoming a prostitute through marriage. She convinced Raskolnikov to accept this sacrifice and to profit from this same marriage, making him a pimp for his own sister. See Florance, “Neurosis of Raskolnikov”: 64–70. 12. See A. D. Nuttall, Crime and Punishment: Murder as Philosophic Experiment (Edinburgh: Sussex UP, 1978), 86–87: “His [Raskolnikov’s] sister and mother both sacrifice themselves to him over and over again [ . . . ] their poverty is largely occasioned by Raskolnikov himself.” Nutall asserts that “Raskolnikov was driven to the murder by the pressure of his family, which consisted only of his beloved women” (87). 13. See Ivan Andreevich Esaulov, “Sacrifice and Beneficence” [Russian “Zhertva i zhertvennost”], in Socialist Realist Canon, ed., Hans Günter and Evgeny Dobrenko (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii Proekt, 2000), 797–802. 14. Raskolnikov committed the murders so as to be imprisoned and thereby avoid committing such taboo acts as incest with his mother and his sister. See Florance, “Neurosis of Raskolnikov,” esp. 61–64. 15. See the chapter “The Psychological Problem” in Nuttall, Crime and Punishment, 86–105. Nuttall asks the simple question, “Why did he do it?” (86), referring to the murder. Nutall argues that Raskolnikov actually had no choice: he had to either kill or become an alcoholic like Marmeladov (89 ff.). 16. Even though the men are portrayed by Doestoevsky as morally lowly and downtrodden, they nevertheless have greater intellectual ability than do the women. The men philosophize and articulate their theories of life: Raskolnikov evolves a theory which is formulated by a male student in a paltry pub: “Kill her [the pawnbroker], take her money and with the help of it devote yourself to the service of humanity and the good of all” (54); Pyotr Luzhin evolves his economic theory of “reasonable self-interest” (116); Lebeziatnikov speaks about communes and advocates nihilism; fuzzy Marmeladov rises to philosophical generalizations about poverty and penury; investigator Porfiry Petrovitch evolves the concept of the guilt feelings by a killer. Even painter Mikolka takes the blame upon himself, not for fear, but for the sake of his own theory, stating that “sufferings must be embraced.” By contrast, neither “bad” nor “good” women have such intellectual talents. See also Heldt, Terrible Perfection, 19: “The hero and heroine, both Russian and usually of the same social class, are from different worlds, the male and female. The female culture is based on feelings; the male culture is based on ideas. . . . The female, whole and perfect in herself, is to the male a fragment of a missing piece of himself, a vital part of him that should exist but does not, a link to a reality with which he is doomed to break (in both its feminine and its social form).” See Amy Mandelker, Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy,

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the Woman Question and the Victorian Novel (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1993); and cf. Gary Rosenfeld, “Afterword: The Problems of Gender Criticism or What Is to Be Done about Dostoyevsky,” in A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature, ed. Sona Stephan Hoisington (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1995), 114–124, esp. 117. 17. See Heldt, “Misogyny and the Power of Silence,” in her Terrible Perfection, 25–37; on misogyny in Dostoyevsky’s works, specifically, see 35–37. 18. See Lev Tolstoy, The Devil, Novels and Stories in 2 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1960), 2:214–257. All quotations are from this edition. 19. About the psychological dangers to men resultant from having sex, see Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, Tolstoy on the Couch: Misogyny, Masochism and the Absent Mother (New York: NYUP, 1998), 141–142. According to Rancour-Laferriere, sex is viewed in the Russian patriarchal tradition as being so dangerous that at times “sex can literally lead to murder of the woman” by the man (142). 20. David Gillespie writes: “Discussions on misogyny in Russian literature generally focus on sexual relationships (or potential ones), where the threat of female sexuality is effectively neutralized by the death of the woman.” See his article, “Is Village Prose Misogynistic?” in Women and Russian Culture: Projections and SelfPerceptions, ed. Rosalind Marsh (Oxford-New York: Berghahn Books, 1998), 237. 21. A. P. Chekhov, “Drama,” Novels and Stories (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1969), 530–534; all quotations are from this edition. 22. On Chekhov as a master of intrigue stories, see G. N. Pospelov, “The Style of Čexov’s Tales,” in Anton Cˇexov as a Master of Story-Writing: Essays in Modern Soviet Literary Criticism, ed. and trans., Leo Hulanicki and Davic Savignac (The Hague-Paris: Mouton, 1976), 119–130, esp. 119–120. 23. See Carolina De Maegd-Soep, Chekhov and Women: Women in the Life and Work of Chekhov (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers, 1987), 227: “In Chekhov’s early work satire often replaces humor whenever he gives a picture of the so-called ‘vamp.’” On the comic aspects of the story, translated as “A Play,” see the chapter entitled “The Artist Emerges, 1885–1887,” in Roland L. Johnson, Anton Chekhov: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1993), 17–49, esp. 45 ff. 24. Darra Goldstein, “Domestic Porkbarreling in Nineteenth-Century Russia, or, Who Holds the Keys to the Larder?,” in Russia, Women, Culture, ed., Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (Bloomington–Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1996), 131: “Much attention has been given to the image of the strong woman in Russian literature, particularly in regard to the weak heroes surrounding her.” In that same spirit, see Vera Sandomirsky-Dunham, “The Strong Woman Motif,” in The Transformation of Russian Society: Aspects of Social Change since 1861, ed. Cyril E. Black (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1960), 459–483, esp. 468; cf. Heldt, Terrible Perfection, the chapter entitled “Misogyny and the Power of Silence,” 25–37; and see also Nicole Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1987).

Chapter Three

Woman as Sexual Predator in Russian Literary Tradition: Tolstoy, Zoschenko, and Trifonov

There is a tendency in classical Russian literature to portray woman as a sexual predator who, in her relations with men, wraps herself in the docile mantle of a sheep but in her heart eagerly strives to derive as much profit from him as possible—even if this means ruining his life and eventually killing him. To illustrate this tendency, in this chapter we shall consider works by three distinguished but very different authors from three distinct periods: Lev Tolstoy’s “Father Sergius,” Mikhail Zoschenko’s “People,” and Yuri Trifonov’s “The Exchange.” These authors belonged to different epochs, dissimilar social and political environments, and used different artistic techniques and methods for portraying reality. But these differences did not carry over to their perceptions and interpretations of relationships between man and woman; rather, in this respect there was an uncanny similarity among them, transcending all the differences.

LEV TOLSTOY’S “FATHER SERGIUS”: A GODLY MAN’S STRUGGLE WITH A MONSTROUS FEMALE MAN-EATER In the protagonist of “Father Sergius,” Prince Stepan Kasatsky, Tolstoy portrayed his own intimate spiritual experiences. A crucial role in the ruin of 41

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both his career and personal life was played by a woman—his bride, Countess Mary Korotkova, the emperor’s mistress. He learns from her the truth about this liaison prior to their planned marriage, and all he can think of is his blindness to have mistaken this corrupt creature for an innocent angel; Mary’s young, fresh, and attractive appearance masked a jaded monster. From that point on, he regards Mary as a miscreant, a brutal man-eater; he constantly thinks about how his tender and innocent feelings for her had been exploited to serve as a cover for her sin. Mary revealed the truth about herself before the wedding, thereby giving Kasatsky the opportunity to renege on his original intention of marrying her—as he did with alacrity. He nevertheless continued to see her as a wicked woman who had deceived him. But the only act of deceit here was the result of Kasatsky’s own impression—an impression that she herself took pains to correct, thereby harming herself. He was so devastated by her revelation that he even asked to be discharged from the army, and moved to the country. Thereafter he turned to the one place where he thought it might be possible for him to avoid further encounters with women —to the monastery, where he became the monk Father Sergius and began his long and thorny path to God. Later on he withdrew even further from the wicked world and removed himself to a remote hermitage, where no one would disturb his solitude. But here, too, there was a woman who brought him to a state of frantic despair, precipitating within him a lustful obsession. One night a woman approached his hermitage in order to seduce him—Makovkina, a woman wellexperienced with men, who entertained the idea that she would spend a night in the cell of this well-known, handsome hermit and seduce him. For her this was an amusement, a game, like trying to win a wager, and she was certain that she could succeed. She came in order to rob him of the spiritual merit he had earned through suffering and sacrifices, intending to devour him sexually and thereby destroy his life. There ensues a scene of shameless and derisive seduction of a man pursuing a saintly life by a low, vulgar, and provincial coquette. For Father Sergius, surrender to carnal lust was tantamount to perdition, causing him to lose the sanctity which he had acquired through years of zealous monasticism. But what did all that matter to a bored and corrupted hussy? She was particularly intrigued by his holiness; she tried to spoil and ruin him, to reduce him to the filth in which she herself was descending. Father Sergius was confronting spiritual rape by a man-eating sexual monster. In order to stem his desire, Father Sergius cut off his finger and came to the woman with blood dripping from the stump of his finger. The finger symbolized his phallus, and the dripping blood—his semen. Thus, the sexual contact between them symbolically took place, but in a masochistic manner,

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as he preferred. Tolstoy thereby teaches us that the only way yielding to sexual desire may be spiritually rewarded is by satisfying it in the way done by Father Sergius.1 Tolstoy paints Makovkina in almost inhuman colors, focusing on the frightening and dangerous spectacle of a female sexual organ walking on two legs, while ignoring other aspects of her physical, emotional and spiritual existence. Woman’s attractiveness and sexuality are the enemy of man’s spirituality. She constitutes the chief danger to the integrity of man’s personality. What can a man do so that woman will cease to be a destructive threat lying in wait for him? How can he save himself from the woman’s devouring grasp? Tolstoy distinguishes between two components in the woman’s personality—the human and the feminine. The feminine component must be uprooted, allowing only the human component to remain. How is this to be done? Her life must be filled with suffering; she must be left with neither the possibility nor the desire to project sexuality. She must forego her own wishes and undergo difficulties, upheavals, insults, and humiliations. A woman needs to be submissive, humble, and unhappy, to the extent that she must sacrifice any desire to be feminine, and worry anxiously about her basic physical survival. An example of this approach is Pashenka, a cousin of Kasatsky, whom he had known in his childhood. Kasatsky remembers Pashenka as a silly and pitiable girl. Later she married a landowner who was in the habit of beating her, with whom she led a wretched life, barely surviving. When Kasatsky saw her again she looked much older than her age. Pashenka was dull, poor, and oppressed, having been reduced to a miserable state throughout her existence. In her figure, the original man-eating female monster became a harmless, toothless old creature, powerless and helpless: this was the only way for a woman to enjoy the right to live.2 The encounter with Pashenka frees Kasatsky from women’s domination over him and his fear of them, restoring his self-confidence and self–respect.3 Tolstoy’s ideal woman is desexualized, she gives birth to numerous offspring through difficult labor, and she is plain and simple-hearted. She is lacking in sexuality to the point of appearing ridiculous and pitiful—that is, an anti-sexual, repulsive female creature. In this way, men will never desire her for her attractiveness. Rather, the accepted manner of bodily contact with her is by means of blows, the very antithesis of sexual contact and a natural continuation of Tolstoy’s sado-masochistic attitude towards women. The good woman, according to Tolstoy, is thus reduced to a minimum physical existence: constantly depressed and punished, to the extent that she will not even be allowed in church.4 In the preceding chapter, we presented works in which the woman forces herself upon the man and threatens his spiritual calm. To avoid degradation,

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the man, in despair and emotional confusion, attacks the woman and kills her. In the present work of Tolstoy, we see what happens when a man fails to attack such a woman: he is forced to attack and to harm himself—a solution preferable to spiritual decline and loss of self-esteem. A man who does not attack the woman first, by way of self-defense, ultimately becomes her victim. In Tolstoy’s opinion, the cure for this situation is to repress the woman to the point that she is reduced to the level of struggle for sheer physical survival. Such a woman will not threaten his spiritual equanimity, and will not arouse fears of seduction and loss of self-control. To the contrary, she will elicit revulsion, and thereby restore his sense of self-esteem and control. There is no place for two survivors in the relations between man and woman: either the man preserves his own personal dignity as a male, in which case he must harm the woman, or else the woman will destroy him and change his life to worse than death.

MIKHAIL ZOSCHENKO’S “PEOPLE”: A NAÏVE MAN AND A MANIPULATIVE WICKED SEX-MONSTER Mikhail Mikhaylovich Zoshchenko (1895–1958) was a Soviet satirist, whose short stories and sketches are considered among the best comic literature of the Soviet period. His tales are mostly satires on everyday contemporary Soviet life, one of his targets being bureaucratic red tape and corruption, which he attacked with tongue-in-cheek wit and a mocking, ironic style. Zoschenko’s short story “People” [“Ludi”] mingles sorrow, regret, anguish and compassion for its ridiculous protagonist, Ivan Belokopytov, with excruciatingly realistic exposure of the merciless, philistine, niggardly, and immovable Russian society of those days.5 Several years after the Revolution, Ivan Ivanovich Belokopytov, a not-young man of noble class returns from abroad to his provincial hometown in Russia, along with his dancer wife, Nina Arbuzova, later revealed as a gross creature that ruins his life. Already at the beginning of the novel the contradiction between Belokopytov and his wife is shown: he is a clumsy, idealistic, unworldly dreamer, while she is a shallow, sly, immoral woman.6 Upon returning to Russia, they do not realize how miserable their situation is. With difficulty, they manage to find an uncomfortable room to rent in a shared apartment. Their neighbor, Yarkin, who rents the adjacent room in the same apartment, is the director of a local bakery, allowing him a certain degree of economic and social clout.7 By contrast, Ivan Ivanovich barely managed to find a place of work in a food shop at low wages, while his wife passes her days in indolence, fantasizing about a life of glamour. But the actual situation of the couple did not jive with these fantasies of hers. As a result, she began to pressure her husband to

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steal from the store where he worked, and he took her advice. He was soon caught red-handed and dismissed amidst scandal. As for his wife, she found a solution of her own: she started flirting with their prosperous neighbor, for whom she eventually left Belokopytov. Wretched Ivan Ivanovich went off to a forest, where he crept into a ramshackle earth-house. Over time, he became used to life in the forest and adopted the behavior of a wandering nomad. When winter came, he died in the forest. Zoschenko portrays an impossible match between a weak man and an egoistic, primitive woman. He identifies with Ivan Ivanovich and describes him, albeit somewhat ironically, with compassion and warmth. He presents his past, his inner world, and his hopes with distinctive details.8 The protagonist’s wife, by contrast, is described as lacking in any sort of interior world; she is only portrayed in terms of externalities. She pushes her husband to commit a crime, and betrays him in a moment for the sandwiches their neighbor feeds her. To this, the narrator adds that “his opinion about ballet-girls is rather low” (423).9 She is a vulgar, frivolous, and grasping woman, who uses her sexual charms to acquire favors for herself. We thus find here yet another woman who dominates her man and casts him away after abusing him.10 From the moment they return to Russia until after their separation, Belokopytov is trampled by his wife. She discovers his low sexual drive in contrast to her own, and presents him as sexually, socially, and spiritually impotent. She insults him in an ongoing, consistent, and public way: she interrupts his dialogue with a porter upon their arrival in Russia, she causes him to lie and to steal, and in the end she abandons him in favor of another man, who seems the embodiment of masculinity in contrast to him. Belokopytov finds comfort in the fact that she left him—not only because he is thereby freed of responsibility for her, as the author says, but also because his castration and degradation thereby end. But ironically for him, he becomes free of this woman when it is already too late. Even after Belokopytov is freed of this woman, he masochistically pursues the last bit of humiliation by her. He returns to his former home, only to see his former wife and her lover living happily together and expecting a child. He thereby completes the process of his own castration and decline to bestiality. He becomes a dog, his tongue sticking out and drooling; his former neighbors treat him with pity, like a vagrant street dog—and this attitude turns out to be correct, as he responds by gratefully licking the hands of one of his neighbors who offers him food.11 In this state, death arrives after harsh suffering, which drives him insane.12 The story of Belokopytov illustrates what happens to a man who, through excessive soft-heartedness and loyalty to ethical values, refrains from attacking the woman, but instead allows her to castrate him and torment him until his death.13

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YURI TRIFONOV’S “THE EXCHANGE”—A MAN’S LIFE RUINED BY HIS WOMAN Yuri Trifonov (1925–1981), an outstanding Russian prose author of his generation, was the creator of “alternative literature” within the official Soviet prose directed against the injustices of Soviet life. The story “The Exchange” [“Obmen”] is obviously autobiographical.14 The time is the 1960s; the characters are ordinary Muscovites, dealing with the usual chronic, exhausting problems: lack of housing, lack of decent work, scanty salaries unrelated to the needs of normal life, and frequent blind-alley situations—which in turn lead to crooked actions.15 “The Exchange” begins with a description of Victor Dmitriev’s mother, Ksenia Fedorovna, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. While she thought it was only a passing illness, her family realized that her days were numbered. In light of the situation, Dmitriev’s wife, Lena, suggested that they go live together with his mother, in a nice apartment in the center of Moscow. Thus, after she died, they could remain there.16 But for a number of years harsh and difficult relations had prevailed between Dmitriev’s wife and his mother, to the point of rejection and mutual hatred. When, in the past, Dmitriev had suggested that they go to live together with his mother so that the latter not be so lonely, Lena had always firmly refused. Were they to move into her apartment now, at the time of her illness, she would immediately realize that her illness was not a passing thing, as she had believed, but terminal. Lena ordered Dmitriev to go to his mother and tell her that they were coming to move in with her. Lena was shameless and knew no moral limits: “when Lena raised the topic suddenly, Dmitriev was scared. . . . He turned pale and slack, and could not look up at Lena. . . . But when he nevertheless dared to look straight into her eyes, what he saw in them was set determination” (8).17 He saw that going to his mother and telling her that they were moving in was now impossible, unthinkable, and told this to Lena, to which she replied: “Vitya, my dear, . . . I say that we need it [the apartment], and you must agree.” But Victor did not want to agree or to resign. Even more “convincing” was the next night full of passion on the part of Lena, after which, with a bit of morning diplomacy, she told Victor, in a matter-of-fact way: “Just tell her [Ksenia Fedorovna] that you need the key.” Victor felt himself helpless, ghastly and harrowingly impotent when confronted by his wife. He felt that she was raping him, doing with him as she wished, teasing him, forcing him to betray his mother, respect for whom was his supreme value and who was dearer to him than he was to himself. But after much suffering and bitterness, he submitted to his wife out of weakness of character, lack of decisiveness, loneliness, fear, and self-contempt.

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He had been thinking once again how much better it would have been had he married a different woman. And such a truly loving woman did in fact exist in his life. Victor met Tanya, a beautiful woman, through whom he learned for the first time what it meant to be loved. If Tanya had been his wife, he would not have to compromise his initial ideals, values, and spiritual world. Victor would not have committed any of his “exchanges”—in either the professional, family, social, or moral sense—and none of the transformations and mean actions, for which he lost his own self-respect, would have occurred. She was the exact opposite of Lena, but he dared not even think of leaving Lena. It was awful to contemplate what he was about to do—to announce to his mother that he and his wife intended to move into her apartment—because this meant telling her to her face that she was doomed, and that he, her son Victor, wanted to take advantage of her death; that he was prepared to force his mother to live out her final months among people who were alien, unpleasant, and hostile to her, and then to die before their eyes. This would surely accelerate and aggravate her death—yet he did everything that his wife had told him to say and to do, literally and almost wholeheartedly. But while doing so, he nearly blacked out. Victor was prepared to carry out Lena’s orders, not only at the price of sacrificing his own will, his own masculinity, his self-respect, but also to the detriment of his own health. What infuriated him in particular was that he was doing these things, causing him to feel contempt in his own eyes. He did not love Lena, he did not respect her, and he did not desire her—indeed, he had no positive feelings towards her, but only a sense of submission. Every day she castrated him anew, while mistreating him. Dmitriev saw how she manipulated him, caused him to cheat, to trick his friends, to behave corruptly and immorally. One duplicity followed another; one mean action was superimposed upon the next.18 He did not notice what was happening to him—and this state of affairs continued even after he ceased to love Lena, and began to perceive her incessant aggressiveness and hostility towards him. He always submitted to Lena’s will, even when she undermined him, his life plans, and his family. As time went on, he behaved more and more disgracefully—and all for Lena’s sake, or incited by her. Dmitriev felt “bewilderment” because of his indecisiveness with her, his inability to reject her, to contradict her, to resist her. She shamelessly abused his weakness. He had no reasonable explanation for his own behavior; he gradually became filled with self-contempt, frustration, and bitterness. He saw his own life as despicable, primarily because he did not respect himself. He became a raped and degraded eunuch, like Dostoevsky’s Marmeladov and Zoschenko’s Belokopytov.

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Upon moving into Ksenia Fedorovna’s apartment, Victor and Lena celebrated the housewarming—but the guests felt as though they were attending the old lady’s funeral. Even during the last days of his mother’s life, Victor could not spend any time with her, but raced about to municipal and lawyers’ offices to gather the papers needed for the transaction. It was this that preoccupied Victor while his mother was dying.19 Victor did things that harmed him, that shamed him, and which were hateful and contemptible in his eyes. Why did he behave this way? In the author’s opinion, this behavior derived from the weakness of his character. Additional reasons were his feelings of inferiority with respect to Lena, which the author notes in describing the early years of their life together, when Victor still admired her; Oedipal feelings which he projected onto her, in the hope that she would protect him from the cruel outside world; and his own masochistic tendencies, because of which he always preferred her welfare over his own. After Ksenia Fedorovna was buried, Victor and Lena remained in the twobedroom apartment which they had managed to obtain so smoothly. Victor hoped to be compensated by Lena with greater warmth and friendship consequent to his betrayal of his mother for Lena’s convenience, but nothing changed in their life. He had traded his mother to enjoy a little affection on the part of Lena, but instead he felt that she again manipulated, cheated, and abused him. He had paid an unthinkable price, more than he ever thought he was capable of giving—namely, the welfare of his own mother—but he received nothing in return. The apartment itself was a constant reminder to Victor of his mother and of the manner in which this dwelling had been obtained. The empty, petty, and obnoxious life from which he could not break loose finally wore away at his soul. He developed severe hypertension and became prematurely old.20 Dmitriev’s life was ruined by his wife—a young, attractive, sexy witch. She seduced him through sex, and attached him to herself through sly and impudent behavior. Lena is described in the novel with unconcealed hatred, while Victor, infantile and easily pressured, is depicted with genuine compassion and sorrow. He is the victim, and Lena is the embodiment of evil, not merely in herself, through her sexuality, but as a cruel person of unlimited corruption.

SUMMARY There is a definite tendency in Russian classical literature to present a shemonster in the guise of an innocent, highly sexual young woman who leads a naive man into the abyss of immorality, forcing him to betray his ideals. Such a monster uses her physical allure to profit from the material and social

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benefits of her victim. Nothing can stop her in the pursuit of her goals, and she is prepared unhesitatingly to totally destroy the man.21 For his part, the man is deluded by the woman’s attractive appearance and fails to perceive immediately her gross and avaricious nature. Least of all can such a man suspect that the seemingly pleasant and naïve woman is capable of destroying him merely to gain a few petty luxuries for herself. When, to his surprise, he finally discovers her true character, it is usually too late to remedy the situation or to separate. He sees himself trapped, not by a loving angel, as he had previously thought, but by a voracious witch. The woman eventually “devours” the man.22 Such is the situation portrayed in Mikhail Zoschenko’s “People” and in Trifonov’s “The Exchange.” Moreover, at times a woman is ready to sadistically deprive a man of his spiritual aspirations merely for the sake of sport, as in Tolstoy’s “Father Sergius.”23 What can a man do in such a situation? Not much. Unlike those works described in the previous chapter, in which the man destroys the woman and in the wake of this himself, in the works described in this chapter the man absorbs insults, humiliations, contempt, castration, and daily spiritual murders from his wife due to his soft-heartedness, fear, hesitancy, and psychological impotence. But this restrained behavior on his part does not save him, as in the final analysis he is harmed as a result of the troubles and diseases that befall him as a result of internalizing his woman’s attitude towards himself. What is the better choice for the man: to harm his evil and vicious woman and to pay the social, psychological, ethical, and often also legal price, or to absorb her constant humiliations? In the former case, he at least protects his own dignity as a man and as a personality, while in the second case, although it is true that he does prolong his life for a certain period of time, his life is unbearably bitter, perhaps even more so than death. 24 NOTES 1. On Tolstoy’s masochistic tendencies and its connection to the sense of guilt, see Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, Tolstoy on the Couch: Misogyny, Masochism and the Absent Mother (New York: NYUP, 1998), 151 ff. 2. Compare to Debora Cameron and Elizabeth Fraser, The Lust to Kill: A Feminist Investigation of Sexual Murder (Cambridge-Oxford: Polity Press, 1987), 97 ff. On the depth of patriarchy in traditional Russian rural society see Barbara Alpern Engel, Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work, and the Family in Russia, 1861–1914 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1996), 7ff. 3. Ruth Cergo-Benson, Women in Tolstoy: The Ideal and the Erotic (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1973); Judith Armstrong, The Unsaid Anna Karenina (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988).

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4. Tolstoy’s didactic writings are discussed in Gary Saul Morson, “The Reader as Voyeur: Tolstoi and the Poetics of Didactic Fiction,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 12:4 (Winter 1978): 465–480. 5. Sociological aspects of Zoschenko’s works are discussed by V. Veshnev, “A Heart-to-Heart Talk” [Russian: “Razgovor po dusham”] in The Face and Mask of Mikhail Zoschenko, ed. Yu. V. Tomashevsky (Moscow: Olimp, 1994), 152–161; see esp., on the sociological aspects of “People,” 153. 6. On Zoschenko’s female characters, see V. Gorshkov, G. Vaulin, L. Rutkovskaya, and P. Bolshakov, “On One Harmful Story” [Russian: “Ob odnoi vrednoi povesti”] in The Face and Mask of Mikhail Zoschenko, 202–210: “Zoschenko’s women are portrayed as having no morals or honor; they have nothing on the brain but to trick their husbands. . . . They are merely females . . . and the reader is drowned in the sea of vulgarity and dirt” (203). 7. See C. S. Volpe, The Art of Being Different (Moscow: Sovetsky Pisatel, 1991), 193: “Zoschenko portrays the world of Belokopytov as a ‘lesser man’ in 20th century humanistic Russian literature . . . as a liberal landlord’s dear child, who had learned Spanish and Latin and returned after the Revolution to Russia where he turned out to be a maladjusted outsider.” 8. Volpe, The Art, writes, 206, “Zoschenko portrays his protagonist as a ‘small world philosopher’” (194). See also: “Zoschenko’s irony is philosophical. . . . The tradition of Zoschenko’s style is rooted in the philosophical and social irony of the 19th century Russian classical literature, which followed Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’ and Dostoyevsky’s ‘Poor Folk’.” See also A.K. Zholkovsky, Mikhail Zoschenko: The Poetics of Distrust (Moscow: Shkola “Yazyki russkoi kultury,” 1999), 277. 9. Mikhail Zoschenko, “People,” in his Selected Works (Moscow: Pravda Publishers, 1981), 404–437. All quotations are from this edition. 10. Such are many of the wives described in “ideal” marriages by Zoschenko. See A. K. Zholkovsky, “The Dentist, the Greedy Milkwoman, the Cultured Handyman, and Their Author: A Forceful Marriage in Zoschenko’s Ouvre,” Literary Review 5-6 (1996): 128–144. 11. A.K. Zholkovsky, “Food, Fear, Feigning, and Flight in Zoshchenko’s ‘Foreigners,’” Russian Literature 40:3 (1996): 385–404. 12. R. May, “Superego as Literary Subtext: Story and Structure in Mikhail Zoshchenko’s ‘Before Sunrise,’” Slavic Review 55:1 (1996): 106–124; Thomas Hodge, “Freudian Elements in Zoshchenko’s ‘Pered Voskhodom Solntsa,’” Slavonic and East European Review 67:1 (1989): 1–28. 13. Galina Belaia, “Existential Issues in M. Zhoschenko’s Oevre,” Literary Review 1 (1995): 4–13. 14. On his works, see Nina Kolesnikoff, Yuri Trifonov: A Critical Study (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1991), in particular the chapter “Moscow Novellas”; on Trifonov’s “The Exchange,” see 56–59. Kolesnikoff notes that the difference between Dmitriev’s voice and that of the implied author is minimal (58), and the attitude of both towards Lena is sarcastic. Kolesnikoff quotes from Trifonov in regard to Lena, 59: “such a nice-looking lady-bulldog with short straw-colored hair and an always pleasantly tanned, slightly dark face. She did not let up until her wishes—right in her

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teeth—turned into flesh. A great trait! Wonderful, amazingly decisive in life. The trait of real men”; cf. Josephine Woll, Invented Truth: Soviet Reality and the Literary Imaginations of Yuri Trifonov (Durham–London: Duke UP, 1991), 25 ff. 15. The background of harsh material and social conditions is the primary cause of the described events and complexities in relations between the characters in Trifonov’s works. See: Woll, Invented Truth, 24 ff. See also, about the problems of everyday life (in Russian: Byt, usually with a negative connotation) and how they affect people’s personal relationships, in Catriona Kelly, “Who Wants to Be a Man? De-Stalinizing Gender, 1954–1992,” in A History of Russian Women’s Writing: 1820–1992, ed. Catriona Kelly (New York: Oxford UP, 1994), esp. 361–363. 16. According to Soviet law of that period, the vast majority of apartments belonged to the government, and the citizens of the Soviet Union lived there by dint of “loan”—that is, a kind of rental without payment. If a tenant died, the other remaining tenants continued to live in the same apartment. However, if an apartment became empty of tenants or had too few tenants—on the basis of governmental decision—the government could place other tenants in that apartment or additional tenants to those that were left. Lena’s plan is quite simple: in anticipation of her mother-in-law’s death, she sought to carry out an “apartment exchange”—meaning, to go live in her apartment, so that at the moment of the old lady’s death she and her husband would remain as residents in that apartment and thereby enjoy a pleasant apartment in a convenient and central location. On the other hand, Victor’s mother understood Lena’s plan well, and concluded from it that she was a terminal patient and was going to die. 17. Yuri Trifonov, “The Exchange,” in his Novels and Stories (Moscow: Soviet Russia Publishers, 1978), 7–69; all quotations taken from this edition. Regarding misogyny in Russian literature and in Trifonov’s prose in particular, see Gillespie, in Women and Russian Culture. Projections and Self-Perceptions, ed. Rosalind Marsh (Oxford-New York: Berghahn Books, 1998), 241. 18. Everyday material life and social hardships in the Soviet reality are one of the main causes for ideological differences and rifts; see Woll, Invented Truth, 26. 19. Woll (104–107) asserts that the intensive struggle a person needs to wage with domestic, social, and material adversities allows him to avoid complicated interpersonal relations. 20. On the image of the woman protagonist as a Satan in modern Russian literature, especially by Zamyatin, see Sona Stephan Hoisington, “The Mismeasure of I330,” in A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature, ed. Sona Stephan Hoisington (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1995), 81–88, esp. 84 ff. 21. Russian authors tend to see a similarity between marriage and prostitution in their portrayal of their characters, in which the personality of a woman is reduced to commodifiable sexuality, through which they in turn consume men. Such misogynist assumptions are accepted in some works by Russian authors. See: Rancour-Laferriere, Tolstoy on the Couch, 72–76. 22. See Eva Kagan-Kans, Hamlet and Don-Quixote: Turgenev’s Ambivalent Vision (The Hague-Paris: Mounton, 1975), the sub-chapter entitled “The Vampire Woman,” 52 ff.

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23. On the continuity of the Russian literary tradition from Lev Tolstoy to Zoschenko, see Alexander K. Zholkovsky, Text Counter-Text: Readings in Russian Literary History (Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 1994), 35–58, esp. 36–40. 24. See Samuel B. Kutash, “Psychoanalytical Theories of Aggression,” Violence: Perspectives on Murder Aggression, ed. Irwin L Kutash, Samuel B. Kutash, Louis B. Schlesinger et al., eds., 7–28, esp. 11: “destructive aggression [is] inevitable. The alternative is illness, self- destruction, masochism, or passive and ineffectual behavior leading to self-defeat.”

Chapter Four

Woman’s Infidelity as the Cause for Man’s Devastation: Tolstoy, Flaubert, Leskov, Turgenev, Kuprin, and Chekhov

In this chapter we shall discuss unfaithfulness on the part of the woman and the attitude towards it on the part of various Russian authors. Many Russian novelists explain such behavior as in some way inspired by the devil—even if they may also sympathize with the woman’s fate. In all these works, the woman’s infidelities, whether she is a married woman or the protagonist’s lover, conclude in death. This may be her own death, as in the works of Tolstoy and Leskov, or the death of the man she has humiliated who is unable to take revenge against her but instead harms himself, as in the works of Kuprin and Chekhov. In Turgenev’s novel, the man fails to harm his woman but internalizes his trauma, thereby poisoning his own life.

LEV TOLSTOY’S ANNA KARENINA AND HER FIENDISH DESIRE In this section we shall compare Tolstoy’s attitude to the unfaithful wife in Anna Karenina with that of Gustav Flaubert in his novel, Madame Bovary. Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, the two classic, world-famous literary examples of the unfaithful wife, are similar in many respects.1 Even the titles of the novels are parallel: both books bear the names of their feminine 53

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protagonist. Both women, having experienced love, dared to discard their respective marriages (or were prepared to do so). Their love was filled with suffering and brought them to suicide. Both had children, whom they abandoned as a consequence of their sinful love: Anna had a son with her husband and a daughter from Vronsky, while Emma had a daughter. But these points of resemblance are superficial, as there was little similarity between the two women’s inner worlds.2 The married couples in Tolstoy’s novel are unhappy: Stiva Oblonsky is unhappy, because he is bored with his wife;3 Dolly is unhappy, because her husband is unfaithful; Kitty was unhappy for losing Vronsky; nor can one say that Levin was happy with Kitty. Neither can any of them expect any change in their church-consecrated marital status. Marriage is a fact not to be questioned or doubted, nor to be trespassed upon. Family grievances simply continue from one day to the next, finding relief in domestic squabbles, mutual recriminations, or in even stronger passions, but nobody dare encroach upon the institute of marriage, which remains the norm of life.4 But for one such couple, the age-old system of marriage collapsed once Vronsky appeared on the scene. For Anna, the only recognized way of life thus became a prison.5 Almost the only thing we know about Anna’s past is that she was brought up by her aunt and that she knew languages. But her education is of little importance, as in Tolstoy’s opinion a different upbringing would have had no effect on her infidelity.6 Anna is a woman of character: intelligent, strong-willed, independent, and with a knack and resolve for fighting. She is conscious of the significance of her actions and capable of assuming responsibility for them.7 One might assume that such women were not unusual in nineteenth century Russia, but Anna’s way out of her situation was atypical. More common was the path chosen by Pushkin’s Tatyana Larina: . . . I love you, what’s the use to hide Behind deceit or double-dealing? But I’ve become another’s wife8 − And I’ll be true to him for life.9

Here fidelity is accompanied by the complete rejection of romantic love (even platonic or unhappy love, as in the style of Turgenev), by obsession and suffering. The phrase, “I’ve become another’s wife,” sounds even more categorical in Russian: “I was given to another man.” Anna was also “given”—a fact that could have been contested more or less successfully before the wedding, but that thereafter became her destiny, an implacable reality she must accept and obey.10

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Flaubert, by contrast, shows the reader the minute details of his heroine’s rearing. Emma was raised in a convent, where no one took care of her. Throughout her adolescence, she was left to her own devices in terms of her maturation as a woman, and her romantic imagination flourished unchecked. Neither church, as embodied by the convent, nor society and family, as represented by her father (her mother died when she was little), lifted a finger to instill in her even the most basic notions of real life. She was not particularly clever or vigorous. Her secular education consisted of the romantic stories she gleaned from the novels she read, which for her constituted the fabric of the life she believed she was about to enter. Haphazard reading, overexcited emotionality (“L’éducation sentimentale,” a phrase itself coined by Flaubert, was absent from her life), and uncontrolled teenage fantasies narrowed her notion of the world to a single love plot with nothing around it. Flaubert tells us of her poor upbringing in order to make it clear that the real blame for Emma’s failure to adapt to life lay with her education, society, church, and the establishment. One could hardly expect an average woman of ordinary abilities to find sufficient intellectual independence to erase from her mind all she had assimilated and to form a world-view of her own. Emma is presented by Flaubert as being lost between reality and illusion, as a passive victim pulled along by the current of events. In this respect she is different from Anna, who turns the stream of events to her own will.11 Anna is overwhelmed by an improper love; she defies the laws of God, society, and morality, replacing them with erroneous notions: she believes that love justifies her actions, while in the author’s opinion such love is an insanity.12 Were one to substitute the word “love” for “devilish obsession” everything—according to Tolstoy—would fall into place. Instead of preserving her home and hearth, Anna destroys her family; instead of raising and cultivating her children, she abandons them—first her son and then, by committing suicide, her daughter as well; instead of subduing her flesh, she openly joins with her lover; instead of penitence, she continues stubbornly in her own way.13 Anna is fighting her own insane war with every possible Godestablished value, and mistakenly believes this to be the right way by which to attain her personal happiness.14 It is as if the devil himself, as embodied in Anna’s passion, had decided to fight God, using Anna as a tool for his purposes. The devil mocks her personally, while she —miserable creature as she is—is so blinded and possessed by him that she does not notice.15 Emma is also at war, or tries to be so, but not so much in order to attain happiness as to prevent the collapse of her romantic dreams. Her war is the desperate personal battle of a silly, confused little woman. The absence of any real life education results in her catastrophic inability to comprehend and accept her

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environment as given. Consequently she loses touch with reality, her existence mimicking true life and eventually turning into her own tragedy. Karenin is a high official and grandee, while Charles Bovary is just a provincial doctor,16 but there is considerable similarity in their situations. Both Karenin and Charles love their wives—Karenin, as befits his position and estate, and Charles, as tenderly and sincerely as he is able. When Anna was in labor with Vronsky’s child, Karenin experienced sufferings and pressed Vronsky’s hand. Charles also took it hard when Emma fell ill after her separation from her lover Rodolphe, and when she was dying “his agony exceeded hers.” Even when she had completely ruined him, even when the situation had become clear to him and he was in the belated grips of torments of jealousy, he could not deny his love. Karenin, however negative he may appear in Anna’s eyes, truly comes to be a man by the grace of God. Despite his miseries, he wished to salvage their family. He was prepared to forgive Anna, to take charge of their son, and to hush her infidelity. He later took care of Anna’s and Vronsky’s daughter as well.17 Karenin is represented by Tolstoy as a victim of Anna who, overcome with passion, lost her self-control, her good sense, and her entire world.18 Karenin is constantly humiliated by his wife. She appears publicly with her lover, thereby mocking Karenin as impotent, but even then he bears his shame with the patience of a martyr. The impotent man appears here as a saint who endures sufferings from the woman whom he desires—much like Father Sergei. God brings about Anna’s death, not only to destroy the devil who had come to dominate her, but also in order to take vengeance on behalf of the publicly castrated Karenin and to provide him with some liberation and satisfaction. Such was not the case with Charles. Emma’s infidelities did not bring about humiliation on his part, but sufferings. Whereas Karenin is presented as the antithesis of Anna, Charles identifies with Emma. Her death was not an act of vengeance, but added to his sufferings. His own death followed in short order. Thoughts of death occasionally crossed Anna and Emma’s minds. Imperceptibly, such thoughts brought about the ultimate outcome. The act of suicide, condemned by religion, was tantamount to contact with the devil. Emma walked this path impulsively and awkwardly, concealing her plans and their causes from the people around her, and acknowledging that it was against religious law. Anna, by contrast, was defiantly frank, contemplating revenge for Vronsky, and her suicide was an outright challenge to God. Emma acted as a helpless, miserable person, lost in her own emotions; Anna, by contrast, acted strong-mindedly, aggressively, realizing the consequences of her conduct. While Anna was challenging the whole world, Emma sought to escape from it.

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Tolstoy suggests that Anna was led to her actions at the instigation of the devil. In describing her, Tolstoy writes, “She was fascinating in her simple black dress . . . fascinating the graceful, light movements of her little feet and hands, fascinating was that lovely face in its eagerness, but there was something terrible and cruel in her fascination” (73). Kitty utters the following opinion about Anna: “Yes, there is something otherworldly devilish and fascinating in her” (73). At the time of the quarrel with Vronsky, Anna feels that “some strange force of evil would not let her give herself up to her feelings, as though the rules of warfare would not permit her to surrender” (611). She considers the advantages of suicide: “And death rose clearly and vividly before her mind as the sole means of restoring love for her in his [Vronsky’s] heart, of punishing him and of gaining the victory in that strife which the evil spirit in possession of her heart was waging with him” (651).19 Tolstoy alludes to an uncanny, evil force controlling Anna’s feelings. Anna is an independent and intelligent personality, aware of the implications of her actions. Emma is a provincial petit-bourgeois person, who does not clearly realize what she really wants. Love brings both of them to their death, but Anna’s love is meaningful, and, most important, she believes it to be her own choice. Emma’s love, by contrast, is the rather trivial flirtation of a milliner disappointed by an unhappy marriage. Tolstoy condemns strong Anna, 20 while Flaubert justifies feeble and small-minded Emma, for what ultimately comes to the same thing: their nonconformity to the system. Karenin masochistically absorbs humiliation and destruction. Anna’s death brought Karenin liberation from the destruction of his dignity as a man and as a personality, from the process of castration which he carried on in the relationship between them. By rights, her death ought to have come from his hands. He was, however, a saintly man who took upon himself whatever God decreed upon him; he offered himself as a sacrifice on behalf of the other, on behalf of the laws of God and of ethics. Anna displays initiative and activism; she is the one who behaves with energy and violence, at least regarding herself. She becomes a man, thereby transforming her husband into a woman. Her death is the only solution, both for her husband and for the author. The devil dwelt in Anna’s body like a cancer in the body of an unfortunate patient who was unaware of his illness. Thus, in the final analysis, it also destroys Anna after it had made use of her, and thus shows contempt for everything of moral value.21 As the old countess Vronskaya told Vronsky’s mother, “Her very death was the death of a vile woman, of no religious feeling” (673). Emma was also disappointed by those who surrounded her: by her husband, who had betrayed her by not living up to the image of the heroes in the novels she read, by her lovers, by other men, and by life itself in a godforsaken

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province. But unlike Anna, she was pushed to suicide by the keen feeling of wrong she had committed against Charles. Deep in her heart, Emma felt guilty. By her death, Anna intended to punish all those around her, while Emma sought to punish only herself. The method of suicide selected by each woman is also significant. Anna’s passion arose from the outset against the background of blood and death, having initially met Vronsky at a railway accident involving another woman. Such a devilish origin for love led to a devilish outcome: an ungodly, gory death. The very thought of plunging herself under the wheels of train, so that her body would be cut up into pieces, could only occur to a person who had had contact with the devil—“a woman who could only be called a lost woman . . .” (613),22 as Levin described Anna before the suicide. Emma, by contrast, selected the “clean” and bloodless method of poisoning herself. According to Flaubert, even by this act of despair she sought to win a bit of absolution.23 For Tolstoy, infidelity, as in Anna’s case, is more than just a moral sin; it is an alliance with the devil or at least an act of submission to him. For Flaubert, it is simply a private human failure, deserving of sympathy, a consequence of Emma’s futile attempts to fit into real life. Tolstoy teaches us that a woman who, in a gross and extreme manner, humiliates a righteous man, will be meted Divine vengeance in an awesome way, suitable to her actions. Flaubert, by contrast, lived through Emma’s life, suffered her pains, and was about to die with her, the way her husband did. Anna chose to punish Vronsky by her own suicide, thereby also taking revenge for the humiliation which he had done her when he intended to leave her, and for causing the repression of her sexual impulses and her emotional needs. But while Tolstoy identifies with the male hero who takes vengeance against the woman who caused him to repress his drives and deceived him (for she definitely does not understand him), as in the case of Evgenii in “The Devil,” in the case of Anna, he becomes alienated from her, denounces her, and finds no explanation for her deeds, apart from the influence upon her of external evil forces.

NIKOLAI LESKOV’S “LADY MACBETH OF MTZENSK DISTRICT”: A WOMAN OBSESSED BY A “NATURAL” DEVIL Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov (1831–1895; pseud. Stebnitsky) was a storyteller, novelist, and journalist who portrayed a wide variety of characters from among the simple Russian folk: from peasants, meek monks, and religious fanatics to mad lovers, eccentrics, bureaucrats, and merchants.

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“Lady Macbeth of Mtzensk District” (1865) tells the story of Katherina Izmailova, a robust, cheerful and buoyant young peasant woman, who was given in marriage to a prosperous middle-aged merchant, Zinovy, a man of dry, dull, and sullen disposition, away most of the time on business. Katherina stayed alone at home, bored and languishing, until she was seduced by a house-serf, a handsome stableman named Sergei.24 The young mistress became emotionally mesmerized by her lover and, swept away with passion, decked herself out to please him in every way, not caring about being seen. When their affair was discovered by her father-in-law, she poisoned him, and later both of them killed her husband and hid the body. But once Katherina’s status as her husband’s heir was legally considered, it ensued that a significant part of his property belonged to his minor nephew, who came to court with his aunt to claim his share. Sergei did not like this turn of events, and to please him Katherina decided to kill the boy as well. The plot was discovered, and during the course of the investigation the two earlier murders were also unearthed. At this time Katherina bore a child, whom she neglected, giving it over to the care of an aged aunt as her husband’s child.25 The lovers were placed in chains and deported to Siberia together with other prisoners. Now Katherina had no means with which to indulge her lover, and he began to shamelessly flirt with other women in the party. She felt this to be the ruination of her life. When he started to play about with a girl she particularly hated, she rushed at her rival and dragged her with herself into the waters of the Volga River. Leskov is more sympathetic to the woman’s dilemma than is Tolstoy. 26 He places the blame for Katherina’s infidelity upon men around her, each of whom played a role in her degradation: her husband, her father-in-law, her lover, and even her husband’s sick nephew. Although Leskov does not justify Katherina, he understands how naturally a young and healthy woman, hungry for love, disappointed with her marriage, childless, could lose her head at the hands of an expert lover such as Sergei. 27 Even Katherina’s unmarried maid Aksinya is happier than her mistress: she meets men as she likes and even bears a child, arousing Katherina’s envy. The only man who understood her misfortune was the house-serf Sergei, who turned her distress to his advantage and abused her. In the heat of passion Katherina commits the terrible crime28 of murder, as well as neglecting her maternal duties, not even seeking a glimpse of her newborn child.29 Love has driven her insane, and she becomes a criminal lunatic. It may be said of Katherina, as it was of Anna Karenina, that “a demon possessed her.” But unlike Anna, Katherina’s acts are not seen as a challenge to God, but ordinary moves emerging from mundane understandable human desires. Unlike Tolstoy, Leskov does not propound any great

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ideas, but is preoccupied with the fate of the “little people,” the repression of whose ordinary physical and emotional needs causes them harm. Whereas Tolstoy assumes the role of God’s messenger, Leskov writes a sad tale about an unfortunate woman driven mad by an overwhelming love, which eventually turned out to be her real tragedy.30 In the previous chapters, we described works in which the male protagonists find themselves surrounded by women who arouse their sexual desire when they are unable to realize it, or who stifle their sexual feelings. In all these cases, the man’s sexual feelings were repressed to the extent that he was no longer able to stand the pressure, finding relief in violence as a kind of substitute for sexual release. This was an act of violence towards one of the women or towards himself. By contrast, Leskov identifies with Katherina and applies the abovementioned pattern to her. He describes her as having strong sexual drive and emotional potential, as being surrounded by stupid and impotent men like her husband, her father-in-law, and her husband’s younger nephew, or by her wicked lover, none of whom are able to provide her with emotional satisfaction, but rather suppress it. The men around Katherina humiliate her: her father-in-law attempts to beat her, her husband relates to her in a patronizing way, and Sergei finds sadistic pleasure in publicly presenting her to the contempt and laughter of the prisoners. In the final analysis, like the men in the earlier-discussed works, she finds satisfaction in murder and suicide, which serve as substitutes for sexual and emotional release. One might nevertheless ask the question as to whether a woman’s response to repression and to the pressure of her sexual drives and emotional needs is identical to that of a man, or whether Leskov applied to Katherina a pattern characteristic of a man, through his own intense identification with her. Is a woman’s only choice really between murder and suicide as rebellion against repression of her sexuality and emotions, like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov or Tolstoy’s Evgenii, or submission to this suppression leading to self-contempt and decline, similar to Marmeladov in Dostoevsky, Ivan Belokopytov in Zhoschenko, or Victor in Trifonov? Cannot a woman find herself substitutes for satisfaction of her sexual impulses and emotional needs unavailable to a man, such as motherhood? How would a female author describe the possibility of substitution of satisfaction of the sexual drives and emotional needs of her heroines? Why does Sergei have a need to humiliate her? He is jealous of her emotional power; the happiness that her love for him brings her. He suffers emotional inferiority in her presence, and takes revenge by bringing her, in a manipulative way, to suicide. Thus the strong Russian woman castrates the weak Russian man.

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IVAN TURGENEV’S “THE TORRENTS OF SPRING”: THE WOMAN’S MAGICAL POWER OVER MAN Ivan Sergeievich Turgenev (1818–1883), novelist, dramatist, and story writer, was one of the foremost Russian writers and an enthusiastic advocate of the Westernization of Russia. Turgenev’s most productive period was during the decade 1850–60, the latter half of which he spent in Western Europe. In his novels from that period, including “Rudin” (1855), “A Nest of Gentlefolk” (1859), and “On the Eve” (1860), Turgenev is concerned with Russian social and political issues. His masterpiece, “Fathers and Sons” (1862), deals with the nihilist philosophy of personal and social rebellion. He influenced the development of Russian and world literature during the following century. “The Torrents of Spring” is a short novel about a young Russian landowner, Sanin, who before settling down permanently in the country and taking up management of his estate, decides to travel in Europe. He visits Germany where, by chance, he encounters Gemma, the young and beautiful daughter of an Italian confectioner. Sanin and Gemma fall in love. 31 Once, while he is dining with Gemma’s family, a German officer, Baron von Dönhof, insults Gemma with his unwanted advances, and Sanin challenges him to a duel. At the duel Sanin misses and von Dönhof fires his gun into the air. Gemma, impressed by these events, agrees to marry Sanin. Sanin needs money for the wedding, so he decides to sell his estate in Russia without leaving Germany. He suggests to his countryman, Ippolit Polozov, who also lives in Germany, that he buy his Russian estate. Polozov informs him that “his” money in fact belongs to his wife, Maria, and that she alone controls the purse strings.32 Maria is willing to help Sanin, so as to enable them to get married. On occasion Maria and Sanin are left alone, and she drops hints that she is a “free woman”—meaning, to Sanin’s surprise, that she is interested in him as a man.33 Things come to a pass whereby, without quite realizing how it happens, Sanin becomes more and more deeply involved with Maria, who binds him to her with her sexual power. Under her destructive influence, he writes a letter of dismissal to Gemma. He now finds himself in a slavish and humiliating position involving Maria, her husband, and his recent enemy, von Dönhof, with whom he had once dueled over Gemma and who now, like himself, is sexually enslaved to Maria. Thirty years pass, and we see Sanin as a spiritually wasted man whose life is ruined, who never married, and who only yearns for Gemma. He learns that Gemma had married a neighbor confectioner and that they left for New York. He is now forced to suffice with the scraps of happiness which could have been his had he not met Maria Polozova, and he sets about to leave for New York in order to be alongside Gemma, even if she is married to someone else.

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Dmitry Sanin is portrayed as an intelligent, well-educated young man, born into the nobility and enjoying a perfect family upbringing—an ideal example of Russian manhood.34 The author explicitly identifies with his protagonist, whose biography closely resembles his own. Mourning over his hero’s inexplicably ruined life, he is actually mourning over his own.35 The course of Sanin’s life was determined by chance encounters with two women. One of them, Gemma, is depicted as the ideal woman and the ideal match for Sanin. She is beautiful, intelligent, generous, selfless, ingenuous, endowed with high moral qualities, and a free spirit. She is thus not the type of woman who would enslave her man and take away his self-control. To the contrary, she values the freedom of her fellow-man. Believing in Sanin’s strong feelings and reciprocating his affection, she nevertheless constantly reminds him that “you are not to consider yourself bound” (97), making her especially precious in his eyes. Everything connected with her exudes freedom, even her political views (46).36 She would thus enable him to maintain his self-esteem as a man; she would neither depress him nor humiliate him, thereby assuring his happiness.37 By contrast, the encounter with the other woman, Maria Polozova, destroys Sanin’s life. She is married but proclaims “liberty” as the main principle of her life, including the “liberty” to commit adultery. But freedom for herself does not imply freedom for her man.38 Her attitude is an acerbic, ironic mockery of true freedom, as her freedom can only be achieved through the enslavement of others. That is why she puts an iron ring on the finger of each of her captive admirers (136). Loud hypocritical declarations of her love of freedom are merely a disguise for her avid desire to take away a man’s selfpossession, to depress his masculine ego, and to take sadistic pleasure in his humiliation.39 In describing these two women, Turgenev emphasizes that both are young, beautiful, attractive, clever, and independent, yet they are presented as antitheses of one another. For example, each of them first appeared to Sanin with her hair uncovered, but whereas Maria had deliberately loosened it to accentuate her beauty, seduce him, and impose herself upon him,40 Gemma met Sanin loose-haired by chance, when her brother was in an emergency state and she had no time to comb it, thereby further accentuating her modesty.41 Maria chooses Sanin and determines the dimensions of the sexual relations between them, denying Sanin free choice. This would not have happened with Gemma, who let him choose her freely.42 Maria makes the decisions for him, preventing him from developing his own desires and depressing him by the strength of her will, thereby demonstrating to him his own weakness and humiliating him. Gemma, by contrast,

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seduces him involuntarily, gently, while allowing him to affirm himself and build himself up, maintaining his own will and desire. The decisive difference between the two women is that Gemma does not want sex, evidently because she does not enjoy it. Her sexual appetite is not greater than that of the man and therefore does not threaten him. She is weak and needs his help, her weakness emphasizing his strength. On several occasions Sanin rescues Gemma, the first time by means of giving first aid to her brother who had a medical problem, and the second time when he protects her from an undesired suitor. The more helpless she is without him, the greater the degree to which he is able to realize his masculinity. Maria, by contrast, wanted sex and initiated it herself, deriving active pleasure from it. She threatens the man with her excessive sexuality, which knows no satisfaction. She emasculates him through her sexual power. Gemma is shown as an absolute angel, because she allows the man to express and realize his sexual urge. Maria, by contrast, is portrayed as a lowly devil, whose sexual urge is stronger than that of a man, thereby stealing the man’s masculinity. She makes him into a woman and herself into a man at his expense.43 A woman who initiates and leads in sex in an active and aggressive manner robs the man of the prerogative of his own initiative, thereby castrating him. Even though by doing so she enables him to experience physical pleasure, she thereby destroys his own self-image as a man, ultimately causing the negation of his masculinity. She exploits him sexually, rapes him, plays with him for her own pleasure like an erotic object—and when he attempts to resist and to restore his own human and masculine ego, she mocks and humiliates him, reducing him even further, leading to the destruction of his self-respect and, ultimately, to the ruin of his personality. The strengthening of the man’s masculine ego, and the respect given him by the woman, are thus the recipe for happiness within the couple’s relations. If, by contrast, the woman is dominant in sex she thereby undermines the man’s ego, denigrates his dignity, and brings about his humiliation and castration, in effect transforming him into a woman, while she becomes tantamount to the man. Such a woman will eventually reduce the man to nothing. Therefore, he ought to have killed her, as Evgenii in Tolstoy’s The Devil killed Stephenida. But whereas Evgenii was a married man experienced with women and with a well-formed personality, Turgenev’s Sanin was young and innocent, lacking in experience of intimate relations. Thus Sanin did not realize the depths of the destruction that this woman was causing him, and through his confusion enabled her to continue to carry out her wishes.44 Sanin did not take vengeance upon Maria, which might have perhaps given him a

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certain satisfaction, but internalized his humiliation and frustration, as a result of which he suffered a psychological trauma. Maria derives pleasure from having men “enslaved” to her. Her relations with her husband are outside the notions of Christian or even of elementary human morality. He is aware of what his wife is doing; indeed, he assists her in finding “candidates” for the role of next potential lover. He is quite active in her schemes, and even wagers with her as to whether or not she will succeed in seducing Sanin—and when she does, scoffs at him with detached contempt. Polozov is so humiliated, castrated and turned into a female by his wife that he became accustomed to it and masochistically learned how to “enjoy” it: that is, by submitting to her schemes and cooperating with her he is placed at the top of her hierarchy of men. He enjoys his position as the “first man” in his wife’s male harem. But Sanin’s nature is different: he is fine, noble, honest, and idealistic. For him, the most dreadful aspect of his relations with Polozova is that he became subject to a woman’s control and thereby castrated—a fact publicly demonstrated in the most humiliating and devastating manner. From this life lesson, he learned to avoid any relationships with women, as a result remaining single for the rest of his life. Even when he arrives in New York and meets Gemma there is no way for them to have any relations, as she is happily married. His only attempt to be a man occurred when he was in a platonic, romantic connection with Gemma before meeting Maria. During that period, he reached the peak of his masculinity: during the thirty years that followed, he came to feel himself less of a man. He now longs to restore to himself the same precious, exclusively male experience which he enjoyed before meeting Maria, and in order to do so, travels to see Gemma in New York. His purpose is to again arrive at the realization of his masculinity, if only his original, youthful, and limited masculinity as it was before he met Maria. The degree of his traumatization by Maria may be compared to that of a youth raped by an active male homosexual while attempting to realize himself as a man.45 Maria Polozova had been a real woman for only a brief while, long ago, when she was young and had her first sexual experience with her tutor. She feared him, respected him, looked up to him, was emotionally dependent upon him—all of these factors that make a female human being into a woman with her man. But since that time she had acquired independence, initiative, and aggressiveness in relations, all of these male characteristics which, when adopted by a woman, make her into a man. Maria Polozova is associated with a snake: “‘Snake! Ah, she’s a snake!’ Sanin was thinking meanwhile” (126). “Those grey, rapacious eyes, those dimples, those snake-like tresses” (129). Even Maria’s surname is not acci-

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dental.46 She creeps into men’s lives like a snake—stinging, enslaving them. The snake, an obvious phallic symbol, is here identified with a woman, thus emphasizing her masculine persona and her lover becoming a woman. She rapes a man, as if sneaking inside him; she then discards him, as a snake casts off its skin: “[the snake’s skin] is cast aside at last, like a worn-out garment” (134). This appropriation of the male sexual function is also a sign of her peculiar nature. Maria herself recognizes her bewitching powers. She says to Sanin, “‘Do you believe in magic? . . . I believe in it . . . and you will believe in it too.’ . . . ‘Magic is sorcery,’ Sanin repeated. ‘Anything in the world is possible. I used not to believe in it—but I do now.’” (134). There is something devilish in Maria’s features: “She . . . clutched at his [Sanin’s] hair with her fingers . . . her lips curled with triumph, while her eyes, wide and clear, almost white, expressed nothing but the ruthlessness and the glutted joy of conquest. The hawk, as it clutches a captured bird, has eyes like that” (136). Polozova is thus depicted as an inhuman creature that resorts to the practice of sorcery. Her real nature, when she allows herself to display it, is that of an avaricious, cruel, blood-thirsty being beyond normal human understanding. The men with whom she comes into contact assume those traits; they too lose their human image and don’t recognize themselves. The entire atmosphere around Polozova is other-worldly, somber, strange, disgusting. Maria is shown, not as a devil, but only as his accomplice. She is unintelligent, comes from servile peasant stock, and even her negative spiritual qualities are of a mean and limited type. She employs primitive utilitarian means, such as sorcery. To call her a devil would be to value her too highly, for she is a lowly material incarnation of only one of his attributes: the destruction of a man’s personality through sex.47

“THE DUEL” BY ALEXANDER KUPRIN— A PSYCHOLOGICAL JOURNEY INTO ONESELF Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin (1870–1938) was an eminent Russian prose writer. Educated in military schools, he later served as a military officer, providing him with ample material for his writings. In 1905 “The Duel” [Poyedinok], the short novel that brought him literary fame and is considered his major work, appeared. His prose is an important contribution to Russian literature at the turn of the twentieth century. The protagonist of “The Duel,” Georgy Romashov, a 21-year-old second lieutenant of mild disposition and sensitive heart, joins a regiment quartered somewhere in the south of Russia, in “a dull and dreary little town.”48 He has

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a liaison with a married woman, his fellow officer’s wife, but falls in love with another woman, also married, named Shurochka Nikolayeva. Infatuated with love, he breaks with his repulsive previous mistress, who in revenge sends anonymous letters to Shurochka’s husband, Nikolayev, disclosing Romashov’s alleged relationship with his wife. Nikolayev and Romashov have things out, the clash ending in a challenge to a duel. Prior to the duel, Shurochka approaches Romashov to tell him that the duel could not be cancelled because it involves the honor of an officer—namely her husband. She assures him that she had persuaded her husband to fire into the air, and asks Romashov to do the same. She comes to Romashov without wearing stays under her dress, thereby initiating the intimacy he so desires. This last “argument” clinched her case, but Shurochka deceives her young admirer: she never asked her husband not to fire at him. Thus Nikolayev shot and killed Romashov. The story concludes with the report of the duel and of Romashov’s death by his second.49 The nobility of Romashov’s figure stands out against the background of drinking bouts, punch-ups, and the wild unruliness of his fellow officers.50 All these led to feelings of estrangement from his fellow officers, which depressed him and publicly showed everybody and himself that he failed to be like the other men around him. Army life was a source of frustration and disappointment for Romashov, encouraging him to find spiritual succor in the sensual area. He poured his energy into seeking emotional support from his relations with his mistress, a factor that in the end deepened the tragedy that befell him. Romashov is shown in a dual light: outwardly, he is an adult man with the responsibilities of a Russian army officer, but within he is still an immature youth who fails to adjust to the external world, trying to realize his fondest dreams to his own detriment. At times, when he was abashed, seized by melancholy or confusion, he tries to look at himself from the outside in a sort of escapism. There are two layers of Romashov’s consciousness: the everyday self that deals with the frustrating reality around him, and the dreaming self which portrays reality as he would like it to be, replacing the reality with an illusion. Listening to his “realistic” self, he understands the need for forbearance and humility, the need to be disciplined, self-possessed, and to adjust to reality.51 But responding to the pull of his “dreamy” self, he rejects the voice of reason and acts according to his own notions and desires, taking an outsider’s position counter to military ways. Romashov’s love for Shurochka is an outcome of his “dreamy” self, allowing him to ignore reality, to take refuge from it, and to seek recreation for his tormented soul. He persists in wooing Shurochka, despite it being clear that

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no shared future is possible for them. Eventually, his “dreamy” self predominates over the “realistic” one, leading to his premature death. He remembers how, as a child, his mother used to punish him by tying him to the bed with a thin thread around his leg, leaving him thus. He reconstructs, with bittersweet longing, his nearly hypnotic dependence on his mother: “Little Romashov would sit quietly for long hours. . . . the thread strangely hypnotized him. He was even wary of pulling it too strongly lest it break. . . . this was . . . a kind of hypnosis, a superstitious dread of the mighty and inscrutable actions of the grown-ups” (361).52 The great pleasure that Romashov continues to derive from the memory of such “imprisonment” by his mother indicates that he was unable to overcome his Oedipus complex, which in his case was incarnated in masochistic form.53 He was willing to fully commit himself to the desires of his mother and to dismiss himself in the face of her overwhelming power. Now in the army, he unconsciously identifies Shurochka with his mother and transfers his masochistic Oedipus complex to her. Thus, his soul melted in ecstasy when he deliberately held a thread of yarn that stretched to her knitting: “It gave him subtle and gentle pleasure to feel how Shurochka’s hands unconsciously resisted his cautious efforts. It seemed that a mysterious and exciting current ran along this thread, connecting the two of them” (335). Shurochka definitely belonged to the “world of grown-ups” and influenced him as strongly as his mother once had: the thread in her hands apparently “stretched” back to his past. His identification of Shurochka with his mother is the reason why an actual liaison with his rejected mistress was less attractive to him than indulging in constant romantic reveries about Shurochka.54 But while his mother always returned home and set him free, Shurochka literally tied him to his death. Through nearly the entire novel, Shurochka is only presented as seen by Romashov—that is, in a dreamy, idealistic light. Even more astounding is the denouement, when at a picnic Shurochka openly confides to Romashov: Rommie, my dear, why are you such . . . a softy? I don’t want to hide it: I am attracted to you, . . . But why are you so wretched! . . . Think that I cannot have respect for you! Oh, if you were only strong!’ . . . [Romashov asked:] ‘What if I achieve all your husband is striving for, and even more?’ She tightly pressed her cheek against his shoulder and answered jerkily: ‘Then, yes. Yes, yes, yes! . . .’ (448–452)

Romashov has feminine qualities; he is insufficiently developed as a man, for which reason he fails to fit into the military milieu. There is also a certain bisexual aspect to him: he not only desires Shurochka, but also identifies with her in the manner of his childhood identification with his mother.

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Shurochka, on the other hand, is ambitious, tough, cruel, strong-willed, cynical, clever, cunning, decisive. She is endowed with traits traditionally considered to be masculine. She is a woman with masculine power posed against a weak, effeminate man, a situation that brings about the humiliation of the man, similar to that in “The Torrents of Spring.”55 Here too, Romashov is raped by Shurochka when she seduces him on the eve of the duel, thereby changing him into a woman. Romashov is killed in the duel, not only because Nikolayev shot him, but because he wanted to die, as in the course of his relationship his effeminate nature had been demonstrated to both himself and to Shurochka. There was thus an element of suicide in the duel between him and Nikolayev. Officer Vassily Nazansky, a friend of Romashov who had also been in love with Shurochka in the past, speaks to Romashov of her duality: “She is awfully ambitious, and there’s a lot of malicious, proud force in her. At the same time she is so . . . womanly, and so infinitely sweet. It seems there are two persons in her: one dry and egotistically-minded, the other with a tender and ardent heart” (353–354). Shurochka’s feminine appearance belies her masculine nature, thereby allowing her to use it even more strongly when need be. She had already broken Nazansky’s heart, as he, like Romashov after him, could not realize her dream of marrying a mature, strong man and a brilliant career officer. Nazansky’s soul had two layers, just as Romashov’s did: a “realistic” self and a “dreamy” one. He too had once been greatly in love with Shurochka, but he had learned the dreadful secret of such desperate love—that it is heavenly sweet so long as it is not realized in an actual liaison, when it starts to be a hell. Nazansky had already drained his cup of bitterness and only wished that Romashov could avoid such a fate. Though he would happily languish with his “dreamy” self, which longed to fantasize about love, as a disciplined adult man Nazansky had long since realized the need to submit to his “realistic” consciousness: “‘What a pleasure it is to dream about women!’ he exclaimed [addressing Romashov], . . . ‘Love! To a woman! A mysterious abyss! What bliss and what acute bittersweet suffering!’ Nazansky excitedly cried” (348). This sweet addiction to the “dreamy” consciousness is accepted by him as a shameful weakness which he must conceal. He and Romashov confess to each other: “It seemed that at those moments all the boundaries of human slyness, hypocrisy and opacity gave way, and they could freely read one another’s hearts. Immediately they understood hundreds of things which they had hitherto kept secret to themselves, and the entire conversation took a singularly deep and definitely tragic turn.” After a long while Nazansky, with a mad fear in his eyes, said to Romashov in a low voice: ‘Really? You

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too?’” (348). Nazansky, like Romashov, had bisexual tendencies, and his love for Shurochka entailed not only desire for her as a woman, but also identification with her. The astonishment elicited by the mutual confession of Romashov and Nazansky relates to their discovery of one another’s bisexual tendencies. The love that each one of them felt for this sweet and intoxicating woman was able to continue so long as it was no more than a dream. The moment it became realized through actual sexual relations it became a source of disappointment, a descent into the depths, a source of hatred towards the woman. The essence of this trauma lay in the transformation of dream into reality, of romantic love into sexual relations that aroused disgust and hatred of the one previously beloved. The more sublime the love and desire, the greater the hatred towards the woman and the desire to harm her. To this must be added the jealousy felt by an effeminate man towards a woman, particularly one who is strong, thereby making the desire to harm her even stronger. Nazansky is more experienced than Romashov, and he succeeded in finding a modus vivendi within the reality of military life. He absorbed the trauma, did not harm Shurochka, kept his disappointment and hatred within his heart, and became a lost soul, someone alive in body but not in spirit, like Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment, or Victor in Trifonov’s novel or Belokopytov in that of Zoschenko. Romashov loved Shurochka as long as he did not have sexual relations with her, so that she could remain the incarnation of his sweet fantasies. However, once his relationship with her was sexually consummated on the eve of the duel, he repudiated her. She ceased to be a part of his dreams and became part of reality, thus evoking his hostility. Romashov was left with two choices: either to realize his hostility by harming Shurochka or to absorb his trauma. But he chose the third way: he harmed himself by means of the duel. Fantasizing about love allowed Romashov to feel more mature, masculine, and secure than he was in reality. His “dreamy” self allowed him to imagine himself as a man, while in an actual liaison with Shurochka he was revealed as having feminine traits. The devastating decline that befell Nazansky was also expected by Romashov, although he rebelled against this destiny and preferred to commit suicide through means of the duel. Shurochka was to blame for this suicide, as she was the one to initiate their sexual relationship. Like Maria Polozova in “The Torrents of Spring,” who only felt herself to be a woman during her adolescence, with her tutor, he being the only man in her life who was stronger and more masculine than herself, so too Shurochka seeks a man who will have more masculine traits than does she herself. Among all the men who surround her and seek her intimacy, her husband, Nikolayev, comes closest to realizing this wish, but he too is unable

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to completely fulfill her expectations. The men who surround Shurochka are effeminate, such as Romashov or Nazansky, or half-impotent, like her husband, Nikolayev. It therefore seems that Shurochka is the only “real man” in the military unit in which all these men serve. The glory of the officer class of the Russian army receives a humiliating mark of failure at the hands of this strong woman. Kuprin’s soul itself combines two elements: a “realistic” self and a “dreamy” one; he combines both a feminine nature and craving for a woman’s love. Thus, Romashov’s and Nazansky’s bisexuality seems to reflect Kuprin’s own orientation.56 His narrative style reveals these two tendencies in him, and even his accounts of casual situations are refined, sensual, and sentimental. Thus, he describes Romashov’s feelings about balls as follows: Romashov madly loved those moments before the ball when . . . he met ladies coming into the vestibule. How mysterious and charming they appeared to him when, excited by the light, music and anticipation of the dances they kicked up a merry fuss, getting rid of their hoods, boas and fur-coats. The small entranceroom was filled with feminine laughter and ringing chatter, smells of frost, perfumes, powder and kid-gloves, and the elusive and exciting fragrance of well-dressed and beautiful women before a ball. How bright and amorous their eyes appeared to him in the mirrors when they hastily smoothed their hair! How musical the rustle of their skirts! (391–410)

Kuprin frequently uses such adjectives as “tender, sensual, dear, passionate, refined, wonderful, marvelous” which lavishly sugar the story. He prefers the word “sweet” (sladkiy), generally associated with female images or the feelings evoked thereby: “keen and sweet suffering,” “sweet and luring hope,” “sweet anticipation of coming love,” “sweet and tumultuous beating of his heart,” and so on. Even Kuprin’s linguistic style reveals his bisexual orientation. The bisexual tendencies of Romashov and Nazansky, as well as that of Kuprin, are their deeply hidden secret. When Romashov is subject to a practical test by a masculine woman, his bisexual tendency is exposed, humiliating him to the extent that he prefers suicide to continuing to live. The character of the strong and decisive woman and the humiliation she brings upon effeminate men are the cause of their Oedipal and masochistic love for her. Her masculine character and ability to humiliate draw masochistic and effeminate men towards her irresistibly, despite their awareness that this attraction will lead to their devastation and death. By contrast, Romashov’s first mistress was not sufficiently strong and did not satisfy his Oedipal complex. She likewise did not humiliate him, thereby depriving him of the intoxicating, masochistic sweetness. Hence his relations with her were not important to him and he left her.

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Shurochka’s machinations prior to the duel were evil incarnate. Her husband Nikolayev is driven by two powerful motives: jealousy and the ambition to rise up the rungs of the service. It is quite likely that, as an officer and a nobleman, he would not have resolved on committing murder, but after Shurochka left their home without stays to go to Romashov, he most likely guessed what happened there—namely, that she let “him feel the compliant resilience of her body” (536). Were it not for Shurochka’s perfidious visit to Romashov, her husband’s hatred for him would not have been so intense and the duel would not have ended in the former’s death. Knowing her husband’s jealousy, Shurochka might well have anticipated the outcome of the duel—that he would be glad to get his revenge on Romashov and to violate the agreement between them, had such an agreement in fact existed in the first place. Her actions were all the more cynical in that she sacrificed Romashov by mere coincidence. As a man with no future she was uninterested in him, but as it happened her own future was dependent on him. On the one hand, Romashov was liable to harm her husband in the duel; on the other hand, were she to ask him to cancel the duel at his own initiative, her husband’s honor would be stained as a coward and as a man lacking in honor. The record of a cancelled duel would almost certainly prevent him from taking the entrance exams to the officer’s academy and nullify any possibility of a future military promotion, in addition to the objective difficulty of his having already twice failed the entrance exams. Shurochka pursued her own selfish ends, utilizing Romashov’s attraction for her as a tool, convincing him to sacrifice himself. She is thus depicted as a villainous, cold-blooded woman who murders the one who loved her; a person of impossibly terrible, inhuman nature, a devil dressed in seductive female flesh. Shurochka cheated on her husband by flirting with Romashov and Nazansky, and later callously and treacherously deceived Romashov by leading him to think that her husband does not intend to shoot at him. In all these relationships, Shurochka was domineering and avaricious. The real perpetrator of the tragic events was Shurochka, and to a lesser extent Romashov’s jealous and vindictive mistress whom he had rejected. Yet the injured parties were specifically the men. Men had to pay for both their own errors and those of the women. They might have to pay with their life, as did Romashov; or with emotional distress and traumas, as did Nazansky; or with the danger of harm or falling into disrepute, as did Shurochka’s husband Nikolayev, who twice fought on her account: once in a drunken brawl, and once in the duel. Women find a way out of such situations through intrigues and perfidy, as did Romashov’s erstwhile mistress, or through cruel tricks, as did Shurochka. But the women are pardoned even for such villainies: as the “weaker

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sex,” they need not pay a social and moral price for their actions. As portrayed by Kuprin, the real leaders and responsible parties in personal relations are the women, while the men, with their emotional and psychic complexes, are the ones who are led and victimized.57

ANTON CHEKHOV’S “THE GRASSHOPPER”: ADULTERY AS EVIDENCE OF STUPIDITY Chekhov’s short story “The Grasshopper” relates the tale of Olga Ivanovna and Osip Stepanovich Dymovs, a recently married young couple. The spouses’ interests are very different. Dymov is a hard-working doctor and has no spare time. Even though they are financially strained, his wife Olga does not work but instead passes her time with “creative” young men, allegedly engaged in writing “works of genius,” but who are in fact lazy and presumptuous idlers.58 Olga looks down at her husband with contempt, because he does not conform to the stereotypes of her own bohemian circle. Dymov, for his part, is a kind and responsible man, who treats his wife with warm indulgence. Being incapable of valuing her husband for his true merits, Olga has an affair with a man more in line with her ideas.59 She does not even bother much to conceal her infidelity. In the end, Dymov begins to suspect her treachery and becomes somber and melancholy towards her. On one such occasion of returning from her lover, Olga finds Dymov infected with diphtheria. Even while sick, Dymov continues to care for her and isolates himself so as not to transmit the disease. She learns from his colleagues that he caught the infection while sucking up the mucus from a boy with diphtheria through a pipette. In the end Dymov dies, and Olga remains a widow.60 Chekhov portrays Dymov and Olga as morally antithetical.61 Whereas Dymov is a businesslike, serious, and modest person engaged in crucial issues of life and death, Olga is shown as a frivolous nobody with a swelled head. Their appearances are also contrasting: Dymov is outwardly common-looking, while Olga invests much effort in attempting to look exquisite and noble. But these external appearances reflect the exact opposite: Dymov proves to be a man capable of sacrifice for the sake of his patients, while Olga, for all her ephemeral beauty, remains a narrow-minded selfish fool.62 Olga takes unfair advantage of the existing concept of woman’s role in society, allowing her to live off her husband, and unjustly placing her in the position of the “weaker sex,” which has the right to consume without giving anything in return and without any justification for such behavior. She is a silly woman who cheats her husband due to her own intellectual and emo-

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tional pettiness. The story is told as seen through the eyes of Olga, who views her husband from her own frivolous stance, hence underestimating him. As a counterbalance, the author treats Olga and her erroneous judgments ironically, mockingly.63 But there is nothing ironic in the situation of Olga’s husband, Osip Dymov. He is humiliated both by his wife’s infidelity and by her patronizing attitude towards him. The atmosphere created in the home is intolerable, and he finds his only satisfaction in his work. The timing of his discovery of her infidelity and the inhaling of the fatal bacteria suggests that this was no mere coincidence. Dymov undergoes a massive inhalation of fatal bacteria and refuses to see his wife prior to his death, not even to part from her, although he allowed his medical colleagues to get close to him. If diphtheria is contagious even through proximity to the sickbed, oughtn’t Dymov to have anticipated that he would become infected by the disease? Was his drawing in of these bacteria a conscious act of suicide on his part? He preferred to die rather than to continue the situation in which his wife had placed him. This act was the result of his internalizing the humiliation and a substitute for the murder that he wished to carry out against his wife. Dymov punishes his wife by his suicide, leaving her a widow.

SUMMARY In the background of all of the above works describing the woman’s adulteries, there lies a certain trauma encountered by the author: namely, the fact that a presumably decent married woman, of a reasonable intellectual and emotional level and enjoying socio-economic status, can derive pleasure from such an animalistic, disgusting and humiliating activity. The man, by virtue of his physiological makeup—thus, in the opinion of the author—is compelled from time to time to descend to the level of an animal, and in retrospect feels humiliated and suffers as a result. But, in his view, matters are different for the woman, as her physiological makeup does not force her to behave thus. What drives her to engage in such behavior is thus her true animalistic nature. The author is unable to deal with the transition undergone by the woman from a sublime figure into a shameful beast, all the more so when she carries out this transition willfully. The awareness of the sexual act arouses feelings of shame and disgust towards the woman in his heart. The author is unable to understand or to believe that the woman, after she has exposed her true self, is capable of again becoming a human being, a mother, a companion, and a wife, but remains in his eyes a dirty beast.

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A woman who voluntarily engages in sexual relations with her lover, particularly when she simultaneously has sexual, erotic, emotional, and personal relations with her husband, is willingly indulging in polyandry. Enjoying relationships with different partners is traditionally considered a male privilege and capability. The man is the one to conduct a harem, not the woman. While maintaining her polyandry she must necessarily determine a hierarchy among her men, preferring one to another. Thus she would become the superior judge of the physical traits and sexual performances of each of them. Such a situation places the woman at the traditionally masculine position, one that is humiliating to the man and reduces his masculine dignity, and which is impossible for a normal woman, according to Tolstoy, Leskov, Turgenev, and Kuprin, to enjoy. Chekhov mocks the unfaithful woman, presenting her sexual interests as one of her idle activities, ignoring its emotional and sensual aspects—for were she a man, she would be engaged with real work and life. In these works the unfaithful woman humiliates and victimizes both her husband and her lover. Her husband or lover eventually dies or is deeply traumatized, his death being perceived as a consequence of the act of infidelity of his beloved woman.64 The human side of the woman is inconsistent with her aggressive, sexual, devouring behavoir. All those women who enjoyed sexual relations were either childless or abandoned their children; they willingly sacrificed the woman’s sacred mission in favor of sexual activity, something incomprehensible in terms of the depths of disgust that it brings in its wake. This aspect in the nature of the woman, according to the authors, is not human but Satanic. NOTES 1. In addition to the evident French influences on Tolstoy, significant Russian influence should be noted in his depiction of feminine figures. Regarding Pushkin’s influence on Tolstoy’s descriptions of women, see Slavskaya-Grenier, “Tolstoy on the Way Toward Feminism and Polyphony: From War and Peace to Anna Karenina,” in her Representing the Marginal Woman in Nineteenth Century Russian Literature: Personalism, Feminism and Polyphony (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 2001), 87–106. 2. For possible influence of this novel by Flaubert on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, see Jane McDermid, “The Influence of Western Ideas on the Development of the Woman Question in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” Irish Slavonic Studies 9 (1988): 21–36. 3. See Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: The Free Press, Mcmillan, 1988), 7–9, who refers to another novella by Lev Tolstoy, “Kreutzer Sonata.” She explains Tolstoy’s attitude toward man-woman relationships: “Through the sexual relationship a man, according to the patriarchal tradition, must make the woman

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afraid and compliant, also through beatings. A man has to train a woman, to break her and to compose her again the way she should be, which is servile, humiliated, a one who realizes the animal stage she is in and to admit on her part that he is her master. . . . His [Tolstoy’s] antagonism towards sexual intercourse is absolute.” See Elisabeth Stenbock-Fermor, “Tolstoy’s Portrait of Anna: Keystone in the Arch,” Criticism 18 (1976): 1–14. 4. See also the presentation of Levin-Kitty’s marriage as unhappy and constantly lacking in communication: Amy Mandelker, “The Judgment of Anna Karenina,” in A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature, ed. Sona Stephan Hoisington (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1995), 42. Cf. Marianna Torgovnick, Closure in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981), 71 ff. 5. L. N. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Tula: Tula Publishers, 1957); all quotations are taken from this edition. See also Mary Evans, Reflecting on Anna Karenina (London: Routledge, 1983), 83, who claims that Anna “offers no model of how women might resist the strictures of conventional patriarchal authority.” Cf. David Holbrook, Tolstoy, Woman and Death: A Study of War and Peace and Anna Karenina (London: Associated UP, 1984), 176; and Karin Horwatt, “Food and the Adulterous Woman: Sexual and Social Morality in Anna Karenina,” Language and Literature 13 (1988): 35–67. 6. Holbrook observes that we know almost nothing about Anna; see Holbrook, Tolstoy, 171. An interesting point regarding Anna’s education is that at the beginning of the novel Tolstoy notes that she speaks mostly Russian, but towards the end she changes over to French. Anna’s gradual transition from Russian to French language and culture corresponds to a change in her ethical views and religious identification. Tolstoy sees her gradual abandonment of Russian Orthodoxy in favor of Catholicism as a negative development, culminating in marital infidelity and suicide. 7. On Anna as an educated, modern woman of her time, and as a strong-willed personality, see Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987), 43: “Vronsky is submissive . . . in her presence he had no will of his own” (ibid.). Her high level of intellectual and personal development emphasizes her great measure of responsibility and guilt, thereby justifying her severe punishment by the author. 8. Translated literally: “but I was given to another man” (Russian: No ya drugomu otdana). 9. Translated by Ch. Johnston. 10. On Anna Karenina as the antithesis to Pushkin’s Tatyana, see David A. Sloane, “Pushkin’s Legacy in Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy Studies Journal 4 (1991): 1–23. On the other hand, there are common characteristics between them. See Richard A. Gregg, “Tatyana’s Two Dreams: The Unwanted Spouse and the Demonic Lover,” Slavonic and East European Review 48 (1970): 492–505. 11. Regarding the principal differences between Anna and Emma, see Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self (New York, Viking Press, 1955), 65. He claims that, whereas the image of Anna attracts the reader, that of Emma, to the contrary, irritates him. The image of Anna appeals to the reader because of her uniqueness, while that of Emma emerges as a more routine one. Tolstoy describes Anna that way in order to later

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break that positive image of her, while Flaubert shows her as a miserable creature from the very beginning of the novel. 12. Trespass of all the rules resulting in a moral crime or sin is a common subject in Russian literature; an example is that of Sonya Marmeladova. But hers was a case of coercion: she went onto the street because of her social and economic situation. The social milieu depicted in Dostoevsky’s novel creates conditions that can only be survived at the price of infringing on social laws. But Anna’s social world is entirely different. Objectively safe, her extramarital love goes against all social and moral norms. Her tragedy is that the rules require her to accept without protest the world in which she has been placed, to abrogate her will, and to abandon herself to the disposition of God. See also Holbrook, Tolstoy, Woman and Death, 176–177. 13. Motherhood is presented in literature in an idealistic light. Thus, when these women abandon their children, that act in itself places them in a very negative, reprehensible, and blameworthy light. See Benjamin, Bonds of Love. On mothering as a means for women to gain higher moral value in the public opinion, see Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Berkeley and Los-Angeles: University of California Press, 1978. 14. Richard Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy, Resident and Stranger; A Study in Fiction and Theology (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986), 131–132, argues that “Tolstoy . . . insisted that people have no rights, only responsibilities. . . . Anna abandons her flawed human relatedness to which she is responsible.” 15. Martin Price, “Tolstoy and the Forms of Life: ‘Inexorable Law,’” in Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 111–123. 16. As it appears in literature, doctor’s wives are more frequently unfaithful than wives of men of other professions. See, e.g., Madame Bovary, Anton Chekhov’s “The Grasshopper,” as well as other works: Hemingway’s “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife”; the Hebrew author S. Y. Agnon’s “The Doctor and His Divorcee”; and many others. The reason behind this phenomenon is probably a bitterly grotesque one: while the doctor is constantly busy with the human body in trying to heal it, his unfaithful wife is also busy with the human body, but in her own way, which is probably more successful and certainly more enjoyable than her husband’s. 17. See Dragan Kujundzic, “Pardoning Women in ‘Anna Karenina’”, Tolstoy Studies 6 (1993), 65–68. 18. See Miller’s introduction, “The Heroine’s Text: Reading in the French and English Novel, 1722–1782”: “[There are] two types of works with female-centered plot: ‘euphoric’ and ‘dysphoric.’ The novels in the euphoric text end with the heroine’s integration into society. . . . The heroine [ . . . ] moves in her negotiation with the world of men and money from ‘nothing’ to ‘ all.’ . . . In the dysphoric text the novels end instead with the heroine’s death in the flower of her youth . . . and the move is from ‘all’ in this world to ‘nothing.’” (xi). 19. See Gary R. Jahn, “The Image of the Railroad in ‘Anna Karenina’,” Slavic and East European Journal 25 (1981): 8–12; and cf. Gary Browning, “The Death of Anna Karenina: Anna’s Share of the Blame,” Slavic and East European Journal 30 (1986): 327–339, who asserts that Vronsky was mainly responsible for Anna’s actions.

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20. Note the opposite opinion by Robert L. Jackson, “On the Ambivalent Beginning of Anna Karenina,” in The Semantic Analysis of Literature Texts, ed. E. de Haard, T. Langerak and W. G. Weststeijn (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1990), 345–352. He states there that “Tolstoy does not judge Anna. He understands her” (346). See also ambivalent and dialectical arguments with regard to the judgment of Anna Karenina. Thus, Mandelker, “The Judgment of Anna Karenina,” quoting Judith Armstrong, says that on a subconscious level Tolstoy identifies with Anna and Anna’s death, implying that Tolstoy perceived his life situation as hopeless. 21. See Gary Saul Morson, “The Reader as Voyeur: Tolstoy and the Poetics of Didactic Fiction,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 12:4 (Winter 1978): 465–480; David H. Stewart, “‘Anna Karenina’: The Dialectic of Prophecy,” PMLA 79 (1964): 266–274; Anthony Thornby, Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 73 ff. Morson poses the question as to whether Tolstoy’s attitude towards women is misogynistic, but eventually rejects this assumption and comes to the opposite conclusion: viz., that his attitude conformed with the Zeitgeist, and his anti-female attitudes did not overstep the accepted conventions of his milieu. See also Gary Rosenfeld, “The Problems of Gender Criticism; or What Is to Be Done about Dostoyevsky,” afterword to A Plot of Her Own, 114–127, esp. 116–117. He argues against the position taken by Joe Andrew, Women in Russian Literature, 1780–1863 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), who presents literary works—thus argues Rosenfeld—as a tool of education and socialization, thereby contributing to the process of educating and policing women as well. Rosenfeld disagrees with him, and insists that works written by males function as instruments for suppression and indoctrination of women in the society—for example, by demonstrating how severely the female protagonist would be judged and punished were she to seek independence and self-mindedness and consequently rebel. 22. On the demonic nature of Anna’s and Vronsky’s passion, see Thornby, Leo Tolstoy, 70 ff. 23. See the opposite opinion in Amy Mandelker, Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question and the Victorian Novel (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1993), Chapter II, part 4, 93–94: “Frame: Image and the Boundaries of Vision in Anna Karenina – The Execution of Anna Karenina: Heroines Framed and Hung,” 83–100. Mandeleker claims that decomposition of Anna’s body did not affect her beauty as long as her head was preserved, even when severed. 24. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problems of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 86 ff., argues that Katherina’s adultery was a result of her primary wish to be loved and desired. 25. Leskov’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtzensk District” was probably influenced by Ivan Turgenev’s “Hamlet of Shchigry District,” one of the stories in A Sportsman’s Sketches, besides the obvious influences of Shakespeare’s works. 26. Gary Rosenfeld, in his “Afterword,” 118, quotes Carolina de Maegd-Soep, The Emancipation of Russian Women in Literature and Society: A Contribution to the Knowledge of Russian Society in the 1860’s (Ghent: Ghent State UP, 1978), 311–312, who indicates, “When women are presented as victims by male writers, they are invariably sympathetically portrayed, shown to be victimized by their environment . . .

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but never are they victimized by their creators.” See also Heldt, Terrible Perfection, 61–62: “The paradox of a male author creating a female character, itself necessarily an act of voyeurism, results, in much Russian fiction, not in an attempt to integrate the image of woman into a human model transcending gender, a chelovek, but rather to isolate her from men, as she acts out her ‘fate.’ . . . The kind of voyeurism which sees women characters performing their female activities focuses on the male observer. The main, male fictions of Russian literature in which one female character observes another are of a different sort altogether. These are not usually interactions of a positive nature, but rather ones involving jealousy leading to the murder of one woman by the other, always in a rage of repressed sexuality that is male-oriented, as in Leskov’s ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtzensk District.’” 27. On Katherina’s sexual passion, see Hugh McLean, Nikolai Leskov: The Man and His Art (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1977), 147 ff. McLean argues that in this novel Leskov explores the “pure sexuality” of the heroine: “One of the most powerful [sexual passions] in all Russian literature. . . . In this sense Leskov’s heroine is perhaps even more archetypal than her Shakespearean namesake.” It would seem that Leskov, more than other traditional Russian authors of his time, tends to describe a woman in the throes of passion as understandable, human, natural. 28. Hugh McLean claims that Katherina’s aggressive conduct is related to her femininity; ibid., 147: “The murders of Leskov’s heroine are directly linked to her female sexuality. She murders as a woman in order to achieve a woman’s ends: so that she can live and be loved.” 29. See: Benjamin, Bonds of Love, 89: “Woman is to accept the abrogation of her own will, to surrender the autonomy of her body in childbirth and lactation, to live for another. . . . Her own sexual feelings, with their incipient threat of selfishness, passion, and uncontrollability, are a disturbing possibility that even psychoanalysis seldom contemplates.” 30. Leskov seems to have continued the tradition, widely accepted in both Western and Russian literature, to victimize the images of woman protagonists even as they are simultaneously idealized. See Joe Andrew, Women in Russian Literature, 1780– 1863 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); cf. The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), xi. 31. For an outstanding article on man’s first love in Turgenev’s novels, see Jane Costlow, “Abusing the Erotic: Women in Turgenev’s First Love,” in Engendering Slavic Literatures, ed. Pamela Chester and Sibelan Forrester (Bloomington– Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1996), 3–12. George Pahomov, In Earthbound Flight: Romanticism in Turgenev (Rockville, MD: Victor Kamkin, 1983), 127–129, claims that Turgenev describes love as an immanent feeling within the man, whereas the woman as a value of her own rarely appears in his works. 32. Maria Polozova’s husband was aware of her affairs and even encouraged them, providing her with new men. Maria hardly belongs to the category of “unfaithful wives,” but to that of “wives having extramarital relationships with the agreement of their husbands.” 33. See Eva Kagan-Kans, Hamlet and Don-Quixote: Turgenev’s Ambivalent Vision (The Hague-Paris: Mounton, 1975), 51: “Polozova’s mad ride with Sanin into the

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mountains which culminates in her seduction of him, is symbolic of her destructive power over him.” 34. He is described in superlatives: “A handsome, graceful figure, agreeable, rather unformed features, kindly bluish eyes, golden hair, . . . above all, that peculiar, naïvely-cheerful, confiding, open . . . expression, by which . . . one could recognize the children of steady-going, noble families . . . freshness, health, softness, softness, softness—there you have the whole of Sanin” (Turgenev, 8:51, all quotations are from this edition). 35. See J. A. T. Lloyd, Two Russian Reformers: Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy (London: Stanley Paul and Co., 1912), 41: “Turgenev Is the Sanin of ‘The Torrents of Spring’.” 36. About the importance of political views for Turgenev, see Leonard Shapiro, Turgenev: His Life and Times (New York: Oxford UP, 1978), xii ff. 37. See Theodor Reik, Of Love and Lust: On the Psychoanalysis of Romantic and Sexual Emotions (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1949), 44: “We are surprised to discover that our first love is not directed to another person or to ourselves, but to an imaginary ideal ego, to an image of ourselves as we would like to be. It is the kind of admiration that makes one feel small, inferior, unworthy by comparison with the object.” 38. Shapiro (Turgenev, xii ff) asserts that Turgenev’s views on personal liberty, including female liberty, were more acceptable in the West than those of other Russian authors, e.g. Lev Tolstoy. The ambivalence of the Polozova character should also be noted. Even an unrestrained woman such as Polozova had her moments of submission to the man whom she feared as a young girl, i.e., her tutor. Thus Kagan-Kans, Hamlet and Don Quixote, 46–47, proves that there is no clear distinction between the young Turgenev’s maiden dedicated to serve the ideal of her beloved man and the older rapacious woman seeking to devour her desired one. 39. The motive of the strong, erotic woman often recurs in Tolstoy’s love novels. See Costlow, “Abusing the Erotic,” 5 ff. 40. On the mythical and historical roots of the image of Maria as Dido, who seduced Aeneas, see Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1951), 197–282; Kagan-Kans, Hamlet and Don Quixote, 41–56. 41. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), writes of “the contradiction between a sexual modernized angel and an aggressive carnal Magdalene.” (11 ff) 42. About seeing in Turgenev’s works, see Robert Louis Jackson, “The Ethics of Vision in Turgenev’s ‘The Execution of Tropman’ and Dostoevsky’s ‘View of the Matter,’” in The Poetics of Ivan Turgenev, ed. David A. Lowe, Washington: Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies (Occasional Papers, 234), 1989, 27–43. See also E. Ann Kaplan, “Is the Gaze Male?,” in Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow and others (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 310: “Women . . . do not function as signifiers for a signified . . . but signifier and signified have been elided into a sign that represents something in the male unconscious.” See also Costlow, “Abusing the Erotic”, 4: “Turgenev’s story of love is obsessed

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with seeing”; and further on, 7: “Women on screen are the objects of several gazes . . . of other men, of an imaginary viewer in a potential audience . . . these gazes are predominantly, perhaps inevitably male and . . . the effect of the male gaze is to objectify the woman’s body, more precisely to fetishize that body—that is, to render it phallus-like, long and slender .” 43. See Vera Sandomirsky Dunham, “The Strong Woman Motif,” in The Transformation of Russian Society: Aspects of Social Change since 1861, ed. Cyril E. Black (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1960), 459–483. 44. The affair with Polozova disturbed the normal course of Sanin’s first love, and perhaps for just that reason hurt him so badly. See Reik, Of Love and Lust, 32 ff.; Pahomov, In Earthbound Flight, Chapter VI: “Turgenev’s Romantic Love,” 89–100, esp. 90–91. 45. See Natalie Shainess, “Nymphomania, Hostile Sex, and Superego Development,” in Sexual Dynamics of Anti-Social Behavior, ed. Louis B. Schlesinger and Eugene Revitch (Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas Publisher, 1983), 61: “Arrogant confidence on the part of a woman . . . seems to him [to a man] as a disguised or actual rape. He feels it to be a hate- or anger-motivated sex, a punishing sex, a degrading sex on the part of the woman performed on him.” See also the opinion that aggressiveness on the part of a woman reflects her feeling herself as a male. Sigmund Freud, Sexuality and Psychology, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 128: “She turns herself in fantasy into a man, without herself becoming active in a masculine way.” 46. “Polozova” in Russian is of the same root as poloz, a blacksnake or a sledge runner. 47. See Costlow “Abusing the Erotic,” 10–11, esp. 10: “In ‘Spring Torrents’ . . . the narrator proclaims that ‘first love is exactly like a revolution: the regular and established order of life is in an instant smashed to fragments; youth stands at the barricade, its bright banner raised high in the air, and sends its ecstatic greetings to the future, whatever it may hold—death or a new life, no matter.’” 48. See A. I. Kuprin, The Duel, Selected Works in 6 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1958), 3:302–547, at 357 (all quotations are from this edition): “Loneliness plagued his life: the regimental brutality aggrieved him, and the moral values he had imbibed from childhood were profaned.” 49. On Kuprin’s self-identification with his character, see Nikolas J. L. Luker, Alexander Kuprin (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 73–74. 50. See “‘I told this joker bluntly’—said Captain Sliva [referring to Romashov]— ‘You’d, Sir, better . . . leave the regiment altogether. Screw off with your officering. . . .’ Romashov shut his eyes tightly and shrunk inside himself” (479). 51. See for example p. 486. See also Luker, Alexander Kuprin, 75–76. 52. About the fear of sexual relationships with women, see Dworkin, Intercourse, 29. On this particular scene, see Luker, Kuprin, 87 ff. 53. On the Oedipus complex in Russian classical literature, see Costlow, “Abusing the Erotic,” 9 ff. 54. On the psychological complexity of Romashov and his remaining a child, see Luker, Kuprin, 84–86.

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55. Judith Butler discusses the issue of so called “masked women.” See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1994), 50–52. She suggests the theory of femininity as masquerade in terms of a theory of aggression and conflict resolution: “women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men. . . . femininity is taken on by a woman who “wishes for masculinity,” but fears the retributive consequences of taking on the public appearance of masculinity. The woman takes on a masquerade knowingly in order to conceal her masculinity from the masculine audience she wants to castrate” (51–52). The first to draw attention to this was Joan Riviere in her 1929 her essay “Womanliness as a Masquerade.” 56. On Nazansky as an embodiment of Kuprin’s philosophical views, see Luker, Kuprin, 95 ff. 57. See Costlow speaking of the Adam and Eve motive in psychoanalysis of Russian classical literature, “Abusing the Erotic,” 5 ff. 58. See Maegd-Soep, Chekhov and Women, 226: “The seductive, graceful women, however, generally have empty heads and lead empty lives. Their occupations speak for themselves: light-hearted love affairs, amateur theatricals, balls, masquerades and so on.” And further, at 228: “But there is evidence that the writer [Chekhov] did not deem the behavior of the frivolous woman inherent in the female nature . . . he linked this phenomenon to the problem of better education which would teach women to live intelligently.” 59. See Arij Rosenholm, “The ‘Woman Question’ of the 1860s and the Ambiguity of the ‘Learned Woman,’” in Gender and Russian Literature: New Perspectives, ed. Rosalind Marsh (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 112–128. See also Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. Victor Terras (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1985), 520: “A worldly, frivolous education makes even blameless girls into traps for masculine lust and leads to tragedies . . . carnal passion breeds crime.” 60. On the figure of Dymov, see G. A. Bialy, Russian Realism: From Turgenev to Chekhov (Leningrad: Sovetskiy Pisatel, 1990), 282–283: “A figure of a plain and unassuming man . . . is brought to the foreground acquiring traits of moral greatness. Osip Dymov is a modest devotee of science endowed with uncommon goodness and delicacy; outwardly he is inconspicuous, and hardly noticed by ordinary people, unlike his gadabout wife, who for all her highbrow claims cannot appreciate the true and unpretentious greatness of her husband.” 61. On the antithesis between Dymov and his wife, cf. V.V. Golubkov, Anton Cˇexov as a Master of Story-Writing: Essays in Modern Soviet Literary Criticism, ed. and trans., Leo Hulanicki and Davic Savignac (The Hague-Paris: Mouton, 1976), 142 ff. Golubkov claims that Chekhov depicts these protagonists as antithetical in every possible sense: social, moral, personal, and in outward appearance. While Dymov is a gifted and highly spiritual person, modest in his demands, his wife is the complete opposite to him. Their world views are likewise presented as diametrically opposed. 62. For a similar analysis of this Chekhov story, see Golubkov, 135–168. 63. Pospelov perceives in such composition of the story a demonstrative example of anti-feminism. See G. N. Pospelov, “The Style of Čexov’s Tales,” in Cˇexov as a Master of Story-Writing, 119–130, esp. 120. V. V. Golubkov likewise perceives this

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story as a manifestation of Čexov’s extreme anti-feminist attitude to women; see his paper in the same volume, “Čexov’s Lirico-Dramatic Stories,” 142 ff. 64. See Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, Tolstoy on the Couch: Misogyny, Masochism and the Absent Mother (New York: NYUP, 1998), 72: “The female is . . . either a wife or prostitute. Wives and prostitutes thus form a kind of equivalence class. They are the same thing. And sexual interaction with either of them is always ‘offensive,’ even if there are different degrees of offensiveness. . . . The best thing is to love and help one’s wife, but never to open the ‘safety valve.’ Tolstoy’s shame, guilt and disgust at the idea of sexual interaction with a woman is all too evident.”

Chapter Five

Anxiety about the Strong Woman: Turgenev, Leskov, and Bulgakov

Within the literature of nineteenth and twentieth century Russia, one may also find works whose authors relate to their female characters with sympathy and affection. But even in that case, their attitude does not transcend the zeitgeist: that is, even such authors perceive woman as inferior to man.

TURGENEV’S MEN AND WOMEN: EACH TO ONE’S OWN CALLING One of the most attractive characters in nineteenth century Russian literature is the “Turgenev maiden,” a fine and tender incarnation of Russian femininity.1 Beneath her ordinary appearance are concealed exceptional spiritual forces: boundless readiness for self-renunciation, a talent for deep and devoted love, and a desire to live for the sake of high ideals.2 Turgenev idealizes these women, but notwithstanding his admiration, their man is always eventually devastated. One of the outstanding figures of this type is Natalya Lasunsky, in Turgenev’s novel “Rudin” (1853). Her external appearance was not particularly striking, but the important thing was her inner beauty, her remarkable personal traits: the depth of her feeling, her decisiveness, her sincerity and authenticity. 3 She was strong-minded and independent in her way of thinking. It was only 83

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wise Lezhnev who apprehended her disposition: “But Natalya is not a child. . . . Her passions are strong, and her character—my goodness!” (p. 55).4 She was prepared to follow Rudin devotedly to the very end, wherever he might go, and to support him in all his deeds. Previously reserved but now in allure of him, she yielded to him intellectually and spiritually. She fell in love with her idol with all the passion of her youth, and was prepared to sacrifice everything for him. But Rudin withdrew and avoided connection with her. Natalya realized that her hero was “a coward,” as she bitterly told him, disappointed and broken. Natalya was right. Here we have a typical meeting between a weak man and a strong woman. Such a woman frightens the man; she threatens to rob him of his control of the situation; he feels defeated, humiliated, and castrated by her. To respond to her positively would mean to submit to her power, to sacrifice his independence, to admit his weaknesses against her power, to acknowledge that she is the man between them, and that he is the violated woman. The only possibility that remains for him is to refuse her—even when he finds her attractive and even when he, by himself, would wish to court her. Were she to ultimately submit to his advances, particularly if she had initially rejected him, this would give satisfaction to his male ego; it would constitute a victory. The weak man does not seek a suitable woman; rather, it is more important to him that she submit to him, thereby affirming his own selfconfidence and self-respect, which are vulnerable and contingent. The strength of Natalya’s character is revealed to Rudin unexpectedly when he was least prepared for this, augmenting even further his feeling of castration. Likewise her readiness to sacrifice her independence for his sake and to submit to him of her own free will only concretizes her great power, which frightens and humiliates him even more. In a later novel, “On the Eve” (1859), we are shown another remarkable female character, Elena Stakhov. She is over twenty, and “there was something nervous, electric, something impulsive and hurried [about her],” (3:25); she is big-hearted, eager to contribute generously to other people. The relations that unfold between Elena Stakhov and her beloved Dmitry Insarov exemplify Turgenev’s idea that no physical harmony is possible without mutual understanding and togetherness of the partners.5 Elena could not accept a life devoid of love, for which she yearns, but she saw no one around her worthy of such love. The story of Dmitry Insarov, a Bulgarian, burning with desire to liberate his motherland, caught her imagination. It was only after a series of long conversations, in which his deep anguish for the sufferings of his motherland and his willingness to die for Bulgaria became clear to her, that she began to see him in a heroic light. Having fallen in love with him, she manifested her feelings to the utmost. She

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was not deterred from marrying him by the need to part from her own family and country.6 Insarov remained faithful to his ideals till his last breath, and Elena’s love outlived his death.7 In this novel, as in Turgenev’s previous novel, the girl is opinionated, idealistic, and has unusual spiritual and emotional power. Insarov is a rather rare kind of man in the scenery of Russian literature, in that he accepted her proposition willingly, without being thereby either humiliated or destroyed by it. What was the reason for this? He sacrificed his private life, his male ego, and even his life per se, for the sake of Bulgaria. He saw in the relationship with Elena the possibility of receiving personal support which he intended to channel towards the political and social struggle for the sake of Bulgaria, and ignored the personal humiliation for the sake of this goal, which was sublime and important in his eyes. Insarov’s personality was one of unusual dimensions: he was a soldier, a survivor, carrying on his shoulders the entire future of his motherland, and thereby received recognition and honor over and beyond that which a woman would be able to give him. He realized himself in the political, social, and professional areas; hence his self-evaluation was not dependent upon Elena. Thus, the encounter with a strong woman did not cause him to feel castration or the desire to take vengeance upon her. A different attitude is depicted in “Fathers and Sons” (1862). Bazarov is attracted to Anna Odintzova, a widow in the prime of life—among other traits, because of her life experience. Before meeting her, his attitude toward women had been cynical and scornful: he believed women were incapable of independent thought, and only existed to be “used” physically. Bazarov was a strong and passionate man, requiring nothing of a woman but that she be visually appealing and submissive. Yet the encounter with Anna Sergeyevna shattered this habitual attitude. Bazarov, who believed it impossible to hold an intelligent conversation with a woman, did not even notice that he and Odintzova had been engaged for a long time in a lively exchange about varied and fascinating topics. “A female with brains,” he concluded, surprised, curious, and excited. He noted to himself that she was quite unique—a fact symbolized by her surname, odin in Russian meaning “the only” or “the single one.”8 This was the first time he had encountered a woman who could be an equal partner to him, which was probably the highest evaluation of a woman in his eyes. Bazarov missed the fact that Odintzova was guiding their conversation. She wisely pardoned him for putting on airs during the first minutes of his visit, realizing that this was a way of hiding his confusion. She is more mature than Bazarov, she is patient, attentive and forgiving to him, she is always there for him whenever he needs an understanding person next to him. She is

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both a mother and a nurse to him. Odintzova allowed Basarov to realize his Oedipal complex.9 Odintzova was the initiator in their relations, but she allowed him to think that he was the one leading their relationship. Had their relations continued in this manner, Odintzova would have ultimately adapted Basarov to her will and needs, castrating him with tenderness and congeniality. She would have turned him into her baby, into her eunuch, without him even noticing this. But Turgenev’s solution to this intolerable situation was to “kill” his hero before this scenario realized itself. It is better for a man to die than to become the poodle of a woman. Turgenev’s favorite heroines are attractive, each in their own way, and beloved by the author, but they surpass their men in the richness of their feelings and their moral strength.10 A “Turgenev maiden” is prepared to submit to her beloved of her own free will. She is prepared to see in him the figure of a father and a spiritual teacher; she wants to look up to him—but all these factors only concretize her own great spiritual power, for she is so confident in herself that she is prepared to lower herself willingly without thereby feeling any sense of inferiority. By contrast, the male figure in Turgenev is terrified and petrified in the face of this tremendous power. Turgenev’s man is infantile, he needs a mother figure, a strong, domineering, and punitive mother like the mother whom Turgenev himself had in his childhood. Turgenev’s man is a baby whose mother needs to lead him and he will obey her. He will give up his own will for her sake and devote himself to her.11 To the Oedipal complex in Turgenev’s man there is added a certain masochistic note. The couple described by Turgenev consists of a man and a woman, each one of whom wishes to look up to his partner, the motivations of each involving an element of masochism. Turgenev’s male requires a tough mother figure; an adoring, fawning girl will not satisfy him emotionally. Nevertheless, the man’s attitude to such a girl is divided: on the one hand she represses him, threatens to deprive him of his independence and to castrate him; on the other hand, she is not brutal enough towards him. The man’s masochism comes from his feelings of inferiority and from a destructive selfimage, while the masochism of the girl derives its source specifically from her power. There is another woman described in “Fathers and Sons” who is the antithesis of Odintzova: Evdoksya Nikitishna Kukshina. She is a comic, somewhat exotic character, through whom the author ridicules women’s efforts to manifest their supposed equality with men. Kukshina behaves in a masculine way, demonstratively and impetuously rejecting the traditional social etiquette expected of a woman: she shakes hands with men, smokes cigars, takes an

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interest in fashionable scientific news of those days, and talks about the professional employment of women. Turgenev presents these as false, bogus, shallow, and slatternly; his attitude towards these activities on her part is one of disapproval and condemnation. She is forward, impudent, and affected. Bazarov is not to be deceived by such “emancipated” style and abhors the vulgar ways of which Kukshina was the embodiment.12 The figure of Kukshina provides Turgenev’s man with an opportunity to make a rationalization regarding his fears, his anxieties, and his flight from a strong woman. Turgenev’s male characters are intellectually endowed, but also delicate and vulnerable, so that they are easily crushed. Their gaze is turned upwards, detached from material reality. They are concerned with the higher spiritual sphere of social life or of philosophical investigation, but they are helpless and defenseless in worldly matters. They eventually die as the result of their spiritual strivings, while the women who have been at their sides are nourished by their men’s ideas, continue their lives, satisfied and at times even happy. Their lack of refined spiritual development is to their advantage: in exchange for this lack, they are more stable and vital. Having recovered from the shock brought about by the departure of their beloved man, they do not sink into depression, but each one finds her own way to survive.13 For example, Natalya Lasunsky, after recovering from her disappointing love for Rudin, happily marries her wealthy neighbor, Volintsev, to whom she makes a loving wife and devoted mother to his children.14

“THE BATTLE-AXE” BY NIKOLAI LESKOV— FEMININE CHARMING NASTINESS Nikolai Leskov’s short novel “The Battle-Axe” (“Voitelnitsa”) does not involve any clearly defined plot or intrigue as such, but is entirely focused on the character of Domna Platonovna, whom the narrator encounters several times, and who told him her life story.15 She is a childless widow, advanced in years, whose short, full-bodied figure matches her kind-hearted and talkative disposition. As she says, she knows everyone in the capital and has something to do with each. Domna Platonovna seems to be typical of the Russian urban mercantile milieu of Petersburg.16 The author finds Domna Platonovna both attractive and repulsive. She is straightforward and responsive, ready to open her heart and her purse to most people, but at the same time also shameless in her intentions. She combines seemingly incompatible characteristics: sagacious and cunning, but also stupid, though sensible and matronly, modest and finicky, she is at the same time a wanton woman.

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Two points of view are presented in the story: that of Domna Platonovna herself, and that of the narrator, who is a young man. She treats him with the motherly patronage of an experienced and well-wishing person, but his attitude toward her is rather critical and disapproving, or at least skeptical, with tongue in cheek. Domna Platonovna’s authoritarian ways only accentuate more vividly her lack of development, the author’s respect towards her being ironic. Domna Platonovna cuts a paradoxical and absurd figure. She can be loved or hated, but one cannot imagine the social life of Petersburg without her. She is the embodiment of Petersburg, and the reader’s attitude to her resembles his attitude to the city. Her figure evokes a wide gamut of emotions: compassion, sympathy, and pity, alongside disgust and incomprehension, Leskov treats her with much warmth and domesticity—which does not preclude this character being designed as a mockery of a woman’s behavior. 17 The protagonist cannot possibly be humiliated by Domna Platonovna because he is emotionally indifferent towards her, building a fence of estrangement, contempt, and scorn.18 He does not need positive evaluation or respect from Domna Platonovna, as he rejects her. But it is quite clear that this cannot be a regular “recipe” for relations between a man and a woman. Leskov’s smiling attitude towards his heroine derives only from the fact that he does not take her seriously.

“THE WHITE GUARD” BY MIKHAIL BULGAKOV: SPLENDID ELENA AS VICTIMIZED MOTHER RUSSIA Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (1891−1940), probably the most eminent Russian writer of the twentieth century, who was also a dramatist and a translator, expressed the doom of Russian creative intellectuals under the Soviet regime. Beginning his adult life as a doctor, he volunteered for the front at the beginning of the First World War. During the civil war that broke out after the 1917 Revolution he was in Kiev, where he witnessed the final days of the “White” movement, the German occupation of the Ukraine in 1918, and the atrocities of the Petlura gang. 19 In 1921 he moved to Moscow, where in 1924 he wrote “The White Guard” (“Belaya gvardiya”),20 based largely on autobiographical events,21 which he later reworked into a play, The Days of the Turbins (Dni Turbinykh), staged by the prestigious MCHAT (MXAT, Russian) Theater in Moscow. “The White Guard” is a chronicle of the Turbin family during the period of the civil war in Kiev, circa 1918–1919. The family members are the older brother Alexei, an army doctor; his sister Elena, who is married to a White Guard officer, Sergei Talberg, a Balt; and the younger brother Nikolka, a

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cadet at a military academy. The adult children live together in the family apartment, which they share with Talberg. The novel proceeds against the background of the civil war. The city is in the grips of chaos: there are incessant gunfire, blasts, and onslaughts. It is not clear who is fighting against whom: German and other foreign troops, the White Guard, the Bolsheviks, and the Petlura units. Armed gangs of various ideological, political, and criminal groupings add to the turmoil. Petlura’s troops approach Kiev, and Elena’s husband, Talberg, who has a personal history of enmity with Petlura, has to flee the city, while Elena remains in Kiev with her brothers. The White Guard, in which both brothers serve, prepares to hold off the attack by Petlura, but Petlura’s forces capture Kiev in an unexpected cruel attack. Alexei Turbin’s unit had intended to leave the city before Petlura captures it, but in light of the intense offensive they flee in haste prior to the appointed time. Alexei arrives at the place where the unit was to be assembled, only to find himself abandoned in the face of Petlura’s advancing troops. He tries to find his way home, or at least to find shelter. But the roads are blocked, and the doors of all the houses tightly shut. Petlura’s soldiers chase him and shoot him in his left forearm. Suddenly, a door in a back street opens, and a young woman whom he has never met before hides him in her apartment. She changes his uniform to civil clothes and, risking her life, is prepared to present him as her husband should Petlura soldiers come to search the house. Alexei stays with her for several days, and when Petlura finally overwhelms the city, she takes him back to the Turbin home. Naturally, he is more than grateful to her. Meanwhile, similar events befall Nikolka. A unit of cadets under his command had been dispatched to support another unit of the White Guard, but when they arrive at the place they find no one left to support. It appears that Petlura’s troops have bypassed them from the rear. Soon he sees a headlong flight of the unit he was sent to assist. Terrified cadets run against him, and behind the running crowd of cadets he catches sight of colonel Nai-Turs, whom he had previously known and whom he holds in great respect. The colonel orders Nikolka to retreat, and following his command Nikolka tells his men to flee for their lives, while he and Nai-Turs remain behind to face the advancing Petlura troops. Nai-Turs covers the retreat by fire, is wounded, and, dying an agonizing death, orders Nikolka to get away. The boy flees and returns home, escaping many dangers on the way. Only Elena and the frightened Nikolka remain at the family home after the city is taken over by Petlura, joined several days later by the wounded Alexei. The wound is dangerous, and he is in an agonizing state. On Christmas Eve, Elena prays fervently and frantically to the Virgin Mary, begging her to save

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her brother even at the cost of her husband’s being lost. Her prayer is miraculously answered, and Alexei recovers. He thinks often of Julia Reiss, the woman who saved his life, and goes to visit her. Revealing signs of his deep sympathy and affection, he makes her a gift of the most cherished memento that remained of his late mother, her precious bracelet, thus hinting that she is as precious to him as his mother was. Nikolka also feels it his duty to find the family of Nai-Turs, to tell them about his heroic death and how he saved his life. He eventually finds his way to the same street where his brother had found shelter, Malo-Provalnaya Street, where Nai-Turs’ mother and his sister Irina live. Nikolka becomes closer to Irina, whom he finds to be a real beauty. In the meantime, Elena receives a letter from Poland, in which a relative of Talberg writes that Talberg left her for another woman. Elena feels abandoned and humiliated, and her brothers take Talberg’s behavior very poorly. But both brothers themselves have found worthy and beloved women, and leave Elena alone, without a husband and without them. The style of the implied author is complex and multifaceted. Dramatic events are described with irony or cynical black humor. Horrible and bloody events of the civil war in Kiev are presented like an “operetta” (382–384, 407), as Talberg mockingly calls them.22 The stance of the author creates an impression of self-alienation, lack of reliability, an internal split within the speaker himself. To this there should be added also his alienation towards what is meant to be precious to him, such as the heroes with whom he himself identifies, or Russian Orthodoxy, which is portrayed in a rather pagan fashion. A complex hodgepodge of religions is presented at Turbins’s home: together they make a heap of ancient pagan faiths that are earnestly accepted by the characters, with the author maintaining an ironic distance. 23 In Elena Turbin, Bulgakov presents a splendid Russian woman, a nearly iconic figure: she is sublime, heavenly and grand. She serves as a mother to her brothers: she takes care of them, even at the price of her own self-sacrifice.24 Elena symbolizes Mother Russia, whom the author reveres. Elena’s husband, Talberg, is depicted in the novel as alien to the family due to his Baltic roots. In part, the brothers dislike him because he is perceived by them as a foreigner. They see Elena’s marriage to him as a kind of betrayal of themselves, of the people, and of the Russian Motherland. But later, each of the brothers commits a more serious betrayal of his people and Motherland. Nikolka fell in love with Irina Nai-Turs whom, as is apparent from the novel, he will eventually marry. His chosen one is a Tatar, and by marrying her he aligns himself with the Tatars. This betrayal is all the more horrible in light of the sufferings and humiliations the Russian people had undergone beneath the Mongol-Tatar yoke.

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Alexei’s betrayal is even more hideous. He becomes attached to Julia Reiss; we learn from the novel that his feeling for her is deep, and assume that he will eventually marry her. But Julia Reiss is a Jewess, and by casting his lot with her he sides with the Jews. His disloyalty must be seen in the context of historically tense relations between the Russians and the Jews. His act is even more pernicious in light of his role as the head of the family, support and example for Elena and Nikolka, which Elena herself expressed so vividly in her Christmas prayer.25 Ultimately, each of the brothers leaves Elena for the sake of another woman, whose origin is alien and hostile to the Russians. Ironically, both women live in the same street. The brothers learn this to their mutual embarrassment, indicating that each one is conscious of the wrongness and sinfulness of his act, but still they do not change their ways. The street is symbolically named Malo-Provalnaya, which sounds in Russian like “Street of Small Collapses,” hinting that the street is the place where the collapse takes place, while “small” reflects its ironic and mocking depiction by Bulgakov.26 Both Alexei and Nikolka follow the example of Talberg, a traitor who left Elena and Russia. They prove to be even lower than Talberg, who at least had the excuse of being a foreigner, for whom leaving Russia was not such a base treachery as that of Alexei and Nikolka. Only Elena sacrificed herself, remaining true to the family and her Motherland. Her brothers’ infidelity represents a vile betrayal of their Motherland. Thus, after the events of 1918 Russia comes to be ignobly abandoned by her best sons, who defect to the enemy.27 Elena’s role in the novel is that of the traditional Russian woman, who sacrifices herself for the sake of her beloved man. But unlike Yaroslavna in The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, whose sacrifice was praised and celebrated in epic poetry, the brothers in “The White Guard,” having profited from her sacrifice, ungratefully desert her. The role of the victimized Russian woman is presented, not heroically, but rather depreciatingly. Bulgakov is rather sarcastic regarding the relations among the main characters of his novel. In the novel, one can perhaps trace the influence of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Hoffman, or Dante, as well as echoes of Russian and international folklore perceptible in the plot. The construction of the plot is to an extent similar to that of such folk-tales as “Hansel and Gretel” or its Russian analogue, “Sister Alyonushka and Brother Ivanushka,” as well as to other folktales centered upon sister-and-brother relations. In such stories the figure of the individual brother is often duplicated or multiplied, and his psychological and artistic functions are divided among several persona. Most often, the number of brothers corresponds to archetypal numbers used in folklore, such as three, seven, or twelve; alternatively, there may be

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one less than these numbers: that is, two, six, or eleven. In such a case, the relations between the sister and the brother are diffused among the sister and the various brothers. This is the case, for example, in such folk tales as “Vasilisa the Beautiful and Twelve Mighty Warriors,” or “Wild Swans,” adapted by H. C. Andersen and others. The conduct of the sister and brothers may differ in various versions of the tale, but the sister always prefers the “multiple” brother to her husband. She takes to heart the sufferings of her brother[s] and abandons her husband for his/their sake. A hint of incestuous feeling is evident in such plots. Analysis of those texts may also reveal that the sister and her “multiple” brothers present different psychological facets of a single personality: for instance the Id, Ego and Super-Ego. The plot of “The White Guard” corresponds with that type of a folk tale. That interpretation according to which the sister and brothers are in fact different facets of a single whole is emphasized by the fact that Elena, Alexei, and Nikolka are intimately related, and make a single soul. Psychoanalytically, such tales describe the maturing of the youth or the girl. In order to mature, the youngster needs first of all to detach himself/herself from the parents and the parental home which gives him/her shelter, while at the same time constituting a barrier between him/herself and real life—and to achieve independent existence. For example, the brother Ivanushka and the sister Alyonushka, like Hansel and Gretel and other similar brother-and-sister pairs, appear as parts of one personality. Each brother-sister pair eventually finds itself outside of their parents’ warm home; at times the parents simply die, and the children are left on their own. At first, the sister and her “composite” or “multiple” brother form a selfsufficient cell and live happily together. It is usually the eldest brother, as against the younger one and the sister, who is the leader and initiator, representing the Id. The sister in such a pair embodies the Ego and the conservative element. But later the “composite” brother, especially the eldest one, tries to break out and prove himself. He is eager to act, to struggle, and to win. As a result, he often returns home wounded. The younger brother later also leaves in order to mature and to show himself as a man. But the maturation of the younger brother is less intensive: he is less exposed to danger, and his injuries are smaller. Through all this, the sister stays at home, worrying about her “composite” brother/s. She takes responsibility for him/them and feels it her duty to do what she can to make him/them happy, even at the cost of self-sacrifice, substituting in a way for his/their mother. For example, in Andersen’s tale “Wild Swans” the sister makes a vow of silence, symbolizing a pledge of sexual continence with regard to her husband, made as a sacrifice to bring happiness to her seven brothers. Rather than building proper relations

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with her husband, she weaves nettle shirts for her enchanted brothers. During the night she gathers nettles for the shirts from prickly shrubs that wound her hands and feet, in a symbolic loss of virginity to her “composite” brothers. She only manages to complete the shirts for her six elder, “multiplied” brothers who, thanks to her efforts, are able to reach full maturity. The youngest brother’s shirt remains unfinished, symbolizing the incomplete nature of his maturation, corresponding to his less intensive activity as compared with the elder brother/s. In the folk tale “Sister Alyonushka and Brother Ivanushka,” as well, the sister is afraid to allow her brother to lead an active life because she is justly concerned that he may not stand such a test. In such folk tales, his failure is symbolized by his becoming a beast. The major features of this type of folk tale may be observed in “The White Guard.” Thus, the parents of the young Turbins die before the novel begins. Sister Elena and her “composite” brothers, Alexei and Nikolka, stay at home. Elena gives preference to her brothers over her husband, expressed first of all in the fact that she does not go away with Talberg, but remains with her brothers. Later, in her Christmas prayer to the Virgin Mary, she expresses clear preference for her brother over her husband. Her brothers seek to complete the process of their maturation by volunteering for the White Guard, for which they are eager to fight. They search for suitable masculine challenges, and are desirous of struggle and victories, each one finding personal fulfillment in the face of mortal danger. Later the elder Alexei comes home wounded, while Nikolka returns scared but unscathed. Thus, the maturation of the elder brother was more intensive than that of the younger. At the turning point in folk tales of this type, the sister must make a definite choice between her husband and the “composite” brother. At this crucial moment, she is generally forced by necessity to give preference to her husband, even at the expense of her brother[s]. But ultimately she does not abandon her brother[s]: her preference is superficial, whereas her heart and strivings are fixed on her brother[s]. But in Bulgakov’s novel the plot is constructed as a mockery of such traditional folk tales. Each of the “multiple” brothers finds a woman who makes an even greater sacrifice for him than does Elena. Julia Reiss literally saves the life of wounded Alexei, exposing herself to mortal danger. She gives him a second lease on life, rescuing him from certain death. She thus becomes Alexei’s mother to an even greater extent than does Elena. An analogous thing happens with Irina Nai-Turs: she had saved Nikolka in an indirect way, through her brother, Colonel Nai-Turs. Nai-Turs saves Nikolka’s life in the battlefield, taking the bullets destined for the boy and urging him to flee. The identity between Colonel Nai-Turs and his sister is accentuated by their mother. In the end, Nai-Turs’s mother “adopts” Nikolka

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and even calls him “her son.” Thus Irina Nai-Turs also gives Nikolka his life, thereby becoming his second mother—even more so than Elena. Bulgakov extends the spirit of “operetta style” mockery to the plot of his novel which, compared with the positive denouement of the traditional folk tale, is filled with black humor. Each of the brothers “chooses” the other mother, denying that role to Elena. If one adds to this the attraction of each brother towards his new “chosen” mother, Elena’s role in their new life comes to naught. Thus, Bulgakov’s novel may be seen as a parody of the traditional folkloric theme, in which brother and sister remain devoted to each other even in the face of mortal danger. Such a portrayal cannot be regarded as a positive interpretation of the female protagonist in the novel. Here too the woman assumes the traditional role of victim, saving the man at the cost of her own travail and degradation. Alexei and Nikolka did not overcome their Oedipal complex. Each one enjoyed a choice of two mothers, both of whom were prepared to sacrifice themselves for his sake. Neither achieved maturity and adulthood as a man, nor did they shape their personalities as independent masters of their own life. Their respective relationships to their new love objects retained a motherly note. In their relationships with these women, there is a strong element of identification, while remaining emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically attached to them. They will not need them for respect or confirmation of their own selfimage. Since in their relationships there is little place for giving respect, there is also not much room for lack of respect, for insults and challenges to the male ego of each one of them. The surest way for the woman to refrain from humiliating her man is for him to remain immature and in the Oedipal state.

SUMMARY At the heart of Turgenev’s novels “Rudin” and “Fathers and Sons” is the “superficial man” (“lishnii chelovek”), a well-known figure in Russian literature, modeled after Goncharov’s Oblomov. Here there are also unique women: strong-minded, consistent, who serve as a female antithesis to the “superficial man.” In “On the Eve” there is no “superficial man” in the center of the work; rather, it deals with a broad social phenomenon. Nevertheless, in this novel too there appears the figure of a special maiden: a full and well-developed personality, mature in her soul. The author’s attitude to his heroines is one of respect, even of admiration. Yet it is clear to both the author and the readers of these novels that the destiny of the young woman is to follow her husband and be a helpmate to him, even when he is inferior to her in terms of his personal qualities and is

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unable to stand up to the tasks imposed upon him by society. It is inconceivable that she take precedence over her man: it is her life mission to be in the second place, standing behind him. Leskov’s heroine in the satiric novel, “The Battle-Axe” is described simultaneously with warmth and repulsion. There is something good-hearted in her own nature, being so earthy and lowly, filled with the cleverness of pimps and cheats, a provincial who is proud of herself, a fool who elicits pity and compassion. Bulgakov’s Elena Turbin is described as a super-human figure, a myth symbolizing all that is feminine and Russian. But she is in fact portrayed as a persistent victim: she continuously and increasingly sacrifices herself for the sake of the men she loves, whether with her agreement or against her will. In the works discussed above, the authors relate to the female characters in a sympathetic way. Nevertheless, the woman is presented as lower than the man, an evaluation that does not reflect the true talents and abilities of the heroines. One must thus ask the question, what moved these various authors to place the woman as secondary to the man, while recognizing her power as superior to his? It was her very power that caused the man to fear her, and that led him to represent her as his inferior.28 NOTES 1. On the epoch during which the “Turgenev women” were created, see Richard Freeborn, Turgenev: The Novelist’s Novelist: A Study (London: Oxford UP, 1960): Chapter 4: “Four Great Novels,” 57–133. 2. G. A. Bialy, Russian Realism: From Turgenev to Chekhov (Leningrad: Sovetskiy Pisatel, 1990), 99–115. For another opinion on the ambivalence of “Turgenev’s women,” see Eva Kagan-Kans, Hamlet and Don-Quixote: Turgenev’s Ambivalent Vision (The Hague-Paris: Mounton, 1975), the chapter “Turgenev’s Women in Love,” 41–56. She claims that Turgenev’s women not only devote themselves, but simultaneously fulfill their own desire (see, esp., 44 ff). Even when Turgenev’s women seem to give up their own desire and personality, this turns out to be wrong, as there always remains something hidden and mystical in them, something saintly which they keep only to themselves (46–47). 3. I. S. Turgenev, “Rudin”, in his Collected Works, 10 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1961–1962), 2:7–106, at 38. Quotations from his “On the Eve” (“Nakanune”) are from vol. 3 (1961), 7–124; “Fathers and Sons” (“Ottzi i Deti”), vol. 3 (1961), 125–276. The translations of “Rudin” and “On the Eve” are by Constance Garnett; of “Fathers and Sons” is by Richard Hare. 4. See Edmund Heier, Elements of Physiognomy and Pathognomy in the Works of I. S. Turgenev: Turgenev and Lavater, (Slavistishe Beitraege. 353; Munich, 1997), who explains the important role of facial descriptions in Turgenev’s works.

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5. On the symbolism of Elena as a strong, positive type, see Joe Andrew, Women in Russian Literature, 1780–1863 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 145 ff. Elena Stakhov, as well as other “Turgevev maidens” were probably an anticipation of the future movement by women for liberation and the right of the individual to self-fulfillment, see Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Linda Edmondson (New York: Cambridge UP, 1992), 2 ff. 6. There was the known phenomenon of the generation gap between parents and their daughters during the reign of Alexander II, especially from 1855 onwards. The rebellion of “Turgenev maidens” against their parents is probably a part of this phenomenon. See Joanine Davis-Kimbell with Mona Behan, Warrior Women: An Archeologist’s Search for History’s Hidden Heroines (New York: Warner Books, 2002), Chapter 4: “Daughters against Parents,” 62–85. 7. See Pahomov, chapter 6: “Turgenev’s Romantic Love,” 89–100, esp. 89 ff, where the author says that what is important in “Turgenev’s women” is their ability and readiness to sacrifice themselves, in George S. Pahomov, In Earthbound Flight: Romanticism in Turgenev (Rockville, MD: Victor Kamkin, 1983). 8. Odintsova resembles the “learned women” of Russia of the 1860s. See Arij Rosenholm, “The ‘Woman Question’ of the 1860s and the Ambiguity of the ‘Learned Woman,’” in Gender and Russian Literature: New Perspectives, ed. Rosalind Marsh (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 112–128. On Elena Stakhova of Turgenev’s On the Eve, see there, 113. 9. On Odintzova as an independent and self-minded person, see Jane T. Costlow, “‘Oh-là-bà’ and ‘No-no-no’: Odintzova as a Woman Alone in ‘Fathers and Children,’” in A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature, ed. Sona Stephan Hoisington (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1995), 21–32, esp. 27 ff. 10. On the “inadequacies and weaknesses of some male protagonists [which] find their complementary awesome strength in the young heroines of Russia,” see Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987), 12 ff, and below, 14–15: “The truly ‘strong’ heroines of Russian literature all have independent power to move events within the fiction; they do not merely embody complementarity to a male in a male-centered work that inverts male nonvirtue into female virtue. The works [of Russian authors] are filled with overtones of disillusionment, impotence and terror.” See also Jane T. Costlow, Worlds within Worlds: The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1990), the chapter “Odintsova’s Bath and Bazarov’s Dogs: The Dismantling of Culture in ‘Fathers and Children,’” 105–137. On the emancipation and intellectual values of Turgenev’s characters, see 106 ff. 11. About Turgenev’s biography and in particular his mother’s image in his life, see J. A. T. Lloyd, Ivan Turgenev (London: Robert Hale Limited, 1942), chapter II, “A Nest of Nobles,” 16–33, in particular 20 ff. 12. On Kukushkina, see Jane T. Costlow, “Odintsova as a Woman Alone,” in A Plot of Her Own, 25 ff. This image of the female émancipée was probably influenced by Evgeniia Petrovna Kittara, whom Turgenev met through his colleague Marko Vovchok; see G. V. Stepanova, “On the Kukshina Prototype in Turgenev’s Novel ‘Fathers and Sons,’” Russian Literature 3 (1985): 152–154.

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13. Andrew writes about the so-called “Turgenev maidens”: “[In the works of Turgenev] the suffering victims or demonic temptresses are replaced by energetic, independent and active women, who at least strive to determine their own destinies. However, . . . the choices available have their own limitations: choosing a man to love is not the same as choosing a life. Moreover, if we look at Turgenev’s female portraits more generally, his work must be seen as only a transition to the ‘real day’ of Chernyshevsky and other radical writers of the 1860s and 1870s” (Women in Russian Literature, 112). 14. See Kagan-Kans, Hamlet and Don Quixote, 48 ff. 15. See Hugh McLean, Nikolai Leskov: The Man and His Art (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1977), 146. 16. Leskov, “The Battle-Axe” (Russian: “Voitelnitsa”), vol. 1, 178–256. 17. See the editor’s “Introduction” to the anthology, Satirical Stories of Nikolai Leskov, ed. William B. Edgerton (New York: Pegasus, 1969), 3–19, esp. 3–16. 18. David Gillespie writes: “. . . in Russian literature . . . the threat of female sexuality is effectively neutralized . . . female sexuality is seen as grotesque and evil.” See his article: “Is Village Prose Misogynistic?” in Women and Russian Culture: Projections and Self-Perceptions, ed. Rosalind Marsh (Oxford-New York: Berghahn Books, 1998), 237. 19. An army of Ukrainian nationalists, named for their commander, Symon Petliura. 20. Regarding the time at which “The White Guard” was written, see N. V. Petrova, “When and How M. Bulgakov’s ‘The White Guard’ was Written,” Studies of Literature and Criticism 71:7 (1969): 57–77. 21. On autobiographical elements in “The White Guard,” see Edith C. Haber and Michail Bulgakov. The Early Years (Cambridge, Mass.– London: Harvard UP, 1998): Chapter 3, “The White Guard,” 75 ff. See also Yaroslav Tinchenko, The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov (Kiev-Lvov: n. p., 1997). This scholar, like other students of “The White Guard,” states that this novel is autobiographical and reflects what befell the author in reality. In his view, the author is reflected in the figure of Alexei. Nevertheless, it is not impossible that he depicted himself in a negative light, which may be consistent with the sarcastic and mocking tendency of the novel. 22. On ironical and even farcical elements in The White Guard, see Haber, The Early Years, 77 ff. 23. From time to time Bulgakov directly addresses the reader with various phrases, mostly ironical and cynical. See for example M.A. Bulgakov, “The White Guard,” Master and Margarita, The White Guard (Khabarovsk: Khabarovskoe Knizhnoe Izdatel’stvo, 1989), 367–599, at 502; cf. 371, 392, 400, 413, 449, 450, 452. The image of the implied author is much influenced by Dostoevsky, who is referred to in the novel several times (Bulgakov, 378, 389, 413). Regarding the influence of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Lermontov on “The White Guard,” see Haber, The Early Years, 81–82; I. A. S. Lur’e, “Mikhail Bulgakov, between Mark Twain and Lev Tolstoy,” The Russian Review 50:2 (April 1991): 203–210. 24. Deborah Anna Logan, Fallenness in Victorian Women’s Writing: Marry, Stitch, Die or Do Worse (Columbia, Miss.: University of Missouri Press, 1988) writes

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(7 ff), on the basis of Tess Cosslett, Woman to Woman: Female Friendship in Victorian Fiction (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1988), 50, that a traditionally “pure” woman has to be childless and single: “Her status as ‘Madonna’ comes not from maternity, but from her roles as rescuer and sufferer.” 25. On the other hand, for love between man and woman in “The White Guard” as a positive, redemptive miracle against the background of universal destruction, see Haber, The Early Years, 92–93. 26. On Malo-Provalnaya Street as a mythological symbol of destruction, see Haber, The Early Years, 100–102. 27. See A. Colin Right, Mikhail Bulgakov: Life and Interpretations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 68–69. 28. The phenomenon of a strong Russian woman causing her man to feel inferior is known in the Russian literature. See Barbara Alpern Engel, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York: Cambridge UP, 1983): “Russian women of the nineteenth century were differentiated from their sisters in the industrializing west, as anyone familiar with the Russian classics has sensed. . . . Indeed, Russian heroines are often more fully human and more positive than the heroes. . . . The Russian heroine’s special strength of character appears so consistently, it cannot be attributed to literary imagination alone” (6–7).

Chapter Six

Surrogate for Man-Woman Relations in Post-War Soviet Literature: Vasilyev, Grossman, and Rasputin

In this chapter, we shall discuss the attitudes towards men-women relations in literature by Soviet authors of the post–Second World War period. During that period, such issues were generally speaking resolved in a simplistic and drastic manner—by ignoring them, by mocking them, or by presenting them as absurd and unworthy. References to sex and to the men-women relationships were treated by the Soviet authorities in a sarcastic and patronizing manner. While women were described by the Soviet authorities as lacking in many feminine characteristics, it was nevertheless appropriate for them to cultivate motherhood, which was conceived as the woman’s most important task.

BORIS VASILYEV: THE FEMALE FIGURES IN “THE DAWNS HERE ARE QUIET . . .” AS EMBODIMENT OF THE CONCEPT OF THE SOVIET WOMAN Boris Lvovich Vasilyev (b. 1924) is a Soviet prose writer and dramatist. Himself the son of a military man, he served as an air trooper during the Second World War; and later served in the military. Vasilyev made his literary debut in 1955, while his short novel, “The Dawns Here Are Quiet . . .” (“A zori zdes tihie . . .”) published in 1969, made him widely known. It was staged in the 99

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repertoire of many theaters, and in 1972 appeared in a screen version, which became a classic of the Soviet cinema.1 “The Dawns Here Are Quiet . . .” is set in the year 1942, when the Soviet Union was engaged in the Second World War. A platoon has been stationed at a remote railway station to protect the area from enemy infiltration. In the absence of any visible enemy forces, twenty lively girl soldiers are sent to the platoon, introducing a feminine element into the army routine. They cook, sunbathe, and overtly flirt with the garrison commandant, Sergeant-Major Vaskov. Vaskov, feeling himself cock of the roost, is pleasantly embarrassed. But this imaginary idyll is created by the author, only to be crushed by the Nazis. One of the woman soldiers, Rita, is the widow of a Soviet frontier guard, who left her toddler in the village with her parents in order to volunteer for the front. By lucky chance, the railway station is not far from that village, enabling her to go there on the sly every night to see her son, returning to the station early in the morning, while it is still dark.2 On one such occasion she observes German soldiers in the woods near the station, whom she realizes are scouts sent to survey the terrain for a planned raiding party. Rita immediately reports this to Vaskov, who sets out with several girls to destroy the scouts and halt the German advance. Five women volunteers are selected for this mission, including a Jewish girl, Gurvich, who may serve as an interpreter if need be, as she understands some German due to her knowledge of Yiddish. Vaskov also asks headquarters for reinforcement, and is promised that a group of experienced male soldiers will be dispatched shortly. Together with the girls, Vaskov follows in the tracks of the German scouts, finding the situation far more difficult and dangerous than it had initially seemed. They are greatly outnumbered by the German forces advancing in the woods. The situation seems desperate: even were they to succeed in killing several invaders at the cost of their lives, they would be unable to stop the others. Vaskov utilizes various tricks: he tries to lure the Germans with the sight of the girls bathing naked, for which purpose several of them strip and frolic in the lake while the others lay in ambush for the Germans, whom they expect to approach the girls unarmed and unworried. But all of Vaskov’s tactics go awry. The Germans do not allow themselves to be ensnared or simply fail to notice his decoys. During the course of these attempts to deceive the enemy, the girls—Lisa, Sonya, Galya, and Zhenya—perish one after the other; Rita is mortally wounded, while Vaskov himself is injured in his left hand. Before her death Rita asks Vaskov to take care of her little son, because her own parents, the boy’s grandparents, will soon die, leaving the boy without any

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relatives. Vaskov continues the pursuit of the Germans by himself. Alone and wounded, he defeats the Germans (!). Nearly fainting from his injury, he hears that the long-awaited reinforcements have at last arrived. The story ends with an epilogue: decades after the war the railway depot is visited by a young Soviet army officer together with his one-armed father. They have brought a gravestone and are searching for the intended grave. It is obvious that the young officer is the late Rita’s grown-up son, adopted by Vaskov, who eventually lost his left arm, and that the stone was intended to mark the spot where his mother had died. All this is clearly tendentious writing. The Soviet characters, particularly the girls who selflessly defend the Motherland, are described in an idealized, heroic manner. The German soldiers, by contrast, are painted as aggressive villains, robots of war, lacking in human features. Thus the author follows the line of official Soviet patriotism.3 The description of the death of each of the girls is preceded by an account of her childhood and youth, emphasizing various pathetic, heart-rendering human moments, so as to evoke compassion and sympathy in the reader. These lyrical digressions serve in turn as the background for the description of their subsequent cruel deaths at the hands of the merciless Nazis. The author portrays the harsh lot of each of the girls in a fixed, repeated schema, allowing only marginal variations to reflect the different environments in which the girls were brought up. But since their lot was eventually the same, these marginal differences are only designed to emphasize the unity of all Soviet people in face of the Nazi enemy. The scheme is repeated five times, once for each of the martyred girls. For example, the pitiful description of Liza’s paralyzed mother, of her childish belief in a wonderful tomorrow is followed by a horrible scene of her drowning in the mire. A portrayal of Sonia’s innocent family life in a provincial town is contrasted with the grisly sight of two stab wounds to her heart by the Nazis. The description of Galya’s death is preceded by a moving tale of her lot as a newborn foundling, who was raised in an orphanage with the cherished dream of one day seeing her dear imagined mother. The same pattern is repeated with Zhenya: the pathetic story of her life serves as background for the subsequent scene of her brutal death. Finally, the story of Rita is somewhat different from that of other girls, as she is portrayed as a mother.4 This fivefold repetition of the pattern of life and death, with minor variations, resembles a traditional fable, in which a number of different stories might be constructed based on the reiteration of the same plot.5 From the beginning, even in their adolescent years, the girls are described in strikingly feminine, even erotically charged terms. Against such a background, the total absence of any actual sex seems astonishing. For example,

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Liza, as a teenager, falls in love with a young hunter who briefly visits their village. The night before his departure she climbs up to the hayloft where he is sleeping and lies there by his side. But as a decent and honest young Soviet man he does not take advantage of this reckless step by a naive girl, but instead asks her to come to his city in August so as to continue her higher education. The author thereby teaches us, his “Soviet” readers, that a Soviet man declines “dirty” sex in favor of “shining” education. Such improbable restraint emphasizes the extent to which Vasilyev followed the traditional Soviet concept that a woman who engages in any sex except for reproductive purposely betrays Soviet values. Now too, during wartime, at the platoon, Zhenya attempts to flirt with Vaskov. She is seductive, free, and brave, but their mutual desire is not realized because of the inner timidity and moral restraint of both. Later Vaskov catches a glimpse of the girls sunbathing in the nude in a glade in the woods, but does not actually approach any of them. Those scenes seem unnatural and unrealistic. A Soviet girl soldier is a feminine martyr saint and never sinks into low vice; sex is low vice, and thus indulging in such activity is outside of her ken. Vasilyev allows the woman to be young, beautiful and attractive, or to be a mother, but omits the intermediate stage of sex per se. Some of the girls hint that Rita might be a suitable partner for Vaskov: she is a widow with a son, while Vaskov’s wife left him, and his small son died. Vaskov and Rita do in fact unite, but only posthumously. After her death Vaskov adopts her boy, in this way virtually marrying her, but this marriage is only realized as joint parenthood, without sexual relations between them.6 The Soviet woman, like the Soviet man, goes no further than innocent flirting. The Soviet woman may of course be erotic, but such eroticism is spontaneous and unintended; she may be aesthetic, but not sexual. Sex is a taboo for the Soviet woman and contradicts her lofty ideological values. The author does not depart from the traditional patriarchal attitude, in which women are divided into saints and whores. The saints are virgins or mothers, they may be soldiers in the Soviet Army, while the whores are those who indulge in sex—but their like is not encountered in this heroic and patriotic tale.7 Vasilyev presents the reader with a national epic of the heroic Soviet woman. The less conscious she is of her role, the more majestic and impressive she is. Each of the young women in the story suffers from her own personal disappointments and injuries, without realizing her great role in the defense and building of the Soviet Motherland.8 This is a hymn to the Soviet woman who voluntarily sacrifices herself to the future of the people; in a certain way, it is reminiscent of Yaroslavna in The Lay of Igor’s Campaign.

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In Vasilyev’s story there is disproportionate idealizing and romanticizing of the Soviet woman. His women are far from realistic, evoking an ironic smile of disbelief in the contemporary reader. It was probably also taken thus by Soviet readers of his own time, who were cognizant of the abuse of women in the Soviet Army during the War. But following the accepted official Soviet line, Vasilyev depicts the deeds of the Soviet Army personnel, particularly during the Great Patriotic War (Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voina), as it is called in Russia, in a heightened and extremely heroic light. The author’s depiction of the Jewish motif, represented in this novel by Sonia Gurvich, adds to his lack of credibility on the reader’s part. AntiSemitism was widespread within both the Soviet civilian society and the Red Army during the war. Sonia Gurvich’s figure was thus designed to respond to the accusations in regard to the existence of anti-Semitism in the Soviet society, particularly in the army. Vaskov and the women soldiers are as much anguished by Sonia’s death as they are by the death of the others girls. Moreover, Vasilyev takes pains to explain to the Soviet readers that certain events which might wrongly be understood as anti-Semitic are not really such. Thus, he mentions that Vaskov removes Sonia’s boots before burying her—an episode that might be misinterpreted as dishonoring her body. But that suspicion is dispelled by the author’s explanation that he did so because another girl in the party needed boots, which were necessary in order to save her life. Yet upon second thought the question arises: why is the absence of antiSemitism emphasized here? Why does it deserve attention? Does not the very demonstration of its absence, rather ironically, mitigate against the author’s intention? And does not its overemphasis suggest the opposite? Vasilyev’s presentation of Soviet reality as cloudless, serene, and paradisiacal seems obviously hypocritical. Both his female and male characters are young, healthy, and normal, yet strangely desexualized and even dehumanized.9 Vasilyev has created a happy Soviet eunuch: the deeper his castration, the happier he is. Sexual activity only causes a person harm, lowers him and humiliates him, placing the flesh before the spirit. As implied in the novel, only Nazis engage in sex, and it is they who would have been tempted upon seeing the naked girls bathing in the lake in the middle of the forest, had they only noticed them. The Soviet man or woman is not subject to such dangers; for them, love of the Soviet Motherland replaces fleshly love. Among Soviet citizens, the higher spiritual side overcomes or nullifies the animalistic, bodily side. One might well ask the question, with tongue in cheek, how then do Soviet citizens have children at all? Were all of them adopted children, like Rita’s son who was adopted by Vaskov, or had perhaps Rita herself adopted her son, who was in fact a German child?

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LIFE AND FATE BY VASILY GROSSMAN: SOVIET IDEOLOGY AS A SURROGATE FOR MAN-WOMAN RELATIONS Vasily Semenovich Grossman (1905–1964), born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman, one of the greatest Soviet prose writers and dramatists, was rejected by the Soviet regime. His first novella, Glueckauf (on the life of miners in the Ukraine) was published in 1934, and before the war his social-realist novel Stepan Kolchugin (1937–1940), about Ukrainian miners during the first Russian Revolution of 1905, was published. In 1942 a book of front-line essays, The People Is Immortal (Narod bessmerten), considered one of the best firsthand narratives about the war, appeared. The first part of the novel, “For the Just Cause” (Za pravoe delo, 1952), was panned by Soviet literary critics for being out of line with the official standpoint on the war. The sequel to this novel, Life and Fate (Zhizn i sudba) was confiscated by the KGB in 1961. Fortunately, the book was photographed and smuggled abroad in 1975 by the late writer’s friends. It was first published in the West in 1980, and in the USSR only at the time of Gorbachev’s Perestroika. Grossman’s epic work, Life and Fate, extends from the late 1930s to the end of the 1940s, from Eastern Russia to Germany. There is no single, unified plot to this novel; rather, it consists of several parallel narratives, a number of the characters appearing in several parallel lines. From the very beginning, the reader is pushed into the thick of events. Grossman describes various occurrences, large and small, happening in different places within the two titanic totalitarian empires—the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. There are descriptions of what was happening within Hitler’s top circle and at the front line, as viewed by the Germans and the Russians; of the Russian hinterland, with evacuees sent to the East; of various institutions and offices, ranging from the USSR Academy of Sciences and Communist Party bosses to Siberian prison camps; of Jewish townships and ghettoes in the Ukraine. There are pages portraying the annihilation of European Jewry in Nazi death camps; the destruction of millions of people under the Nazi regime, mostly civilians, for “social” and “racial” reasons; the Great Terror under Stalin; the dispossession of the rich peasants (kulaks) by catastrophic famine in the Volga region and Ukraine; the general collectivization of agriculture, with the consequent death of millions of people in the Soviet Empire. There are scenes of mass extermination of men, women, infants, children, and the elderly. Major problems of empires are presented alongside the feelings of a small Jewish boy, David, transported in a packed railway car to a Nazi extermination camp. Grossman writes how Stalin and Hitler planned to redraw the

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maps of Europe and Asia, and at the same time shows a childless Jewish woman doctor, Sophia Ossipovna, at last feeling herself as a mother while hugging small David in the gas chamber and dying with him. This global epic raises questions of an existential, social, and ideological nature and how they affect individual human fate; questions about physical and spiritual sufferings; of the possibility of an individual surviving in a totalitarian state; issues of freedom10 and of zest for life; of the conflict between inner emotions and a certain social and political ambience. Although Life and Fate is a work of fiction, one easily gains the impression that the writing is not only realistic, but documentary. This impression is intensified by its giving detailed, realistic attributes to imaginary characters. The style is deliberately simple and even ascetic: Grossman shuns rhetoric and figures of speech. The description of historical events is also provided in a documentary mode. The novel is on the scale of Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace,11 while its intricate psychological twists resemble those of Orwell’s 1984.12 Like Orwell, Grossman enters into the complexities of “double-think” and man’s control over his way of thinking.13 Grossman regards Communism and National Socialism as fraternal twins almost equal in power and sharing many identical characteristics.14 These regimes are locked in mortal combat, and tens of millions of human lives, both in one’s own camp and in that of the enemy, are not too high a price for their rulers, whose only objective is political victory and physical annihilation of the enemy. In both political systems, the desire to crush human individuality is even stronger than the wish to build themselves and to destroy the other. An example of this is the history of Major Yershov—a devoted communist, notwithstanding his origin in a family of kulaks, prosperous peasants. While he was fighting for the Soviet state, his own family was exiled to Siberia as punishment for their bourgeois background. Yershov went to visit his dying old father, the last surviving member of his family, and was persecuted for this act because, according to Soviet ideology, he was required to feel alienated and hostile towards his family.15 It was only in the Nazi prisoner-of-war camp that he, for the first time, felt motivated and unfettered. He joined the camp’s anti-Nazi underground and was at last able to put his great spiritual energy and resoluteness of his character into the struggle with the Nazis. The German captivity provided an outlet for the pent-up forces within his tormented soul, whereas in the Soviet Union he had had no possibility of either independent activity or of independent thought. He was afire with the struggle. But the communist underground in the camp was disturbed by his success and popularity, as he was not a Communist Party member and, utilizing insiders among the camp administration, they entered his name on the Nazi death roll

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(165–168). The Communists were more fearful of the popularity of a noncommunist than they were eager for victory over the Nazis. The novel serves as an example of the intense effacement of individuality, whether in men or women. In a totalitarian state all that is personal in man is subordinated to external ideological factors. Thus, the person inevitably needs to resist external pressure. Individual qualities of different groups of men or women have only minimum opportunity to be realized and are blocked by the natural desire of each individual to survive. One of the most striking female characters in this novel is Evgeniya Shaposhnikova (or Zhenia), a young, beautiful, and intelligent woman who is living in common-law marriage with a loyal communist, Nikolai Krymov. She contemplates leaving him because she has fallen in love with a handsome and stately Soviet army officer, Novikov, who fights at the front. She tries to unravel to herself her true feelings for each of these two men and to discern whom she really loves and whom she only thinks she loves: which one is the true object of her tenderness, sympathy, and passion? Zhenia’s life is filled, of her own free choice, with emotion and love, but this is entirely suppressed by ideological pressure. Krymov, who had been a brigade commissar,16 is unjustly suspected of treason, charged, arrested, tortured, and forced to sign a confession that he was a German agent. Zhenia, though not formally married to him and no longer in love with him, decides that the only moral option for her is to return to Krymov. On the other hand, Krymov wrongly suspects Zhenia of having denounced him, something that causes him great pain, because he loves her deeply. For her part, Zhenia was ready to sacrifice her own happiness and well-being for his sake. Thus, while attempting to locate his whereabouts after his arrest, she entered the word “wife” in the appropriate blank on the questionnaire, thereby connecting her name to that of a persecuted person.17 Zhenia is plagued with doubts that it was Novikov, her new lover and fiancé, who might have denounced Krymov. But Novikov too is subject to ideological and political persecution. Party functionaries at the front attempted to dissuade him from marrying Zhenia because both her brother and her civilian ex-husband had been subject to repressions. Novikov came to the conclusion that the commissars were no less dangerous than the Nazis. As a result of this situation, Zhenia ceased to feel herself as a woman. Her femininity, emotion, and even sensuality were suppressed by her fruitless and exhausting attempts to find her way through the labyrinth of the Soviet regime. For example, when she tried to obtain residence registration in Kuibyshev, Men talking to Zhenia always noticed that she was beautiful, and she felt it. But Grishyn, a high official at the passport department, looked at her in the same

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way as he did at the watery eyes of old women and invalids. When she entered his room she was no longer a woman, but an applicant. She felt weak and confounded in the face of this impenetrable blocking force. (63)

Thus, the ideological and political climate affected not only the private life, work, and career opportunities of the heroes, but also their way of thinking and self-awareness. Ideological and political pressures were the key factor in private life, governing even the most intimate relations of the characters. Thus, Victor Strum fell in love with Maria Sokolova, his colleague, because she identified herself with him when he was baited by his party group, when his friends and even his closest family turned their backs on him. At that time, his relations with his wife Ludmila had deteriorated, being marred by mistrust, estrangement, and mutual rebukes because Ludmila held orthodox party ideals and failed to give him the support that he so badly needed. The impact of the external ideological and political situation on spousal relations was only one instance of a general dependence of all personal relations on the pressures imposed by the regime. Ludmila shunned not only her second husband, Victor Strum, who had fallen into disgrace, but also her mother, following the arrest of her brother Dmitry, and her sister Zhenia, after the arrest of her civil husband Krymov. Indeed, Ludmila had divorced also her first husband, Abarchuk, as a result of the political persecution to which he was subject, even though she genuinely loved him and longed for him many years later, even after her second marriage. The heroes must give up their own individuality, not only with regard to their sex, but also in terms of faith, social, spiritual, and moral convictions.18 As the author bitterly remarks, in the Soviet prison camps, at the front, and in the German extermination camps, there were people of every possible physical, spiritual, and other type, but all of them fell into only two groups: those useful to the Nazi or Soviet regimes, and those rejected by them (8–9). The Soviet man’s feeling of his own masculinity during the period portrayed by Grossman is distorted by the system and subject to it, whether he submits to it or whether he is opposed to it. His own self-sense of masculinity is dictated by his ideological considerations. He is castrated by the communist regime in a coarse and public manner, and does not even have the opportunity of confronting his fleshly desires, as these desires are not in his hands, but in those of his Soviet masters. He is a depressed and humiliated slave of the government, and has no real possibility of realizing his masculinity. The Soviet men, like the women, were only able to realize their individuality by means of opposition to the regime—that is to say, in a spiritual manner. Thus, the realization of masculinity or femininity is replaced by the realization of individuality—and thus the realization of physical desire is replaced

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by acts of spiritual and civilian courage. The regime substituted ideological consciousness for the gender identity of the heroes. While in classical Russian literature we have also seen exchanges of roles between men and women, in which the strong woman suppresses the weak man, in the literature of this Soviet period we find an equalization of functions: the Soviet man and woman are both transformed by the regime into castrated, depressed, and frightened people. The equalization of the sexes brings about the strengthening of the woman and the weakening of the man and thus, in the final analysis, once again, as in classical Russian literature, we have the figure of the strong Russian woman—this time because of the communist regime—standing alongside the weak, powerless, or impotent Soviet man.

VALENTIN RASPUTIN’S “FAREWELL TO MATYORA”: THE SOUL OF THE NATIVE RUSSIAN WOMAN The prose writer Valentin Grigoyievic Rasputin was born in 1937 to a peasant family in the village of Ust-Uda, in the Irkutsk region in Siberia. After completing university in 1959, he served as a journalist in Irkutst and Krasnoyarsk, often visiting the construction sites of the Krasoyarsk hydroelectric station and the Abakan-Tayshet railway. His first collection of short stories, Man from This World (Chelovek s etogo sveta) was published in Krasnoyarsk in 1967. His short novel, Money for Maria (Dengi dlia Marii), appeared that same year, followed by Live and Remember (Zhivi i Pomni; 1974) and “Farewell to Matyora” (“Proschanie s Materoi”; 1976), establishing his name among the most prominent contemporary Russian writers. Rasputin’s novel Farewell to Matyora is an epic of Russian nature and countryside, after the fashion of I. S. Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches.19 Rasputin shows us the life of the villagers on the island of Matyora in the middle of the Angara River. A huge dam is to be erected there for a hydroelectric power station, after which the island with the village will be flooded, and the villagers evacuated to a nearby town.20 The villagers are aware of the intended changes and many of them, particularly the young, have left the village even before the formal announcement of the move.21 The remaining residents, mainly old women, are in low spirits and losing their heart, as the changes are already taking place. Life in the village has lost its wonderful enchanted flavor; for the old women, it has even lost its sense.22 Those old women—Darya, Agafya, Vassilissa, Lisa, Tatyana, Domnida, Manya, Katherina, Vera, Tunguska23, Nastasya and Sima, with her grand-son Kolunya—have gotten used to the village and identify themselves with it.24 Before parting with their huts, which will be demolished, they tidy, smarten

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and even whitewash them. Symbolically, it is like the laying out of the dead before burial.25 The sense of approaching death is everywhere: death for both the village as well as for its inhabitants, both symbolically and literally. The old women don’t want to leave the village and discuss how they can stay on even after it has been flooded—meaning that they will be flooded too. On the other hand, they would prefer to be buried in the earth. Darya, Sima, and Nastasya speculate as to what the possible future may hold in store for them: “‘As for me, I would never move. Let them sink us if they need.’ ‘And they will,’ echoed Sima, ‘So let it be. Death comes but once, so why be afraid of it?’ she says. ‘But I don’t like being drowned,’ says Nastasya, alarmed. ‘It must be a sin. Let them better bury us below ground’”(21).26 The village where they were born, which is now slipping away beneath their feet, symbolizes for them the entire world, which with the village’s destruction has also come to an end.27 Darya, the central figure in the story, lost one of her sons in the war, the second was killed felling timber, one daughter died of disease, and three others are still alive. She is the most fortunate of the women in the island: not only has she had the fortune to raise her grandchildren, but one of her sons is at her side (62). Nastasya lives on the memory of her deceased children and husband and spends her life in grief (18–19).28 It is hard for her to leave her house and kitchen garden, which for her symbolizes family. Having bundled up her goods and chattel, Nastasya bids farewell to her hut (53-54). Seventy-fiveyear-old Sima, who has a dumb and mentally retarded daughter, Valka, and says of herself: “I am a free bird with no place to perch on. All has been taken up, and I have no good wings to fly” (129). Each of the other women in the village also has a story of her wretched lot, despoiled by the war and social disorders in the country. All these women are orphans, whose only way of self-realization is through love of their village, Matyora. With the death of this village, they too will die. There is no other life awaiting them at the new place. Death lies in wait for the old women everywhere, but for a countrywoman in town it will be a violent death.29 The women also share in common the same moral principles and notions of duty, conscience, honor, and justice. They are not takers, but givers; it is important for them to be needed by someone, to take care of someone. They have been accustomed to toil their entire lives and, unless they have work to do, they feel “subdued, tired and bewildered” (78). There are technological advances and changes in life, but the human heart does not change—it is as vulnerable as ever, and as ever needs love, warmth, and steadiness (106). Rasputin’s story gives us an idea of everyday life and consciousness among country women in the Russian village after the war. Their fates are

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those of people living deep in the interior of the country, who are dependent on objective realities: the war which has devoured their husbands and sons; hard work, which does not allow a moment’s relief from the need to procure bread for themselves and fodder for their animals.30 The story is predominantly a feminine one; even though we do encounter a few men, they are all crippled in one way or another, emphasizing even further the feminine air of the novel. The old-fashioned, hard-to-move village symbolizes the nature of the feminine, while the technologically advanced, cruel and harsh city symbolizes the masculine. The old village, like the old women themselves, is doomed to be abandoned, to die and to be forgotten, while the city, constantly recreating itself, will move along, like an aging man marrying a young new bride. The story is thus an elegy over woman’s bitter lot.31 Rasputin sees his heroines, first of all, as human beings—thus, his writing may be described as feminine writing. He portrays his heroines in the middle of their preparations for their own deaths, something suggestive of existentialist naturalism. The author’s innovation lies in the fact that he focuses our attention upon a phenomenon that is hardly discussed at all in art, particularly not by male authors: namely, the inner world of the old woman. His work is simultaneously an elegy and a song of praise to the deeply-rooted Russian old woman, who is like Mother Russia herself—the holy, persecuted martyr. The relations between man and woman are replaced here by the thoughts about death that awaits each of the heroines.32

SUMMARY The three novels presented above differ from one another in terms of their genre, their spirit, their thematics, and most of their other components. Nevertheless, the common denominator, as in other Soviet literary works written after the Second World War, is that in the encounter between man and woman there is no sex, no erotic tension, no differences between the sexes. True, there are other things from which such partners are meant to derive satisfaction, such as friendship, cooperation, understanding, mutual support—but all these come, not in addition to, but instead of sexual and emotional satisfaction—and in such a context each of these can cause frustration, disappointment, and anger. The man and the woman are here called upon to suppress their own sexual impulses, or, to be more precise, their drives are suppressed as a result of the external situation. One might say that the totalitarian regime makes women who have become like men, and men who have lost their masculinity, equal, and thus it is the regime that castrates Soviet man and woman

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alike. Moreover, even changes in the relations between the sexes—such as cooperation, friendship, and mutual support—develop against the background of ideology. Events having a public and political nature, rather than their own personal tendencies, are what shape the character of the friendship of the heroes of the novels. NOTES 1. Boris Vasilyev, “The Dawns Here Are Quiet . . .” (Moscow: Pravda Publishers, 1978), 5-106; all quotations are from this edition. 2. On self-minded, independent, and strong women as described in literature of Stalin’s time and the post-Stalinist era, see Xenia Gosiorowska, Women in Soviet Fiction, 1917–1964 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 45 ff. 3. See Gosiorowska, Women,157–169. 4. On motherhood in Soviet literature of Stalin’s time, see Gosiorowska, Women, 57–59. 5. A number of different stories might be constructed based on the same plot. See Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 2nd edition, rev. and ed. Louis Wagner; introd. Alan Dundes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975; first ed. 1928); Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, The Types of Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography (Folklore Fellows Communication, 184; Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1973; William Bascom, “The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives,” Journal of American Folklore 78 (1965): 3–20; Patricia Carden, “Fairy Tale, Myth, and Literature: Russian Structuralist Approaches,” in Literary Criticism and Myth, ed. Joseph P. Strelka (Yearbook of Comparative Criticism, 9; University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State UP, 1980), 179–197; Steven Swann Jones, “The Structure of Snow White,” Fabula: Journal of Folktale Studies 24:1–2 (1983): 56–71. 6. See Gender and Russian Literature: New Perspectives, ed. Rosalind Marsh (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), “Introduction,” 19–20: “In the Stalin era a new concept of Soviet womanhood emerged, which all writers and artists were expected to promote: a glorification of maternal and wifely values.” 7. Gosiorowska, “The Typical Kolkhoz Woman of the Postwar Decade,” in Women in Soviet Fiction, 60 ff. 8. Vasilyev’s women continue to a large extent the tradition of the revolutionary women. See Gosiorowska, “The Comrade-in-Arms,” in Women in Soviet Fiction, esp. 148–150. 9. Regarding the Soviet trend to present women as sexless creatures, it would be interesting to note Caryl Emerson’s “Bakhtin and Women: A Nontopic with Immense Implications,” in Fruits of her Plume: Essays on Contemporary Russian Woman’s Culture, ed. H. Goscilo (New York and London, M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 3–20. Emerson raises a question: why doesn’t Bakhtin relate to women and issues of gender? The reason for such an attitude is that Bakhtin was raised in the Soviet Union, where gender issues were totally ignored both in education and in culture. Moreover, Bakhtin

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was educated in a post-formalist cultural milieu, at the beginning of the development of structuralism. Gender issues would be totally out of that sphere of attention. See on that topic, but supporting the opposite opinion, M. Cave, “Bakhtin and Feminism: The Chronotopic Female Imagination,” Women Studies 18:2–3 (1990): 117–127; Lisa Gasbarrone, “‘The Locus for the Other’: Cixous, Bakhtin, and Women’s Writing,” in A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin, ed. K. Hohne and H. Wussow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 1–19; Karen Simroth James, “On veult responce avoir: Pernette du Guillet’s Dialogic Poetics,” ibid., 171–197. 10. On liberty as the most precious value in a person’s life, see Mikhail Geller, The Concentration World and Soviet Literature (München: Dr. Peter Belej, 1974), 207: “Grossman reiterates four times in one phrase the key word to his philosophy of history, which is ‘liberty.’ Finally . . . he gives it an ultimate and unambiguous definition: ‘liberty is the whole life of all people . . . and any mechanic, or steel-maker, or landscape painter should have the liberty to work at his will, and not as he was bidden.’” (quoting V. Grossman, Life and Fate, [Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1989, 85). 11. On the evident influence of Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace on Life and Fate, see John Garrard, “Stepsons in the Motherland: The Architectonics of Vasily Grossman’s Zhizn i Sud’ba,” Slavic Review 50:2 (1991): 336–346; Robert Chandler, “‘Speaking for Those Who Lie in the Earth’—The Life and Work of Vasily Grossman,” Introduction to Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, trans. Robert Chandler (New York: New York Review of Books, 1985), 17 ff. There are also possible other influences on Grossman by Dostoevsky and Turgenev; see Garrard, “Stepsons,” 339; by Chekhov, see Chandler (above), 21. 12. Although there is a similarity between some parts of Life and Fate and those of 1984, there is hardly any likelihood of influence between these two works; see John Garrard, “The Original Manuscript of Forever Flowing: Grossman Autopsy of the New Soviet Man,” Slavic and East European Journal 38:2 (1994): 271–289, at 281–284. 13. We also find features similar to those appearing in other novels of Soviet literature, beginning from the late fifties in which the Soviet regime is criticized: Lidia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna, Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Yury Dombrovsky’s The Faculty of Useless Things, and Anatoly Rybakov’s Heavy Sand and Children of Arbat. But it is difficult in this case to speak of any influence. 14. Grossman claims that Stalinism and Nazism are the same. See Garrard, “Stepsons in the Motherland,” 337–338; Garrard, “The Original Manuscript,” 271–272; Chandler, “Speaking for Those,” 15. 15. Challenging natural family connections in favor of the great “Soviet family” was one of the approaches used in the former Soviet Union. See Garrard, “The Original Manuscript,” 281–282; Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (London: Macmillan, 1968), 279 ff. 16. A Communist Party activist. 17. This move on the part of Zhenia is both surprising and quite unusual. As a rule, the majority of prisoners’ wives divorced them quickly and demonstratively severed all connection with them, so as to protect their own welfare and that of their families.

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See “A woman will sue for divorce immediately after her husband’s arrest in order to save the lives of her children,” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 150. And see also “The women lost their jobs, their rooms, their permits, had to sell possessions, live on occasional work or on the few relatives who might help them. Ignorant of their husband’s fate, they faced a worsening future.” Conquest, The Great Terror, 290. 18. See Helena Goscilo, Dehexing Sex: Russian Womanhood during and after Glasnost (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 12 ff. See also Gender and Russian Literature: New Perspectives, ed. Rosalind Marsh (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), “Introduction,” 6, where she states, “Socialist realism, developed in 1934, . . . imposed a monolithic, male dominated ideology on male and female writers alike.” 19. On the genre characterization of “Farewell to Matyora,” see Teresa Polowy, The Novellas of Valentin Rasputin: Genre, Language and Style (Middlebury Studies in Russian Language and Style, 1; New York, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Paris: Peter Lang, 1989): Chapter 4: “Tragedy and Myth in ‘Živi i Pomni’ and ‘Proščanie s Matёroj,’” 96 ff. Polowy claims that “Farewell to Matyora” combines elements of tragedy and is a sort of modern myth; see esp. 100–101. See there also about “Farewell to Matyora” as a modern Noah’s Ark. On the mythological element in this novel, see “The link between the idea of motherhood of the earth and the worship of ancestors is established through the belief that an individual comes into the world for a transient moment in the eternal life . . . and returns at death to Mother Earth to be with his ancestors” (111). 20. On the antagonism and contradictions between the village, symbolizing traditional Mother Russia, and the city, symbolizing the materialistic progress of modern life and the West, see David Gillespie, Valentin Rasputin and Soviet Russian Village Prose (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1986), 61 ff.; N. Richards, “The Town-Country Dichotomy in Some Recent Soviet Fiction and the Literary Press,” Co-existence 18:1 (1981): 65–79. 21. Gleb Zekulin, “The Contemporary Countryside in Soviet Literature: A Search for New Values,” in The Soviet Rural Community, ed. James R. Millar (Urbana, Ill.: Illinois UP, 1971), 376–404. 22. See Zekulin, “Contemporary Countryside,” 552–561. 23. Tungus are a Siberian ethnic group, closely related to the Manchus. The Tungus language resembles the Mongolic and Turkic languages. 24. See Gillespie, Valentin Rasputin, 235: “The dominant relationship in village prose is not between husband and wife, or between lovers, but rather between parents– and often grandparents– and children.” On the link between people through the generations and their link to the place, see also Polowy, The Novellas, 69 ff. 25. On symbolic depiction in Russian village prose, see also Mary Kelly, “The Ritual Fabrics of Russian Village Woman,” in Russia: Women, Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (Bloomington–Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1996), 152-176. 26. Valentin Rasputin, “Farewell to Matyora” (Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya, 1976), 13–176, trans. into English, Antonina Bouis, introd. Kathleen Parthe (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 1995); all quotations are from this edition.

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27. See Gillespie, Valentin Rasputin, 63: “Rasputin explores his characters’ inner awareness divorced from any concrete background. Mind is divorced from physical reality, and we are shown mystical, transcendental images of human crisis.” 28. Polowy, Novellas, states that motherhood is symbolic: Women are the mothers of the whole Russian people and feel themselves responsible for the entire country (68–69). See also Gillespie: “The women he [Rasputin] portrays in glowing colors . . . in Proscchanie s Materoi [Farewell to Matyora] . . . are all idealized and saintly figures, explicitly associated with the land and with motherhood” (Valentin Rasputin, 238). 29. As Gillespie states, “Derevenshchiki (village prose writers) became notorious in the late 1980s for their chauvinistic and xenophobic statements . . . such writers as . . . Valentin Rasputin in the 1990s ”; cf. in Women and Russian Culture, 234. 30. Rose Glickman, “Peasant Women and Their Work,” in Russian Peasant Women, ed. B. Famsworth and L. Viola (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992), 148–162; cf. Philippa Lewis, “Peasant Nostalgia in Contemporary Russian Literature,” Soviet Studies 28:4 (October 1976): 548–569; Geoffrey Hosking, “The Russian Peasant Re-discovered: ‘Village Prose’ of the 1960s,” Slavic Review 32:4 (December 1973): 705–744. 31. Gillespie, Valentin Rasputin, 237, writes, “In village prose male dominance is associated with progress, disruption and disaster. . . . The female values of stability, tradition and warmth are the only positive ones. The focus here is on the village as the moral soul of the country, and the female becomes an embodiment not only of Mother Nature, but also of Mother Russia.” See also Polowy: “The image of the Russian village woman as presented in Rasputin’s novellas graphically illustrates what he believes are irreversible losses which modern society has suffered in terms of human values and compassion” (63). Polowy, The Novellas, asserts that the heroines do not themselves realize their situation, the growing alienation towards them from the material technological world around them, just as they do not realize their own strength and courage (70). 32. David Gillespie asserts that the tendency to see woman only as personified maternity “conceals a mistrust and a fear of female sexuality” (in Women and Russian Culture, 239).

Chapter Seven

The Eunuch as Hero in Late-Soviet and Perestroika Literature: Dovlatov, Nagibin, and Polyakov

Criticism of the totalitarian regime already appears in the literature of the late Soviet period authors.1 Thus, Sergei Dovlatov’s “The Zone: A Prison Camp Guard’s Story,” exposes certain shocking truths of Soviet reality, where men and women are cynical beasts. Although there are many depictions of women engaging in sexual relations with numerous men, there is neither emotional involvement nor even sincerity between them. Their sexual relations are a rather tasteless physiological activity, which probably bring in their wake more negative feelings than positive ones. The Soviet man suffers in the Soviet reality, and in the depths of his heart hates the regime. These experiences influence his entire being and suppress his sexual desire as well. On the one hand, he gets satisfaction when he “fucks” a woman who symbolizes the Soviet regime, as described in Yuri Nagibin’s “My Golden Mother-In-Law.” The Soviet man can also realize himself, at least in a partial manner, by throwing off the total suppression imposed on him by the regime, as in Yuri Polyakov’s brilliant social satire, “Paris Love of Kostya Gumankov,” written during the era of Perestroika.

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THE ZONE: A PRISON CAMP GUARD’S STORY BY SERGEI DOVLATOV: SELF-CASTRATION AS AN ACT OF DEFIANCE The Soviet prose writer Sergei Donatovich Dovlatov was born in Ufa in 1941, where his parents had been evacuated during the war; after 1945 he lived with them in Leningrad. During the years 1962–1965 he served in the army as a guard at a prison camp: it was memories of this period that served as material for “The Zone: A Prison Camp Guard’s Story” (1982). He worked as a journalist, and emigrated to the United States in 1978, where he lived in New York. From the mid-1980s his popularity grew and his books were published in the United States and Europe. He died suddenly in New York in 1990. The narration in “The Zone: A Prison Camp Guard’s Story” alternates between the author’s letters to his publisher, written in the first person, and pungent scenes of events in the camp. The two lines of narration are made visually distinct by the use of different fonts for the author’s words and the narrative stories. The author’s narrative thus resembles a diary, with elements of confession and stream of consciousness. The short stories center on the figure of Boris Alikhvanov, a camp guard. The protagonist in several of the stories is Captain Yegorov, while at the end there appears yet another guard, Gogeridze, who also speaks in the first person. Each story includes several episodes vividly illustrating the life of the camp and the feelings of its heroes.2 “The Zone: A Prison Camp Guard’s Story” describes Dovlatov’s conscript service in Siberia as a guard at a reformatory prison, whose life he found a tremendous shock. His conclusion is that the inmates were degraded to a subhuman, beastlike state: “I saw how low a man can fall, and to what heights he can soar. . . . I saw a man fully degraded to the state of a beast. . . . It seemed to me that I regained my sight. The world I entered was a horrible world” (16).3 Prison camps were a maddening world, inhabited by men guilty of unimaginable crimes and brutalities—and there was little difference between them and the camp guards. Nevertheless, a clear system of values and relations did exist in the camp, with its own conceptions of honor, decency, justice, and personal relations: “The world was awful, but life went on. Moreover, the usual proportions of life were observed. The ratio between good and evil, between joy and sorrow, remained unchanged. . . . But the content of these notions had radically changed. . . . An entirely new scale of preferred values emerged, with the top positions taken by food.” (17–18) How could Dovlatov survive in such an environment without going out of his mind? He explains: “Terrible things occurred all around, and people turned into beasts. Hungry, humiliated and worn-out by fear, we lost our hu-

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man shape. My flesh was exhausted, but my mind did not experience much commotion. . . . My flesh and my mind existed separately” (24). Senseless cruelty prevails both in the camp and in the adjacent village. The people are embittered, rude, and sadistic. But this world, says Dovlatov, is realer and truer to life that the false, trouble-free world outside.4 The attitude towards women on the part of Dovlatov’s heroes is unambiguous: for them, women are no more than tools for satisfying men’s sexual desires. There is a scene in which the guards rape a woman exiled to Siberia for prostitution. This woman was not a prisoner, but lived in the village close to the camp; she was boozed up, wandered into the camp and fell asleep in an abandoned barracks. The guards who came upon her discussed whether she was free of venereal diseases and whether it was safe to rape her. Finally, one after another, each one entered the filthy barracks and raped her. Boris Alikhanov, with whom the author identifies in this story, at first refuses to join them, but in the end he goes in after all. He finds the woman in a horrible state: naked, in a drunken stupor, and begging for a scrap of food to eat. Alikhanov raped her silently. She was too weak to resist him, and only scolded him half deliriously. This episode exemplifies the manner by which the Soviet man becomes an animal through means of sexual relations with a woman, who is herself no higher than this level. The camp guards are no less bestial than the prisoners. The following episode describes how a prisoner is forced to agree to his wife’s rape by the camp guards when she comes to visit him. The protagonist, one of the guards, is the only one to silently protest, by leaving the room: [The camp guards] are at the check-point. . . . A woman at his [one of the guards] side is undoing her shawl. “Your visit is not allowed,” said Fidel [another guard]. “I have come from far away” [she says to them]. “Your visit is not allowed,” Fidel says again. . . . he bows down to the woman and whispers something to her. . . . They bring in Kuptsov [her imprisoned husband]. He recognizes her and gazes at her . . . never tires of gazing. . . . “Your visit is not allowed,” says Fidel [to her]. “They said that I should . . .” she looks yearningly at her husband. “Oh, I’m ashamed to repeat what they said.” . . . The woman cries out and bursts into tears. . . . “You should agree, Tamara,” he [her husband] says [to her] . . . “You should agree. You should do what the masters tell you . . .” he is still begging [her]. I fling the door open and go out on the road. . . . When I came back in . . . The woman was not there.” (61–63)

In the milieu described here, women are regarded by both the prisoners and the camp personnel as functional tools. The woman is dependent upon the men, who make all her decisions for her, even with regard to her own body.

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Women, irrespective of their individuality, age, or appearance, are only seen as articles to satisfy men. They are whores, ready to submit in exchange for money or other benefits, such as food, or simply because they are wanton. This is an unshakable norm of conduct of the local women. Zina and Nadya live in a village near the camp. They “belong” to the men who work at a timber enterprise, and think and behave as their speechless sexual slaves.5 When guards Petrov and Goderidze come to their hut with vodka and food, intending to have a sex party, they receive them without any objections, as it is not women’s responsibility to speak with men or to explain anything to them, although they are aware of what their “masters” at the timber facility would do to such “suitors.” They act like sheep or goats: if a stranger comes to steal them they allow themselves to be stolen, for it is not their prerogative to choose their masters. Thus, when their original “masters” unexpectedly return, to discover that their “sheep and goats” are about to be stolen, Petrov and Goderidze leave the hut like thieves, running away and hiding in the woods, as the other men follow in angry pursuit (159–162).6 The women are entirely in the hands of the men, and it is for the men alone to come to an agreement as to how to “share” them and to decide to whom they should “belong.” Any man coming to a woman’s house would be accepted by her with the same indifferent hospitality. The course of her life is determined elsewhere, by men.7 Man/woman relations are determined by the physiological needs of the man and in accordance with his hierarchical position within the social herd. In light of this situation, the Soviet man who wishes to preserve his dignity might well prefer to suppress his own sexuality, to become impotent, rather than to become an animal. But this narrative depicts other women as well, who are unwilling to submit to a man on his first demand and who show some level of intelligence and self-awareness. Among these is Katyusha, the future wife of guard Yegorov. Her refusal to give in to him came to him as such a surprise that he fell in love with her, held her in respect, and ultimately married her. But there was a reason for this seeming “idyll”: Katyusha had not been reared in Siberia, and her moral and emotional code was thus not influenced by the local mentality. What would have become of Katyusha had she been brought up there? Presumably, she would have been spiritually drained like the other women of the village (75–92). Dovlatov also describes Guard Goderidze’s encounter with a decent and cultured Siberian-born woman —a fine, reserved, polite librarian. She seems to Goderidze like a being from another, more cheerful world whose presence he missed in the camp. Helping her to collect some books before leaving the library, he accidentally touches her hand, and this momentary contact moved

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him more than the sexual relations he had enjoyed with the common women from the Siberian villages. It reminded him of the possibility of another type of relationship with a woman: one based on warmth and romance, a human relation as against an animalistic one. Only then did he realize how important the world he had left behind, beyond the boundaries of the camp, was to him. But such encounters were a rare exception to the rule. Even if Goderidze wished to continue his friendship, their relations could never take a normal turn within the social environment ruled by the camp code. Outsiders might possibly exist as individuals, avoiding any prominence, but the union of two outsiders would be perceived by the local community as provocative and produce a negative reaction. 8 Dovlatov does not subdivide human beings into man and woman. They are all degraded and miserable, unaware of their situation and of themselves. Truly, this is a terrible world, and the best way to deal with it is to run away, as Dovlatov did when he emigrated. The Soviet regime confronts the man with a cruel alternative: on the one hand, he can adopt an animalistic type of behavior such as is accepted in his environment and thereby enjoy a certain degree of security, but in this way he will also be humiliated, first of all in his own eyes. On the other hand, he may suppress his sexual impulses, castrating himself as an act of protest against the regime. There remains the final option for the Soviet man: to commit suicide as a man, like the anticipatory suicide of one condemned to execution, which serves as the ultimate demonstration of his freedom vis-à-vis his executor. The Soviet man who suppresses his sexual impulses, thus castrating himself, appears as a kind of a martyr, who raises himself up in an heroic, almost iconic manner, in order to maintain his self-dignity as a man and a human being. The self-castration of the Soviet man is thus a symbolic spiritual realization of his masculinity, surrounded by glory. But such a destiny on the part of the Soviet man is perhaps preferable to that of the Russian man who is raped and castrated by a strong woman. Sacrifice of the male ego in face of the all-powerful regime is preferable to losing one’s own value and self-esteem as a male because of the man’s failure to dominate one woman; in either case the man is humiliated and destroyed.

YURI NAGIBIN’S “MY GOLDEN MOTHER-IN-LAW”: AN ANIMAL IN THE SOVIET HERD Yuri Markovich Nagibin (1920–1994), a major Russian prose writer, journalist, and screenwriter of the second half of the twentieth century, is considered

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a pioneer of modern Russian naturalism. In 1941, he was called up to the army, and in 1942 returned to Moscow. In 1943 he published a collection of prose pieces, Man from the Frontline (Chelovek s fronta). The most fruitful period in his creative life was the mid-1950s, when several collections of his stories were published. His memoirs, Darkness at the End of the Tunnel (T’ma v kontse tunnelya) and “My Golden Mother-in-Law” (“Moya zolotaya tescha”) were published posthumously. Nagibin’s novel, “My Golden Mother-in-Law,” is the tale of a young man from a family opposed to the Soviet regime, whose members were subject to repressions during the years of terror under Stalin. 9 At the beginning of the Brezhnev era, during a drinking party, the young protagonist meets Galya, a young divorcée from a family that is part of Stalin’s inner circle—the daughter of Vasily Kirilovich Zviagintzev, Stalin’s minister for all of the rolling stock in the USSR. Soon he is invited to the luxurious country house of her parents, Zviagintzev and his wife Tatyana Alekseyevna. The latter is an archetypal Russian beauty—a gray-eyed, golden-haired, majestic, portly, and placid woman—whom the author calls a “stately matron.”10 The protagonist desires her at first sight, and immediately decides to make her his “motherin-law” (202). He fortuitously marries the daughter and is energetic in his marital relations with her, imagining during the moment of embrace that he is with her mother.11 Life follows its normal course, and the young man is anguished by his mother-in-law’s proximity yet inaccessibility. But he unexpectedly discovers that Zviagintzev has a mistress; Tatyana Alekseyevna feels injured and abandoned by her husband, and her son-in-law takes timely advantage of the situation. A passionate and hectic romance ensues, to which Nagibin devotes dozens of pages, describing the mother-in-law’s body in explicitly sensual and erotic images that border on the pornographic. In the end, this unimaginable knot of passions is undone dramatically but prosaically: in the midst of their love-making Zviagintzev returns home and the lover jumps out of the window into the garden, rushes out to the highway where he stops a truck, and disappears from the family forever. The novel combines attacks on the Stalinist regime with diverse and abundant erotic scenes. Tatyana Alekseyevna is presented, not as a real person, but as a powerful and horrific, positively feminine element. She serves as a symbol of Mother Russia in her communist incarnation—all the more so, given that Russia, according to the Russian cultural tradition, is a woman.12 Outwardly, Zviagintzev resembles the famous geographer and explorer Przhevalsky, who was rumored to be the biological father of Stalin.13 Thus Soviet Russia, represented in the novel by Tatyana Alekseyevna, is symbolically married to Father Stalin, represented by Zviagintzev. The young man,

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by engaging in a vigorous liaison with her, takes his vengeance on outraged Russia, which had humbly followed Stalin, as well as on Stalin himself, for the repression to which his family had been subjected and the povertystricken existence of his dear parents.14 Tatyana Alekseyevna and her entire milieu seem disgusting. Their world is one of endless drinking bouts, participation in such revelries being a precondition for entering the upper crust of Soviet society. The high Soviet circle swinishly accepts nearly total sexual libertinism, with hardly any limits. Given such total license, the son-in-law could even indulge himself with his own mother-in-law, excusing himself to his wife by saying that her father really desired her (291; cf. 264). Lies and affectation prevail everywhere: “everything was permitted, so long as there was a show of respectability” (190). The protagonist perceives life in his new environment as a manifestation of savagery and hypocrisy, inspiring horror of the Soviet way of life. The members of the Zviagintzev family are presented as irreproachable people, basking in their Russian national greatness, generosity, and high moral ideals—but in actual fact their way of life is thoroughly corrupt. Nagibin describes the vulgarity, ignorance, and boorishness of the Soviet elite. Tatyana Alekseyevna and Zviagintzev tell their son-in-law of a visit to the ballet in the early 1920s, where they found much that they did not like. Zviagintzev thinks, for example, that they should not only dance, but also sing. He suspects that before the Revolution they sang for the bourgeois, but now they have became too spoiled and would not charm proletarian ears by singing in addition to dancing. On another occasion, Zviagintzev, a gross, home-spun anti-Semite, was much annoyed by a Jewish couple in front of them in the theater. He triumphantly tells his family how he literally “smoked them out” by breaking wind at them, thereby winning the admiration and pride of his wife (230–232). The protagonist does not think much of Tatyana Alekseyevna, and wonders whether she is simply “a fool or a whore” (291). She may have been both—much like Mother Russia, in its Soviet version. The numerous, poignant, sensuous, and graphic sexual scenes serve as a way of showing the protagonist’s vengeance on the Soviet regime. Noteworthy are the scenes of oral sex performed by Tatyana Alekseyevna. The only thing which concerned the young man was how acute the gustatory feelings of Tatyana might have been at that moment, sarcastically hinting at the sweetness of “screwing” the Soviet regime. He regrets that, like heavy drunkards who pour cheap vodka directly down their throats so as not to feel its nasty taste, Tatyana does not want to savor the substance in her mouth, thereby reducing the pleasure he derives from this symbolic revenge on the Soviets. But on the other hand—so the young man continues his acid deliberations—there are drunkards who would be glad to relish even the disgusting taste of bad vodka. Why doesn’t

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Tatyana Alekseyevna behave likewise? Why cannot the Soviet regime feel a mouthful of what he thinks of it? Following their hasty separation, the protagonist encounters Tatyana Alekseyevna again only twelve years later, when she is lying in her coffin. The sight of her dead is even more delightful and exciting to him than “screwing” her before, when alive, and unexpectedly evokes in him the physiological reaction, and he cannot keep his lust in check. Only now, upon seeing Tatyana Alekseyevna in her coffin, does the hero attain full satisfaction. Nagibin describes the life of the Soviet aristocracy with astonishment and with curiosity, as if his protagonist were visiting a zoo. The protagonist enters the animal cage and stays there for a certain length of time. He learns the life of these animals and playfully imitates them, while carefully assuring the possibility of flight from the cage should the game become too real, and he actually becomes too much like these disgusting animals. In the end, he feels himself in danger of adopting Zviagintzev’s crooked worldview. When caught in flagrante delictio, fleeing mother-naked from the rage of the cuckolded Zviagintzev, he actually saves himself from permanently turning into a similar beast. The hero’s lowering himself to the level of an animal is a game which he plays when he goes into the cage of these animals with the goal of living their experiences, while controlling the boundaries of the game. He cannot possibly be humiliated by his relations with Tatyana Alekseyevna, as he does not see her as a person from whom he expects to receive respect. Rather, he gets from her only what he expects: the pleasure of taking revenge against the leading male of the herd by mating repeatedly with his female. Relationships between man and woman are distorted in the Soviet reality, as in the case of Dovlatov, in which refraining from sexual relations was what proved the protagonist’s spiritual and ethical “masculinity.” In Nagibin’s case as well, relations between man and woman are seen as cynical, sarcastic, and vengeful. The more the protagonist humiliates the woman and himself, the more he feels that he has achieved his goal. In this work, as in many others written during the Soviet period, ideological consciousness replaces the gender self-consciousness of the man.

“PARIS LOVE OF KOSTYA GUMANKOV” BY YURI POLYAKOV: CASTRATION OF THE SOVIET MAN THROUGH MEANS OF BASIC CONSUMER GOODS Yuri Polyakov was born in Moscow in 1954, where he has lived to this day. Endowed with a gift of psychological analysis and an acute sense of humor,

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he is among the most brilliant and popular satirists of the Soviet regime and of Russian society. “Paris Love of Kostya Gumankov” tells the story of a trip taken by a group of Soviet workers to Paris in 1984. Kostya, a young Russian intellectual who works at a computer company, is included in the group along with a number of other specimens of the Soviet society. Polyakov describes certain episodes of the trip illustrative of the Soviet reality, its citizens, and their twisted way of thinking. The travelers’ startled reaction to the abundance of goods they see in the Paris shops, their wretched attempts to look appropriately dressed in the Western world, are grotesque and laughable, as are the narrator’s wisecracks at his own financial situation as a programmer in a company that is perceived to be promoted in Soviet concepts. The piquancy of the story is created by the fact that the group was provided with only a few hotel rooms. Most of its members were invited to stay with French families, but in order not to lose face, and so as to put up a good show of Soviet reality, they must pass themselves off as someone else. Thus the young single mother, Alla Muravina, has to pretend to be the housewife in a happy Soviet family, and the group had to select a partner for this pseudocouple. Alla chooses to present herself as Kostya’s wife, despite her knowledge of the fact that he was in fact married to another woman, who did not participate in the trip. Consequently they were accommodated in the same bedroom by a French family. Events took their predictable turn: so much so that on the way back Kostya even proposed to her, but he was quite reasonably reminded that his wife Vera Gennadyevna was awaiting him back in Moscow.15 Of interest here is an episode involving a lambskin coat, which Kostya’s wife Vera obliged him to buy for her in Paris. Instead of doing so, on the very first evening in Paris Kostya went to a restaurant and, wishing to show off his supposed “wealth,” ordered a bottle of champagne, which exhausted his entire modest “fortune.” The same day Alla bought herself the same type of lambskin coat as was coveted by Kostya’s wife. Before returning to Moscow Kostya was assailed by black thoughts about the “terror” which he might expect on the part of his wife, and whether this might force him to part from her for good. When he saw his wife meeting him at the airport, he shuddered at the pending storm and, sympathetically, Alla thrust the parcel with her own coat into his hands. The story ends with the group’s successful homecoming, and life continues in the same gray and thoroughly boring way as it had before. Kostya returns to his computer company and to his wife and frequents his usual pub, nicknamed “Rygoletto,” a word that sounds in Russian like a combination between Verdi’s famous opera and the word “vomit”—a combination reflecting Kostya’s

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feeling about his life. He recalls his Paris trip as a happy dream, which he passed through, only for it to disappear from his life forever after. The story seems to be about love, but upon closer reading its primary purpose seems to be to ridicule the Soviet way of life. This is achieved with such stylistic devices as satire, parody, irony, black humor, grotesquery, and carrying topics to the point of absurdity. During the final years of the Soviet regime the realities of everyday life, devastating in essence but often comical in form, were often perceived ironically even by the Soviet people themselves. Polyakov describes the nervous breakdown of a country girl upon seeing Paris, contrasted with the memories of her provincial collective farm (kolkhoz); the Communist Party squealer among them, called a “special group leader”; and, in the end, an appeal for political asylum for his substitute—and many other things intrinsic to Soviet reality but utterly ridiculous to the outsider. The author demonstrates the misery of Soviet reality from a number of different points of view. The wretchedness of Soviet life is evident in every breath of the characters. Soviet people without experience of travel abroad had only a dim notion of what such a trip might involve; they were accustomed to living in an absurd world, distorted by Soviet ideology. The author attempts to paint the events in a satirical and mocking tone, but between the lines the notes are more tragic than comic. Polyakov creates a contrast between two types of the Soviet women, each of whom plays a symbolic role in the novel: Alla, Gumankov’s “Paris love,” and Vera Gennadyevna, his “severe” spouse. Alla personifies the wondrous Paris, while Vera represents the dreary life in the Soviet Union. Vengeful, rancorous, and dull, Vera is a silly, hidebound creature without color or taste. Kostya treats her with a sense of resignation, as a burdensome condition forced upon him, with which he must “comply.” Life with Vera removed Kostya’s taste for life and turned him—once a “bright and unrehearsed” wit and jester in panel quiz games, who made everyone, especially the ladies, rock with laughter—into a sorrowful type of a married man, such as Vera wanted him to be. Eager to balance his family life, Kostya tried to adjust to his wife and to conform to her wishes, and now he was, as he sarcastically and ironically indicates, a “perfect conformist” (375). He is crushed by the frustration of an unfortunate marriage to Vera, who symbolizes the depressing Soviet reality. Life with her causes him to abandon attempts to fulfill himself; he “gives up” on his dreams. Vera is presented by the author as Kostya’s ill fortune, as indisputable as the fact that he was born in the Soviet Union. Alla is portrayed as the antithesis to Vera: she is attractive, interesting, intriguing, and alluring. In Alla Kostya felt something making him alive again. She appeared to him as a painful reminder of the world from which he had

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been banished when he married Vera. Alla was associated with Paris: only in such a dream world could Kostya encounter his “dream woman.” For Kostya, Paris was as different from the Soviet Union as was Alla from his wife. Alla also had many indispensable attributes of the Soviet woman, but such details were of little concern to Kostya: they were natural and inevitable. Alla, like Vera, was an ordinary Soviet woman, overwhelmed by the dullness of everyday life. But the former’s difference from the latter lay in her inner liberty, and that she was not enslaved by the demands of Soviet existence. She was ready to perform an act unacceptable to the ordinary Soviet person in the street, such as parting from clothing. She explained her point to Kostya: “One should strain oneself. A real fighter is . . . the one who against all odds contrives to live a worthy human life” (431).16 She had a special approach to struggle with the Soviet regime—a peculiar feminine method of resistance, quiet and unmilitant, which dwelt deep in the human heart, when even under the oppression of the Soviet reality one remembered that a different scale of values existed. In this respect too Alla seemed the opposite of Vera, for Vera’s happiness lay in possessing a lambskin coat (451). The contrast between Alla’s inner freedom and Vera’s inhibited nature are also recognizable in the relations each one builds with Kostya. Alla did not yield to the pressure of the Communist Party functionary in their tourist group, who tried to exploit his position to become intimate with her. She flatly rebuffed him—a risky step, demanding no little courage. Her inner freedom and broad heart allow her to submit to a man she likes—Kostya. By contrast, Vera is internally strained, restless. For Vera, repressed by her complexes, the important thing is to maintain primitive matriarchal rule in her family. She regulates relations with Kostya by periodically banning him from her body, thereby depressing his masculine ego, taking away his freedom, individuality, and his taste for life. Scenes of Kostya’s intimacy with Vera when they were newly married are cynically presented as castrating, an obstacle he could only overcome through estrangement from her and even from himself: [When I] tumbled into bed, my seductive spouse came to me exhaling fragrance of all possible shampoos, deodorizers and perfumes. Her movements were sharp and well coordinated, as if she had been called upon to perform a program of gymnastics demonstration, the content of which was known only to herself. In my mind I gave her a score of 5.7: her artistry, after all, was not first class. (p. 366)

Sex in the shadow of Soviet reality is devastating for a man. For a Soviet woman like Vera, sex could have been replaced by phone chatter, as far as her emotional involvement was concerned: “‘I must call someone!’ [Vera]

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answered seriously . . . and went to her precious, affectionately loved phonedarling. I think if they could have manufactured handsets of a certain shape, a host of women would have abandoned their relations with men” (354). But even with the shape of a handset as it is, the Soviet woman was ready to forsake relations with her man in favor of the phone, so cold and asexual she is. Kostya’s frustration is hidden deep within his heart. He attempts to obscure it, to ignore it, not to allow it to rise to the conscious level in order to protect himself. But the moment there is a suitable opportunity to free himself from the subjugation to his wife, he hastens to exploit it by a romance with Alla, taking his vengeance against Vera and against the Soviet regime at one and the same time. His vengeance already begins on the very first evening in Paris, when he “by mistake” drinks up all his money in one bottle of champagne at the restaurant, discovering to his horror—or perhaps to his secret joy—that he has no money left with which to buy his wife the lambskin coat she so desired. Kostya takes vengeance against Vera in the one way that could truly hurt her—by denying her a vulgar item of clothing. The lambskin coat she so wants is connected in his consciousness with other vulgar cosmetic products, such as the deodorants and cheap shampoos which were of primary importance for Vera whenever she had sex with him. His wife openly prefers basic consumer goods, like the phone chatter mentioned earlier, to her husband. She seems to derive more satisfaction from using these things than from having sex with him, thereby humiliating and castrating him. Kostya is jealous of the goods which his wife prefers to him; they are connected in his subconscious with the process of castration carried out by her. The goods are reflected in his subconscious as tools of torture. This time he tries to prevent her from buying more of these basic consumer goods, therefore executing sweet vengeance against her. This sharp and successful retaliation against Vera makes Kostya even more drunk than did the bottle of champagne. Alla’s last-minute decision at the airport to give Kostya her own lambskin coat for his wife, appears in the work almost as a deus ex machina, like the somewhat artificial happy end in fairy tales. The scene is tragi-comic, for Kostya’s domestic peace depends upon this lambskin coat he is holding. Vera won’t divorce him provided he brings her the coat; she thus regards him as secondary to the coat. His male ego is evaluated by his wife as lower than the value of the coat. Vera wants Kostya to buy her a lambskin coat just as she would like him to buy her a vibrator, at the very moment that she has a young, virile man right next to her. Although he initially refuses to cooperate with her in the humiliat-

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ing process of his own castration, in the final analysis the group returns home, and he is left with no choice. Hence Alla gives him her own lambskin coat, as if to say, “Better that you cooperate with those who are castrating you, as you will be castrated in any event, and if you don’t cooperate, then you’ll suffer even more.” But Perestroika began, and gradually the old Soviet reality began changing. Basic consumer goods ceased to be of life-and-death importance. Kostya was at last able to purchase a spray for exterminating cockroaches, whose hitherto constant presence seemed to symbolize the persistence of the Soviet reality. This time consumer goods served, not as a tool for castrating Kostya, but specifically as a means of his freedom. The destruction of the cockroaches symbolizes, even if only in a comic way, Kostya’s victory over the Soviet regime, and in its wake also the partial liberation and rehabilitation of his male ego. Simultaneously Vera—what a miracle—became more feminine and even began to treat him “with more care” (461). Upon the breakup of the Soviet Union, the woman, too, is freed and regains her feminine consciousness. In states ruled by a totalitarian regime, under conditions which nullify the freedom of the individual, neither masculinity nor femininity can be fully realized. But full liberation was still far away, and Kostya was no longer young or optimistic. He kept performing his daily round in the triangle of office, his saloon, and his home, gradually aging and gaining weight (461). All that is left him is to mourn that Perestroika came too late for him, when he was already a broken and castrated man.

SUMMARY The woman as depicted in literature of the late-Soviet and Perestroika period serves as a symbol for the Soviet regime. Thus, the protagonist’s attitude towards her reflects, not only his frank relation towards her, but also his attitude towards the Soviet regime. The Soviet man is castrated—not by the strong Russian woman, like the man in pre-revolutionary literature, but by the regime. The Soviet man and woman may have a lot of sex, but such sex is painful, disgusting, and humiliating, and abstinence from it is the preferable option. In such a system of relationships, no voluntary, free expression of the personality of either one of them is possible. For the Soviet man, it is from the beginning impossible to realize his masculinity in such a system of relationships. The only time that a Soviet man enjoys sex is when he “fucks” a woman who symbolizes to him the Soviet regime. But it is clear that one is not speaking here of an honest set of relationships from which the man might derive

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authentic satisfaction. At most he may derive an ideological or ethical satisfaction rooted in his taking a vengeance against the system. The self-realization of the Soviet man only occurs in the ideological or ethical areas, while his own masculinity remains crushed and suppressed, and he himself emerges castrated and frustrated.

NOTES 1. See Helena Goscilo, Dehexing Sex: Russian Womanhood During and After Glasnost (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). In the chapter, “Russian Womanhood During and After Glasnost,” 13, she writes about the blank denial of sex in the Soviet system on the one hand, and the “windfall” discovery of sex during Glasnost, on the other. 2. A strong influence of Ernest Hemingway, whose writings have been translated into Russian and published in the USSR, can be traced in Dovlatov’s work. On the final page, Dovlatov indeed alludes to Hemingway as a key to his narrative. This is particularly evident in the structure of The Zone: A Prison Camp Guard’s Story, where monologue letters of the author alternate with topical stories, strongly reminiscent of Hemingway’s In our Time (1925). The narrative form chosen by Hemingway, with his protagonist Nick Adams, is suitable to stories about traumatic events experienced by the protagonist in the past, whether at war, as in the case of Hemingway, or in prison camp, as in that of Dovlatov. Boris Lanin, “The Image of Women in the Prose of Sergei Dovlatov,” in Women and Russian Culture: Projections and Self-Perceptions. ed. Rosalind Marsh (Oxford-New York: Berghahn Books, 1998), pp. 252–258, esp. 254, also notes Chekhov’s influence on Dovlatov. 3. Sergei V. Dovlatov, “The Zone: A Prison Camp Guard’s Story,” in his Collected Works, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg: Azbuka Publishers, 2000), 2:5–168. All quotations are from this edition. 4. See Rosa Glinterschik, Contemporary Post-Modernist Russian Writers (Kaunas, 2000), 330, who notes the use of absurdity and slapstick comedy elements in Dovlatov’s prose. 5. About men possessing women, see Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: The Free Press, Macmillan, 1988), 63: “Intercourse is . . . a form of possession or an act of possession in which, . . . a man inhabits a woman, physically covering her . . . penetrating her; and this physical relation to her—over her and inside her—is his possession of her. . . . he occupies and rules her.” 6. Boris Lanin, “The Image of Women in the Prose of Sergei Dovlatov,” in Women and Russian Culture, 253. Referring to this scene, Lanin says: “In the camp zone women are not in the habit of working. Sex is their chief work and way of life.” See also Gary Rosenfeld, “Afterword: The Problems of Gender Criticism; or, What is To Be Done about Dostoevsky,” in A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature, ed. Sona Stephan Hoisington (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1995), 114–124, esp. 117. He quotes from Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection:

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Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987), 62: “A heroine’s insistence on self-definition is usually violently punished for . . . their striving toward self-naming has dire implications for the men who do the naming.” 7. See Attwood, “The Post-Soviet Woman in the Move to the Market: A Return to Domesticity and Dependence?” in Women and Russian Culture, 255–268, esp. 260: “Women are the passive objects of male lust: men’s only meaningful relationships are with one another.” 8. See Lanin, “The Image of Women in the Prose of Sergei Dovlatov,” in Women and Russian Culture, 254: “In Dovlatov’s work . . . femininity is associated with restlessness, bustle and the impossibility of attaining fulfillment. . . . His heroines are by no means Turgenev maidens.” 9. The story is told in the first person by a young journalist who serves as narrator, the reader gaining the impression that he is to be identified with the author. The novel rests not so much on its plot, as on an amalgam of different literary styles. The author’s style of documentary memoir is combined with stream of consciousness, elements of confessional prose, and dramatic intrigue. His frankness creates the effect of authenticity and spiritual exhibitionism, thereby winning the reader’s credence. 10. Nuttall claims that, within the framework of modern political thought, Divine felicity, represented in this novel by Tatyana Alekseyevna, is transmuted into human and political issues. See A. D. Nuttall, Crime and Punishment: Murder as Philosophic Experiment (Edinburgh: Sussex UP, 1978), 50. 11. On falsehood and hypocrisy in Soviet life and literature, see Anna Krylova, “Privacy the Soviet Way: Family and Everyday Life in Pre-War Soviet Literature” [Russian: “Sovetskoe lichnoe: semeino-bytovaya tema v predvoennoi sovetskoi literature”], in Socialist Realist Canon, ed. Hans Günter and Evgeny Dobrenko ( St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii Proekt, 2000), 803–813. 12. On representation of the Soviet regime as a woman and its criticism, see Adele Barker, “Reading the Text—Rereading Ourselves,” in Women and Russian Culture, 43 ff. Cf. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1965), 361. 13. A Russian nobleman and famous traveler, N. M. Przhevalsky (1839–1888), is rumored to have been Stalin’s biological father. On the other hand, there is a possibility that Stalin himself initiated those rumors in order to estrange himself from his officially known and embarrassing Georgian father, Vissarion Dzhugashvili. It is also possible that his biological father was A.M. Przhevalsky, the above Przhevalsky’s brother. 14. About Stalin’s regime and its literature, see Beth Holmgren, Woman’s Works in Stalin’s Time: On Lidia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelstam (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993), 5–28, esp. 6–8. She argues about the totalitarianism of Stalin’s regime and the natural impulse to mock it. She polemicizes with Michel Foucault’s paper, “What Is an Author?” in Textual Strategies—Perspectives in PostStructuralist Criticism, ed. J. V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979), 141–160, claiming that the question posed in Foucault’s essay regarding the authorship in the cultural and literary world is not relevant to Stalin’s regime, since the evaluation hierarchy of

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literary works and their authors were determined, not by their immanent values, but outside of the literary world, by Stalin’s decisions (7). 15. See Valerie Sperling, “Gender Politics and the State during Russia’s Transition Period,” in Gender, Politics and the State, ed.Vicky Randall and Georgina Waylen (London: Routledge, 1998), 143–166. 16. Yuri Polyakov, “Paris Love of Kostya Gumankov,” in his Lamb in Milk (Moscow: OLMA-PRESS Publishers, 1997), 331–461. All quotations from this edition.

Chapter Eight

Man as an Object in Literature by Women: Shcherbakova, Rubina, Ulitskaya, Petrushevskaya, and Grekova

This chapter differs from the rest of the book in that it discusses literature by women authors, thereby reflecting how women perceive themselves and the men in their lives—a perception with its own colors and hues that distinguishes it from that of men. “The Year of Tangerines, or: The Ideal Opportunity” by Galina Shcherbakova is an introspective psychological novel about the relations between men and women. The woman is shown here as manipulative, strong-minded, and more decisive than the man, and it is she who, for better or worse, directs his life. Dina Rubina’s novel, “On Upper Maslovka,” likewise presents an original and unexpected psychological analysis of the interaction between man and woman. Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s “Medea and Her Children” is a dramatic family saga at whose center stands the figure of a matriarch portrayed in nearmythic terms. Ludmila Petrushevskaya’s novel, “The Time: Night” relates to issues of a social nature while asking existential questions. The heroine of Irina Grekova’s “The Hotel Manager” draws attention to the domineering attitude of the Soviet man towards the woman in family and society.1

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“THE YEAR OF TANGERINES, OR: THE IDEAL OPPORTUNITY” BY GALINA SHCHERBAKOVA: WOMAN AS THE REAL MASTER OF THE WORLD Galina Nikolaevna Shcherbakova, a Russian prose writer, was born in 1932 in Dzerzhinsk, in the Donetsk region of the Ukraine, and worked as a school teacher. Now retired, she lives and writes in Moscow. Her novel, “The Year of Tangerines, or: The Ideal Opportunity,” reflects the complex psychological factors involved in women’s power. “The Year of Tangerines, or: The Ideal Opportunity” tells of an office romance between a chief editor, Alexei Nikolayevich, and a proofreader, Vika, a trainee at a publishing house. Alexei Nikolayevich is long married to another woman, Anna, and their relations have been stable. Anna, a school teacher, enjoys high standing at her school, where she is held in respect thanks to her position as a happily married woman. Their grown-up daughter Lena is a practical and cynical young woman. Alexei Nikolyevich’s life is rather monotonous, his only pleasure being an annual leave, which he usually spends at the company’s holiday resort in the south. During one such leave he becomes intimate with his colleague Vika, a young, well-educated, stylish, facetious, bright, and elegant divorcée. This liaison continues for two years until, on one of his leaves which Alexei had planned to spend with Vika at the holiday home, she can only come for the last three days. Her absence scares him so that he decides to marry Vika in order not to lose her forever. When Vika finally comes, he haltingly sputters at her, only half conscious of what he is saying, that he plans to divorce his wife and marry her. Vika agrees, and a host of practical problems immediately arise, the main one being where the newlyweds would live. Alexei and his wife have a proper three-bedroom apartment, originally allotted to himself and his late mother. Vika, for her part, owns an excellent two-bedroom apartment, acquired in the wake of her divorce from her former husband, Fedotov. Alexei does not want to lose his apartment to his wife and daughter, but even greater than his own reluctance to lose it is Vika’s desire to get it. In exchange for her splendid dwelling, she is prepared to give to Alexei’s wife her own two-bedroom apartment, which is one room smaller. But weightier for her is the emotional moment: her apartment was decorated by her ex-husband, thereby serving as a constant oppressive reminder of his abandonment of her for another woman. Alexei’s wife Anna flatly rejects the idea of the exchange, arguing quite reasonably that, if Alexei wishes to ruin his life, he may do so, but not hers or their daughter’s. Both Vika and Anna persist in their intentions: the former to move into the three-room apartment, and the latter not to leave it.

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Alexei is torn between the wishes of these two strong-willed women, but most of all is depressed by the ambiguity of his own desires, each day making a new decision—now listening to the advice of Vika, now to that of his wife, daughter and his friends, none of which helps to untangle the complex web of emotional, family, social and economic problems.2 The solution comes quite unexpectedly: Alexei dies suddenly of a heart attack while sitting in the toilet.3 He is buried, and nothing changes in either of the woman’s lives. The novel ends with a casual remark by the author that a lot of tangerines had been imported into Russia that year, and all the heroines fall to the fruit with good appetite. This solution is ironic, as the women “ate” the hero, tearing him apart prematurely as if he were a large, juicy fruit desired by all of them. More precisely, it was his luxury apartment that was the desired fruit which they failed to divide between themselves. There is nothing left for them to do now but to be satisfied with eating tangerines.4 The subject of this novel is quite similar to that of Trifonov’s “The Exchange,” discussed above (Chapter Three). In both cases the scene is set among the Muscovite intelligentsia of the 1960s and 1970s, while the personalities, habits, and mentalities of the characters also have much in common: there are the same problems, and the same young, alluring, and strong-willed woman counterpoised to a weak, infantile, and hesitant man. The plots of the two novels are also similar, centering on the complexities of apartment exchange and the stubborn problems of everyday life, driving the protagonist to a premature death: Trifonov’s Victor dies of hypertension, while Shcherbakova’s Alexei dies of a heart attack. But there are also important differences between them. Although the figure of Vika embodies some of the elements of the sexy young vamp, similar to Lena in “The Exchange,” she is not regarded as negatively as is her counterpart. Lena, the wife of Trifonov’s protagonist, is only presented superficially, as seen by her husband: a cruel, egotistic monster, whose inner world the reader is hardly shown. Trifonov describes his heroine primarily as an object, lacking in feelings and personality, whose function in the novel is measured in terms of her relation to the protagonist himself—that is, according to the emotional upheavals and psycho-physiological processes that she causes him. The distinction between the novels is rooted in the different perspective of the two authors: the male one, in the case of Trifonov, and the female one, in that of Shcherbakova. In “The Year of Tangerines, or: The Ideal Opportunity” by Shcherbakova, matters are presented from the viewpoint of the women who surround Alexei. Alexei is shown as an infantile, stupid, and inarticulate weakling, who makes fatal decisions in reaction to his unreasoned fleeting whims. He is a

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frivolous, irresponsible man with an exaggerated self-image, muddle-headed, hesitant about every step he takes. He lives in the world of smart, sophisticated, and clear-thinking women who make decisions in his stead, suggesting to him the proper actions, thoughts, and words, explaining to him what he “really wants,” and manipulating him to satisfy their wishes. They put ideas into his head, using him as a tool. The only serious and independent deed Alexei ever “managed” to accomplish in his life was to die. But even this was in an anti-heroic and ridiculous manner: while sitting on the toilet. In this novel, the woman plays the role of man’s nurse but the man is disobedient and tries unsuccessfully to act for himself, ultimately resulting in his premature death. His death upsets the plans of the women around him—his wife, his daughter, and his mistress—and interferes with the intentions of each to arrange their own lives.5 Although Shcherbakova’s women are rather aggressive and lacking in foresight, such traits do not carry negative associations, since the character of the opposing male, due to his feebleness and infantilism, justifies such qualities in the women and even encourages them. The women surrounding Alexei—his wife, her female half-cousin, his mistress, her aunt and his daughter—are shown as predators, who eventually devour the only man among them. The man serves for the women’s convenience, performing the functions needed by her. But he spoils the women’s plans and, once the situation becomes unbearable for him, “stupidly” dies. He is desperately confused and lost in problems for which he is unable to find any solution. In the world of women, the man is an object, a tool and toy which might break if they push too much or misuse it. Vika’s first husband, Fedorov, is the antithesis to Alexei. He is the other man, who enters the world of aggressive women. But unlike Alexei, he is not devoured by the rapacious women, but survives safely. How does he protect himself? Only by fleeing their world. He takes the necessary precautions: divorcing Vika, he leaves her as ransom all that he has acquired in life—a perfectly furnished apartment. Even after this lucky escape from Vika, he continuously pays her off, giving her money when she asks for it. After divorcing Vika, he remarries and becomes the father of a longawaited baby. His second wife is utterly plain, sickly, and undersexed: a figure closer to the maternal prototype, who sacrifices herself for the sake of others, rather than to the sexual one, who tears man apart for her own satisfaction and needs. By contrast, Vika is childless, and her promises to bear him a child sound improbable and unconvincing even to herself, let alone to him. In order to survive, a man must avoid overly sexed women, but should live in the world

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of mothers, whose lot is the travail of bearing children. He chose a woman whose sexual traits were repressed in favor of human ones, and shunned willful and strong-minded women sharks. Fedorov’s second marriage was successful because his new wife was weaker than he, dependent on him, not dangerous, one whom he could rule and patronize.6 A man must beware of female predators who will devour him, after first using him to their best advantage. Or, as ironically shown in this novel, they may even devour him earlier if they make too much haste. The attitude of the women to the man in this novel is ambivalent. On the one hand, “The Year of Tangerines, or: The Ideal Opportunity” demonstrates the heroine’s feelings of contempt and disdain towards the weak man, who is overwhelmed by his own inferiority complex. The women scoff at him, seeing him as impaired or even defective in relation to themselves. On the other hand, they are dependent upon him for their social status, for their economic well-being, and for their emotional and personal security— all of which require the presence of a man at their side. Anna’s respectable position at work derives from her personal status as a woman in a stable marriage. Likewise the economic positions of his daughter and of his mistress depend upon the apartment which he and his mother received from the government. A man has many social, economic, and personal opportunities which are not available to a woman. Notwithstanding all the contempt a woman may feel for the man, she is dependent upon him; she fears losing him and is afraid of him. Her attitude to the man is ambivalent: she simultaneously has pity on the man, likes him, and exploits him thoroughly for her own satisfaction. She sees him as a kind of powerful fool, simultaneously admired and despised.

“ON UPPER MASLOVKA” BY DINA RUBINA: A UTOPIAN FAIRYTALE ABOUT LOVE Dina Illyinichna Rubina, a popular Russian prose writer, was born in Tashkent in 1953, graduated from Tashkent Musical Conservatory in 1977, and immigrated to Israel in 1990. She has received Russian, Israeli, and French literature awards. Rubina is a peculiar writer endowed with a brilliant sense of humor, of which her realistic yet sentimental novel, “On Upper Maslovka” (which was made into a prize-winning movie), may serve as a vivid illustration. “On Upper Maslovka” is the story of ninety-five-year-old Anna Borisovna, a retired sculptress who shares her apartment with Peter, a relatively young

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provincial man. She picked him up many years ago in Moscow, when he was a junior theater student without any permanent residence. She is a woman of means, supports Peter materially, and enjoys the privileges of those belonging to the high milieu of Muscovites. Now she is unhealthy and barely able to move, but despite the heavy burden of her age and ailments, her mind is remarkably lucid and vigorous, resolute, authoritative, and courageous. Peter is cut from a different mold: he is weak-willed, emotional, even sentimental, altruistic, frail, and fidgety. His life is filled with instances of self-sacrifice on behalf of his fellow men. Unemployed and a “might-havebeen” professionally, he lives with Anna Borisovna, who serves as his family. The figure of Peter is of a kind of Christ adapted to late-twentieth century Moscow. In the union of Anna Borisovna and Peter, the former is the leader, while the edgy Peter readily submits to her. The novel, though resembling a fairy tale, is nevertheless presented by the author as realistic. Beneath the externalities of foolish arguments between the partners, Rubina draws a picture of a hidden ideal romantic love. The world is not so bad after all, she says, and at times its superficial ills are a mask for authentic goodness, love, and self-sacrifice. Anna Borisovna and Peter behave like spouses; bound by incomprehensible spiritual and emotional ties, they love each other tenderly and are inseparable. Their relationship is a puzzle to their friends: might it be that Peter lives with her in hopes of receiving a permanent residence registration, allowing him to stay in her Moscow apartment after her death? Is their connection purely spiritual? Is Peter afflicted with a sort of inferiority complex, which makes him love old women? They remember that in his provincial home-town he was also attached to an elderly woman librarian. In the author’s opinion, neither sex, nor the woman’s charms, nor the man’s domination, are essential components of a great love between a man and a woman. The only thing required for a deep emotional relation is the ability of the two to have such feelings for each other; extraneous physical or material circumstances are unimportant. A man is attracted to a woman by her strength of character, her zest for life, and by her wisdom and cleverness, and not by things unrelated to the spiritual constitution of the two individuals. Anna Borisovna describes her feelings for him: “‘Yes, I’m attached to this lanky fellow’” (482).7 The author says of her, “Peter was the last affection, the most stupid one in her life, the sense, the pain . . . of her last years” (520). In the end, Anna Borisovna dies of old age. At the moment of her death, Peter groaned, rushed to her, fell heavily with his forehead into her cramped arms and spoke hastily beneath his breath in a frenetic whisper, sincerely believing that she could hear him. He complained, he cried that life would be

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impossible without her, that he was ready to give to her all his worthless years. (524–525).

For him, losing Anna Borisovna was tantamount to losing his entire world; although he would outlive her physically, her death ruined his soul. Another couple, Nina and Matvey, serve as an antithesis to Anna Borisovna and Peter. Nina is young and charming, but the spiritual bonds with her husband are not as strong as those between Anna Borisovna and Peter. She envies Anna Borisovna for Peter’s devotion to her. But while Anna Borisovna was able to recognize Peter’s qualities because of her own intelligence, Nina could not do so, because she was shortsighted. Peter is the object of the dreams of all the women in the novel: the elderly woman librarian from his home-town; Katya, whom Peter married fictitiously in order to provide her with a cover for a pregnancy out of wedlock; Anna Borisovna herself; and Nina, Matvey’s wife. What “spell” was cast which attracted such intelligent, worthy women, both young and aged, to a weak misfit like Peter? Most probably, it was precisely those qualities. Women are attracted to weak men, who serve as an outlet for their frustrated maternal feeling, and such men allow themselves to be governed by women like a small child. Such “real” love can only exist when the man is weak, infantile, and dependent. But might not such love be regarded as coercion? And what will happen if the infantile misfit matures, even belatedly, into an adult man? Is real love possible between a man and a woman not seeking to dominate one another? In Rubina’s opinion, “the balance of forces” between man and woman is established individually, depending on the personality of each one. But are all these “balances of forces” really necessary in love? Peter suffers from an Oedipal complex, as a result of which he constantly connects himself to mature women. In addition, he is masochistic, leading him to acts of self-sacrifice such as marriage to Katya, or causing himself harm for no reason, such as foregoing his permit for permanent residence in Moscow by virtue of his marriage to Katya, and also by virtue of his living in Anna Borisovna’s apartment until her death.8 Only a man who suffers from a combination of Oedipal complex and masochism would not feel depressed by such a relationship with a strong and dominant woman. The personality of such a man is insufficiently developed, so that he fails to see himself as a separate personality from his beloved, who fulfills the maternal function for him. Likewise, as the male ego of such a man is not developed, he does not feel humiliation in the face of his unrealized masculinity. Together with this, due to his masochistic tendency he persists in this state and foregoes any attempts to develop as an autonomous personality and to realize his masculinity.

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In the case of Anna Borisovna and Peter, the former functions as the man, while Peter acts as the woman. Anna Borisovna, a powerful woman, imposes herself upon Peter and becomes not only an integral part of his personality but replaces his personality. True, she loves him with a genuine love, if only because she “adopted” him after her estrangement from her biological daughter, who died in the end. Nevertheless, her love does not prevent her from behaving towards Peter in a manipulative way. For example, they constantly argue, engaging in endless squabbles, after which Peter frequently needs to go away to his friends for a couple of days. But these quarrels play a constructive function in their relationship, as they prove to him, when he is by himself, that he is unable to survive without her. He is always the one to seek out Anna Borisovna, if only with the excuse that she is an old woman and he ought to be interested in her welfare. As a weak and overly emotional character, he is the one to make the first step towards reconciliation with her. She allows him to deliberate, to torture himself, to court her over and over again, after he has learned on his flesh—like a small child—that he is unable to live without her. As against this, Anna Borisovna does not bother to ascertain whether he has anywhere to sleep after he has fled in the wake of the dispute between them. She educates him in practical terms, a harsh and cruel education, with the knowledge that this will connect him to her even more. Peter is not an integral part of Anna Borisovna’s image of herself, but an external object for her emotional manipulations; she practices on him the power of her nerves. His repeated courting of her after every quarrel strengthens her own sense of security, providing her with satisfaction from the feeling of dominance over him. His presence in her life makes it easier for her to deal with everyday difficulties and improves her spirits, but unlike him, his hypothetical departure would not destroy her, but would arouse her to seek out new and ever more sophisticated manipulations; or else would encourage her to seek another object for emotional investment.

MEDEA AND HER CHILDREN BY LYUDMILA ULITSKAYA: CHERCHER L’HOMME Lyudmila Evgenyevna Ulitskaya, prose author and cinema script writer, was born in 1943 in the town of Davlekanovo in Bashkiria. She graduated from the Moscow State University; later she served as a literary reviewer at the Jewish Theater. In 1996 her novel Medea and Her Children was published in the Novy Mir magazine, making her a nominee for the Booker Prize in 1997. Medea and Her Children tells the saga of a Greek immigrant family, named Sinopoli, living in the Crimea. Destiny divided the women members

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of this family into two groups—those who had numerous children, and those who were childless. The novel follows the lives of the women of the family, for whom barrenness—or, alternatively, child-bearing—was the most significant factor in their sense of happiness. The story is told from the viewpoint of Medea Sinopoli-Mendes, an elderly and childless widow, who maintains an open and hospitable household for all her dozens of nephews and nieces, their children and grandchildren. Her childlessness leaves a mark upon every aspect of her life and affects her worldview, beginning with her belief in a kind of global cosmic harmony which reigns in the world, and ending with the special attention that she devotes to her young relatives. Her younger and beloved sister Sandra, for whom Medea served as a mother following the death of both their parents, herself suffered many disasters—as did her daughters, granddaughters, and great-grandchildren. But in the end the explanation of this cruel fate becomes clear to her: Sandra had secretly conducted an affair with Medea’s husband, became pregnant by him, and thus in Medea’s eyes symbolically stole her children and made her barren. For this reason Sandra’s offspring were punished and their memory eradicated, as a kind of revenge for Medea. Thus, in the final analysis, Medea’s basic belief in the harmony of the cosmos, and the moral order in the world, was vindicated.9 Why is the protagonist Medea, the lonely and childless widow, given such a name? Her name, coupled with the allusion to her children, recalls Medea of the ancient Greek myth, who killed her children in ruthless revenge against her faithless husband, the king’s son Jason. In this novel it is fate itself that wreaks Medea’s revenge upon her “children”—namely, her younger sister and the latter’s offspring – because she had stolen her children and husband. Described as a mythological forebear of a tribe, Medea is eternal and mighty, and in this sense even outshines her namesake in Greek mythology, who is torn by human passions. She proudly maintains her position as the matriarch, the head of her kinsfolk and clan. But Sandra’s approach to life is opposite to that of Medea. Sandra, whom Medea took to her heart without reservation, giving her the best she had, comes to play the role of her adversary. Sandra is an egotistic, mediocre person, undeserving of the attention she got from her sister, not to mention her ungratefulness to her. Following the Second World War, as a widow with two children, Sandra returned to Medea, who lived in a village with her successful husband, Samuel Mendes. Theirs was a strong and happy love that came late in life, and she felt content at his side. While living with Medea, who gave her refuge, the young and attractive Sandra begins an affair with Medea’s husband, bearing him her daughter Nika, to whom she would later pass on her exploitative attitude to life.

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An affair between Medea’s husband, who had worshipped his wife throughout the years of their marriage, and her sister Sandra, whom she thought she knew down to her smallest vein, seemed impossible. Sandra did not even notice that she had committed a perfidious disloyalty to her closest relative. Medea felt that an interdiction of some higher order had been violated; the harmony of her outlook was shattered. She asked herself—is the world really chaotic? Existential harmony shall be restored later when the heroes will be rewarded according to their deeds. This treachery, whose anguish took Medea many years to outlive, upset her entire worldview. She firmly believed that all that happens in life must fit together into an inevitable, ultimate pattern of global harmony. Eventually, over the course of many years, such a pattern gradually began to take shape and Sandra and her offspring received the vengeance they deserved. Sandra’s eldest son died in a car accident together with his wife, leaving an orphaned Masha; Sandra and her daughter Nika, born to Medea’s husband, took the place of her parents. Later Masha, now grown-up and married, and her fostermother Nika, fell in love with the same man, with whom each of the women conducted an affair. For conceited and light-headed Nika, this affair was just one more casual adventure. But for Masha, who sincerely loved this man, the relationship was a tortuous one. The situation deteriorated when she accidentally learned of her foster mother’s liaison with him, and the latter refused to break off the relationship for her sake. This was too much for the vulnerable state of her mind, and in a fit of depression she committed suicide. Thus, in the final analysis, the global harmony of human destiny, as embodied in the figure of Medea, is fulfilled. Through the story of Medea’s life, Ulitskaya creates a universal, existential picture of life. Medea and Her Children may be regarded as a sort of a new Bible where, against the background of modern realities, there reign the same Higher Laws as always, by which goodness is rewarded and harmony prevails. Ulitskaya creates a feminine microcosm in which the men serve as instruments to provide the needs of the women, whether pleasure, as in the case of Sandra, or everyday emotional security, as in the case of Medea. This is a kingdom conducted and dominated by women, without a place for men as personalities. The subject/object relationships between women and men are described here from the female point of view. The man is the object of jealousy between women even after his death. The memory of the man serves in the woman’s life as a means of returning, if only in her imagination, to her earlier life, when she was younger. The only crisis in the world of the women occurs when they do not succeed in dividing the man—the source of satisfaction of their needs—among them-

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selves. This crisis is repeated each generation anew: first between Medea and Sandra, and later, in the second and third generations, between Nika and Masha. Women struggle with one another over a man, his loss is justification for suicide, as in the case of Nika and Masha. Nevertheless, the women are not interested in the man’s personality or inner life, making it seem as if they are not conscious of the fact that he is a person in his own right. The man, as desired and as beloved as he may be, always remains a tool in the world of women, and their attitude towards him is on the level of “I-It.”

“THE TIME: NIGHT” BY LUDMILA PETRUSHEVSKAYA: A WOMAN FIGHTS AGAINST THE WHOLE WORLD Ludmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya is a prose writer and dramatist, who has made herself the voice of the suffering people. She was born in Moscow in 1938; in the wake of the Great Terror that reigned in Stalin’s Soviet Union, most of the members of her family were harshly persecuted and, as a little girl, she was left on her own. Half-starving, she turned from one relative to another;10 later she stayed at an orphanage near Ufa in the Urals. Her first prose writings appeared in the mid-1960s, and her plays in the mid-1970s. She lives and works in Moscow; in 1991 she won the German Pushkin Prize (Hamburg); her novel, “The Time: Night” (“Vremya noch”) was published in 1992.11 “The Time: Night” is presented as a monologue by its protagonist, Anna Adrianovna, an impoverished poetess, about herself and her family life. Anna is the mother of two grown-up children: her older son Andrey is about to finish a term in prison, while her daughter Alyona is a young divorcée with a son. 12 The novel depicts things in a tragicomic, absurd light.13 Life is hopelessly gloomy, with shadows of death lurking in every corner, and suicide seeming the most realistic way out of an unbearable existence.14 The lives of both male and female characters are dominated by constant concerns about money, or rather the lack of it. Moreover, as money appears a distant and unrealistic dream, the hunger is mostly material. The life and personal traits of the protagonist Anna Adrianovna resemble those of the poetess Anna Akhmatova.15 But this similarity only serves to accentuate the difference between the two. Their names and patronymics—Anna Andreyevna for Akhmatova and Anna Adrianovna for the novel’s protagonist—are strikingly similar. But Akhmatova’s patronymic sounds more common than that of the protagonist, thus leading the reader to expect the latter’s personality to be

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more complex and elevated than that of Akhmatova. Yet the reality turns out to be just the opposite. As was the case with Akhmatova, so too, the protagonist’s poems were hardly published. But whereas Akhmatova’s works were rejected for political reasons, adding to the poetess’s glory in the public eye, the poems of her fictional namesake were rejected because the editors were unworthy narrowminded drunkards—a fact that only served to emphasize the dark despair of her life situation. Anna Adrianovna, like Akhmatova, once had a husband, the father of her children, who later disappeared; neither woman knew what happened to them. But Akhmatova’s husband, the famous poet Nikolai Gumilev, was executed as a political enemy of the Soviets, a fact which retroactively conveyed to him a sublime and tragic aura. By contrast, the husband of Petrushevskaya’s protagonist left the family matter-of-factly, cowardly running away with another woman while leaving his wife and children to the mercy of fate. Each woman had a son who served time in prison: Akhmatova’s son, Lev Gumilev, was persecuted by Stalin for political reasons, and his image, like that of his father, remained heroic; unlike him, Anna Adrianovna’s son went to jail due to a fight between two groups of young thugs. His mother ironically referred to him as a “political prisoner,” thus accentuating the difference even more. After the liberation, each son was visited by people from the prison world, but in the case of Akhmatova the visitors were secret Soviet agents wishing to frame her son again, adding even further to his heroic image, while in that of Anna Adrianovna they were delinquent buddies approaching him with proposals for further criminal activity. Both Akhmatova and Anna Adrianovna spend sleepless nights, but the former did so because for decades she lived in tense suspense, every night expecting to be arrested by agents of the Soviet regime, while the latter was simply unable to untangle the everyday problems of her beggarly and dingy life. Thus, Akhmatova’s lengthy, heroic struggle with the political system forms the background, as the antithesis to her personal wretched life, while Anna Adrianovna’s life was filled with dirty intrigues devolving from her endless and futile attempts to avoid becoming bogged down in the mire. If one were to categorize Akhmatova’s life as a literary work, it would be close to a heroic drama or even an epic, whereas that of Anna Adrianovna would be a black-humor tragicomedy. The imitation of Akhmatova’s life comes out as a grotesque mockery.16 There is a hierarchical pattern of moral significance in the novel. We witness the ongoing emotional, social, and economic degradation of the protagonist’s daughter Alyona. Her youthful liaison with her school-mate ended in pregnancy, a hasty marriage, and birth within wedlock. Thus, both

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her relationship with the man and the birth of her eldest son belonged to the realm of emotional and social normality. Her later one-night affair with the deputy-head of the factory at which she worked ended up in her second pregnancy and the birth of her second child. Nevertheless, the child‘s father assumed responsibility and provided the rent for a miserable apartment for Alyona and his child. Alyona was thus degraded to the status of a cheap mistress bearing an illegitimate child. Her personal degradation continued even further. The owner of her dwelling returned from the Kolyma region,17 from which we may assume that the man probably had a criminal past. He forces her to participate in sexual orgies that he holds in the apartment, and thus Alyona bears her third child. If her first child was begotten with her husband out of love, and the second when she was her boss’s mistress, the third was born when she was raped by her landlord, whom she slept with merely not to be turned out into the streets with her second baby. Continuing the line of Alyona’s degradation, we may well predict that she will beget her fourth child as a street-walker for a piece of bread.18 We thus find the characters in this novel totally preoccupied with problems of survival, fruitlessly struggling in utter despair with hunger, illness, addictions, and death. The world of “The Time: Night” is mostly populated by women conducting a so-called “feminine” way of life: they have numerous affairs and beget many children. But the more such sexual and maternal episodes there are, the less we see the woman as such. For Petrushevskaya’s women, sex and maternity is primarily the result of biological urges and abject social and economic misery. It is hardly possible for a woman to both have spiritual life and to physically survive in Soviet reality. The women in this novel are devoid of any femininity: they are poor sexless creatures who, though formally free, are actually imprisoned.19 Extending Petrushevskaya’s tendency to present things in the light of the tragicomic absurd, we may conclude that the life of a Soviet woman in prison was not as hard as her life at liberty. At least women in custody worked and had their miserable daily bread assured, but the only choices for women at liberty were either to whore or to die. Anna Adrianovna waited impatiently for her son to return from prison, believing his life was harder than that of her daughter, but it turned out that she was probably wrong. Under such circumstances, men and women behave differently. Women give their children whatever they have, while men are unaccommodating. Men are always hungry for food and sex, always eager to settle their foolish scores, as does Anna’s son. Women are more practical, reasonable, and logical than wild and selfish men. The men do not constitute an integral part of the self-definition of the heroines of this novel. In their eyes, the men are objects within the cruel and absurd

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reality with which they are forced to contend. Nevertheless, it is impossible to manage without men, as the presence of a man in the life of a woman gives her a certain social status, as well as (in most cases) a source of income. But the woman’s need for a relationship to the man is not immanent, but rather derives from social arrangements. Men are unnecessary in a world of feminine survival; but only young and inexperienced women can find sincere interest in a man, such as Alyona did in her husband. Mature women honestly love only young children—as opposed to men—and cultivate them with devotion and with loyalty. Even though the woman is dependent upon a man, he is a disturbing object in her life, unless he is a child who has not yet matured.

“THE HOTEL MANAGER” BY IRINA GREKOVA— THE IRONIC HAPPINESS OF THE SOVIET WOMAN Irina Grekova was the pen-name of Yelena Sergeevna Ventsel (1907–2002) née Dolgintseva, prose writer and outspoken critic of the attitude towards women in the USSR. She was one of the few Soviet women to attain the degree of Doctor of Technology (equal to the rank of “professor” in the West). She always defined herself as a scientist; indeed, her choice of the pen name “I. Grekova” is based on a variant of igrek (Y), the mathematical symbol for the unknown. Parallel to her scientific work, she wrote novels that touched upon issues of social justice which were critical of the Soviet rulers, calling attention to such phenomena as the discriminatory attitude towards women. Her novel “The Hotel Manager,” which was screened as a prize-winning film and enjoyed popularity, is notable for its criticism of the accepted attitude towards women during the Stalin era.20 “The Hotel Manager” tells the story of Vera Butova, daughter of a farming family, who grew up in an atmosphere of hard work and abject poverty. During the flower of her youth, seeking the love she had not known in her parents’ home, she married a high-ranking Red Army officer, Aleksander Ivanovich Larichev. He was older than her, tough, authoritarian, stubborn, cruel, divorced, and the father of a child. Vera had to serve him like a servant, constantly pleasing her husband and master in every situation. She was forced to sacrifice her own personality: he forbade her to study, to work outside the home, to have children, or even to adopt his own small child after his ex-wife took ill and became unable to raise him. Under no circumstance would he allow her to have any of her own feelings and affections. 21 In the end he died suddenly, leaving his young wife without any means of supporting herself. She was forced to work as a charwoman in a hotel, where she behaved in the same manner to which she had become accustomed in her husband’s home:

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she worked with dedication and self-sacrifice. Her work earned her the recognition of the proprietors of the hotel, so much so that she was appointed its manager. She thereafter came to know another man, with whom her life was not much better, even though she served him faithfully. Still later, when she was even older, she took up with yet another man for whom she also gave her all, but with him too she found no satisfaction. Despite Vera’s harsh fate, it is presented throughout the novel in elevated, idealized, saccharinely-sweet style. The motif of Vera’s constant good luck is asserted repeatedly: she had ascended from the lowest strata of the working class, to achieve the age-long dream of all utopias—a veritable successful and happy life. Her life story is portrayed as a wondrous fairy tale of a Soviet Cinderella, celebrating the happy lot of the Soviet woman who rises from poverty and misery to the heights of financial well-being and social recognition thanks to her marriage to a high-ranking Soviet officer. Even the action is set against a honeyed background: the colorful azure sea at the outskirts of a big city in the south, with abundant fruits and vegetables in hand’s reach, nurturing and beautifying the life of its inhabitants. The human environment is described as filled with lovelocks, ample bosoms, clear flashing eyes, and frank, artless faces. The characters in the story always address each other by pet names: for example, Vera always calls her husband “Shunechksa,” believing that he loved her at first sight with a lifelong and invincible love. Everything around Vera is described as wonderful, full of endless love and affection, as some heavenly paradise on the earth—all these are depicted in excessively sweet terms. But something else comes to light as we move through the story: something earthy and rude that distracts us from this happy life history. These realistic elements are so different, bear so little resemblance to what the heroine sees, that the reader may think the author has been poking fun at him, pretending that the syrupy sweet image she presents was Vera’s real life. Might not the entire novel be a mockery? One must remember that ponderous, optimistic novels of this type were ubiquitous in Russia during the 1970s, when “The Hotel Manager” was written. Such “Verochkas” were an indispensable part of those novels, beginning with the girl’s impoverished proletarian origin and her subsequent life as wife of a Red Army officer. But one cannot avoid a sense of sham, that this cheery narration is glossing over some negative sides. There are two layers within Gregova’s prose: the wonderful external facade relating to Soviet reality, and the inner stratum, between the lines, hinting that women’s lives were destroyed by the system based on a patriarchal and even chauvinist attitude towards women. The superficial layer might be regarded as pro-Soviet, whereas the inner one was the opposite.22

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What reason do we have, after all, to think that Vera’s childhood was particularly happy? The opposite would seem to have been the case: [Her] Mother Anna was gross . . . because of her hard life. . . . She washed lace for rich ladies in the city, where she went by foot with small Vera, who also washed and ironed underwear. She helped her mother from the age of five or six, both in the house and in the kitchen-garden. The hoe was long—twice the height of Vera—but she managed somehow. Mother went to fetch water, and Vera followed her (10).23

Vera did every job, not with chagrin but with joy, despite wanting to play with other children. She did so because she loved her mother, even though her mother’s love was reserved, not for her, but for her younger sister. After her father died, Vera hoped that her mother would need her more than previously and would love her more. But such hopes were in vain: her mother soon brought in a vagrant boy and made him her foster son. Vera was frustrated, as she felt she had not enjoyed her fair share of love in her childhood. Vera married early, without ever having a go at anything in life on her own. Lieutenant-Colonel Larichev easily won Vera, she immediately resigned herself to the powerful will of a man old enough to be her father. He appeared to inexperienced Vera as unbelievably loving, caring, kind, and protective. He spoke sweet words of love, which she liked and believed. She always believed his words, which were sweet even when he was cruel to her. She became enslaved to him without even realizing it. But her very faithfulness and loyalty turned out to be superfluous, unnecessary, naïve—in a single word: stupid. Alexander was uninhibited in his egotistical desire to keep Vera down; he kept her constantly repressed. For him she was a robotic creature, meant to provide him with the comforts of home, always with a lovely affected smile on her lips. The same was true in bed, when he felt like it. Vera’s implicit obedience was an indispensable condition of what he euphemistically called “their mutual love.” His unrestricted power over her excited him. The fact of spiritual and physical domination, which caused her pain, gave him satisfaction and even joy. His sadistic experiments over her thus constituted his family happiness. She accepted this way of life as a kind of patriarchal family, because she believed these were real love and happiness, and because such relations are a deep-seated tradition in the Russian family. Her mother had no rights in the family either, and her father, though a good-natured man, would not accept that he had any obligations towards his wife and his family, believing that it was the wife’s natural duty to work without respite and feed both him and their children.

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After Larichev’s death, Vera found herself unprepared for life on her own. She was helpless and inexperienced in the ways of the world; the only thing she knew was how to serve someone slavishly. By chance, she found a job, albeit a minor, servile one, as a floor hostess at a hotel. In the years following Alexander’s death, Vera met another man, a married one. Vera believed that she had discovered a new love, and was again prepared to accept a humiliating situation and be the mistress of a man who was utterly devoted to his wife. This time, too, she interpreted her situation as a kind of great good luck that had fallen to her lot. Later, after he left her, she met another man, who also neither cared for her nor appreciated her devotion and self-sacrifice on his behalf. Could it be that Vera was too easily satisfied with whatever she had? Throughout her life she justified everything that the men did to her, and submitted passively to every bodily or emotional trauma each one of them caused her. None of them appreciated her sacrifices on their behalf, but accepted them as given. The question is whether this is meant to express the innocence of the heroine, or the irony and sarcasm of the author, in describing an exaggeratedly devoted Russian woman (“vera” in Russian means “faith”), who sacrifices her own wishes for those of others without any real reason to do so, and who in the final analysis is empty and exploited. Vera allegorically alludes to Russia, submissive and blindly faithful to whatever master comes along—Tartars, czars, communist dictators—while in the final analysis remaining impoverished and humiliated, as a state, as a cultural and religious establishment. This is a bitter satire by an author who feels the pain of Mother Russia and who anticipates a harsh future for one who, through mindless submission, has given up all she had. Grekova portrays the same life situation from two different points of view: as seen through the eyes of her protagonist, a rosy picture that coincides with the official Soviet point of view; and then, tongue in cheek, as this same reality appears to the author: What the author saw as the harshness of life, as want and disorder, as the absurdity of man’s willfulness towards Vera, was perceived by Vera herself as happiness and good luck. The reader is left to decide for himself which standpoint better fits the reality, and to what extent the story is a travesty of official literature. But the real problem was the Russian woman’s willingness to accept this situation. It was not easy for Vera: every separation from a child who appeared in her life and from whom she was forced to separate, every sacrifice of the very possibility of professional and personal development, pained her terribly. But Vera’s main job was in forcing herself to accept the authority of a man rather than to oppose to it, be it her husband or any other man whom

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she came to know after his death. She embodied the essence of the Russian woman, who accepts her own oppression, the denial of her rights, her being evaluated as an inferior human being, with dumb enthusiasm and happiness.24 Vera symbolizes the traditionally feminine Russia, dominated and silently oppressed by different tyrants, entering and leaving her life one after another.25 Grekova describes the foolishly sentimental and melting submission with which a woman is prepared to accept such humiliating callous masculine domination over her. The saccharine, pathetic, and patronizing attitude to woman is presented here with large doses of malicious irony, which seems mocking and sarcastic. In this work, we see for the first time a woman who relates to the man as her alter ego, as a personality from whom she attempts to derive self-worth. Vera’s attitude towards her husband resembles the relationship of a man to his wife. But whereas the husband’s relationship to his wife as portrayed in works by male authors is open to question—Does the woman respect him or despise him?—in works by female authors the woman’s relationship to the man is governed by the question, “Does he provide her with benefit, or does he harm her?” These benefits are not necessarily material, but may include the possibility of realizing herself as a mother, as a professional woman, psychological peace, and other emotional needs. Vera feels first of all exploited, and only thereafter humiliated. Ambitions in the realm of personal and male gender honor, so characteristic of a man, are alien to women.

SUMMARY The above-presented works reflect a range of possibilities by which female authors perceive their heroines. One finds among the heroines an evaluation of man as inferior: his intellectual talents, his personality, his ability to make decisions and to find solutions. There are even cases in which the heroine displays an attitude of disdain and derision towards the man, given expression in the heroine’s maternal, solicitous, and forgiving attitude towards the man. But contempt and scorn are not without ambivalence: they go with an admiration of the man’s power and a fear of losing him. Even though the heroine often despises the man, she nevertheless hopes that he will do those things which she is incapable of doing—albeit these hopes are mostly severely disappointed. At times the man’s strength is negatively displayed to the heroine in the form of irrational and damaging behavior bearing catastrophic consequences for them both. Whereas women behave in a manner consistent with their own and members of their family long-term benefit, men seek the satisfaction of their spontaneous, momentary impulses, so that

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subsequently they and those around them are forced to confront the miserable results of such immediate satisfaction. There are cases in which, in the eyes of the heroines, the men serve as external objects, as “the other,” presented in the works with a sense of dissociation and ridicule. How does a woman react in light of the man’s expectation that she will pay respect to him? How does a woman relate to the man’s fear of her? She seems to ignore it, and it is doubtful as to whether she is even aware of it. At times she even shows contempt for the man, playing with him, humiliating him, and openly presenting him as inferior to herself— thereby stimulating his anger and his desire for vengeance. Such expressions may come together with her desire to hold him close to her and her fear of losing him. The male authors and their heroes experience anxiety and alienation towards women, and do not know how to deal with a couple-relationship with a woman. They would prefer to leave her altogether, certainly after they are sexually satisfied. The man experiences feelings of shame and guilt following sexual relations, which he passes on to the woman. In order to prove his “righteousness” and to cleanse himself, he tries to “punish her” because he desired her. His behavior is intended to prove first and foremost to himself, that because of her, in a moment of lust, he became a lowly animal and sacrificed his human dignity. His alienation and cruelty towards her after satisfying his lust corresponds to his degree of shame and his sense of contamination. Thus, the man both gets his pleasure and gets to feel self-righteous as well. By contrast, the female authors and their heroines are afraid neither of confrontation with men nor with their own feelings following the sexual act. Women do not fear relationships with men and do not seek to flee from them. In these works by women, the woman’s behavior with the man revolves around the question of who will subdue and exploit whom. In this struggle between the sexes there are two basic possibilities: either the woman overcomes the man, in which case she exploits him, holds him in disdain, and does not let him go; or else the woman surrenders to the man, in which case the author considers her a fool. NOTES 1. See Balancing Acts: Contemporary Stories by Russian Women, ed. Helena Goscilo (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1989): “Introduction,” xiiixxvii, where she provides an enlightening and instructive introduction to contemporary Russian writings by women authors. Cf. Barbara Heldt, “Gynoglasnost: Writing the Feminine,” in Perestroika and Soviet Women, ed. Mary Buckley (New York: Cambridge UP, 1992), 160–175; cf. Elaine Showalter, “Toward a Feminist Poetics,” in

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Women Writing and Writing about Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 35 ff.; Rosalind Marsh, “The Birth, Death and Rebirth of Feminist Writing in Russia,” in Textual Liberation: European Feminist Writing in the Twentieth Century, ed. Helena Forsas-Scott (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 130–163. See also Ellen Moers, Literary Women (London: The Women’s Press, 1976); Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the NineteenthCentury Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979; repr. 1984). 2. On the role of women in Soviet society, see Gail Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 3. Monika Katz, “The Other Woman: Character Portrayal and the Narrative Voice in the Short Stories of Ludmila Petrushevskaya,” in Women and Russian Culture. Projections and Self-Perceptions, ed. Rosalind Marsh (Oxford-New York: Berghahn Books, 1998), 188–189, writes that the “superfluous man” of nineteenth century literature was in reality the “superfluous male,” whose place in society was balanced by the strong women, together making a dyad. From the nineteenth century on and throughout the Soviet period, a strong feminine protagonist at the head of the family was perceived as a positive example and a proper role. 4. Shcherbakova focuses on human interaction, man-woman relations, family dynamics, generational conflicts, problems of self-fulfillment, and the conflicting claims of job and home—thus notes Helena Goscilo, Dehexing Sex: Russian Womanhood during and after Glasnost (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 17, 29. 5. Thus the situation is presented from the women’s point of view. See Patrocinio P. Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading,” in Speaking of Gender, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 17–44. Cf. Adele Barker, “Are Women Writing ‘Women’s Writing’?” and “Women without Men in the Writings of Contemporary Soviet Women Writers,” in Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Daniel Rancour-Laferrière (Linguistic and Literary Studies in Eastern Europe. 31; Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamin, 1989), 431–449. 6. The relations between Fedorov and his second wife symbolize civilization, on the one hand, and nature, on the other; see Sherry Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature to Culture?” in Woman, Culture and Society, ed. Michelle Rosaldo, Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1974), 67–87. See also what Jane T. Costlow writes in “‘Oh-là-là’ and ‘No-no-no’: Odintzova as a Woman Alone in ‘Fathers and Children,’” in A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature, ed. Sonia Stephan Hoisington (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 1995), 31: “There is a long tradition in Western culture of depicting female sexual energy as inherently dangerous, and Russian literature generally follows that tradition. . . . Maternity is traditionally the only ‘safe’ form of female sexuality, an institution and practice that has confined women and directed their erotic energies toward nurturance.” 7. Dina Rubina, “On Upper Maslovka,” in Close-Up in Hero’s Eyes (Ekaterinburg: U-Factoria Publishers, 2002), 339–537, all quotations are from this edition. The translations of the quotations are by Marian Schwartz.

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8. According to Soviet law, if a tenant dies, the other remaining tenants continues to live in the same apartment. 9. On the other hand, on frightening and terrifying motherhood, see Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (New York: Penguin Books Ltd., 1974), 35–41. 10. All of whom were afraid to let her stay at their home, as she was a child of persecuted parents. 11. See Melissa T. Smith and Nyusua Milman, “Ludmila Petrushevskaya,” in Russian Women Writers, ed. Christine D. Tomei (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999), 2:1421–1444. 12. On tense and difficult mother-daughter relations as feminizing history, see Helena Goscilo, “Perestroika and Post-Soviet Prose: From Dazzle to Dispersal,” in A History of Women’s Writing in Russia, ed. Adele M. Barker and Jehanne M. Gheither (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002), 297–312, esp. 304. 13. Both the style of the novel and the author’s choice of muddled, neurotic, and hysterical characters are probably influenced by Dostoevsky’s works. Elizabeth Beaujour also notes the possible influence of Dostoevsky and Chekhov on I. Grekova; see Russian Women Writers, ed. Tomei, 2:1332. On Chekhov’s and Trifonov’s influence on her, cf. Monika Katz, “The Other Woman: Character Portrayal and the Narrative Voice in the Short Stories of Ludmila Petrushevskaya,” in Women and Russian Culture, 190. Chekhov’s influence on Petrushevskaya was also analyzed by Rosa Glinterschik, Contemporary Post-Modernist Russian Writers (Russian; Kaunas, 2000), 98 ff. There are possible foreign influences on Grekova’s work as well; see Susan Hardy Aiken, “Stages of Dissent: Olsen, Grekova and the Politics of Creativity,” in Dialogues/Dialogi: Literary and Cultural Exchanges Between (ex)Soviet and American Women, ed. Susan Hardy Aiken et al. (Durham, S.C.: Duke UP, 1994), 120–140. On style and thematic complexity in “The Time: Night,” see Helena Goscilo, “Perestroika and Post-Soviet prose: From Dazzle to Dispersal,” in History of Women’s Writing in Russia, ed. Barker, 302 ff. 14. Monika Katz describes dreams, night, and death as escapes from the cruel reality; see in Women and Russian Culture, 190. 15. It should be noted that Anna Akhmatova, like Petrushevskaya herself, was also influenced by Dostoevsky’s works; see Mikhail Kralin, The Poetic Word that Overcame Death (Russian; Tomsk: Vodolei Publishers, 2000), 11 ff., 33–34; Sonia Ketchian, The Poetry of Anna Akhmatova: A Conquest of Time and Space, trans. F. D. Reeve (Slavistische Beitraege, 196; Munich, 1986), 148. 16. There are also other depictions by Petrushevskaya, based upon irony and opposite to the regular interpretations of the features. 17. The Kolyma region in northeastern Siberia was the site of a large complex of forced-labor camps for criminals. “The man who returned from Kolyma” became a known concept used to refer to a dangerous prisoner who was released. 18. See Helena Goscilo’s comment that “Alyona’s life recalls Dostoevsky’s ‘accidental families’ on the edge of existence,” in her article, “Mother as Mothra: Totalizing Narrative and Nature in Petrushevskaya,” in A Plot of Her Own, 102–113, esp. 107.

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19. Helena Goscilo, Dehexing, 18 ff.: “Although Petrushevskaya views children, pregnant women, the sick and the old as instantiations of the most vulnerable moments in human life, and tends to favor female narrators and protagonists, her writing is relatively free of gendered binarism. It shows both sexes inflicting and experiencing pain in an unbroken chain of mutual abuse.” On gendered binarism, see Gillian Beer, “Representing Women: Re-presenting the Past,” in The Feminist Reader, ed. Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 63–80. 20. See Elizabeth Beaujour, “I. Grekova,” in Russian Women Writers, ed. Tomei, 2: 1329–1356. 21. Regarding the suppression of feminine desires and basic emotional and physical needs, see Helena Goscilo, “Women’s Space and Women’s Place in Contemporary Russian Fiction,” in Gender and Russian Literature: New Perspectives, ed. Rosalind Marsh (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 326–347, esp. 326–336, and at 334: “Despite official Soviet glorification of motherhood, male-dominant society and literature find it expedient to ignore the actual process of giving birth.” It appears that Larichev’s decision in regard to Vera’s abortion is part of the general mood of suppression of feminine physical desires, both in Russian and Soviet literature. 22. As stated by Adele M. Barker, “The fact that so much of Stalinist literature was prescriptive, making it uncommonly difficult to produce a sort of double-voiced text . . . has also made us reluctant to explore beneath the surface of many postStalinist literary texts where one finds a great dialogue between the author and the social system. Thus, for example, many of the literary works written by I. Grekova . . . suggest the possibilities of reading post-Stalinist works palimpsestically, partially because Grekova . . . was attempting to write simultaneously within and outside the system.” In her paper, “Reading the Text – Rereading Ourselves,” in Women and Russian Culture, 42–-59, esp. 45. 23. Irina Grekova, “The Hotel Manager,” in her The Ship of Widows, Selected Works [Russian]. (Moscow: Text, 1998), 7–192; all quotations from this edition. 24. On the paradoxical understanding of the sacrificial, see Ivan Esaulov “Sacrifice and Beneficence” (Zhertva i zhertvennost) in Socialist Realist Canon [Russian], ed. Hans Günter, and Evgeny Dobrenko, (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii Proekt, 2000), 797–802. 25. Judith Vowles, “The ‘Feminization’ of Russian Literature: Women, Language, and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” in Women Writers in Russian Literature, ed. Toby W. Clyman and Diana Greene (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), 35–60.

Conclusion: Sex as an Animal Act Beyond Comprehension

A person finds it difficult to understand the reason for the physiological processes that befall him and his body during the course of his life. He cannot understand the mystery of his birth or of his death. He likewise cannot understand the secret of his digestive processes: how does the food which he consumes turn into waste matter? A person tries to be a pure, lofty, ethical, rational being—yet his body nevertheless creates filthy excrement which elicits disgust. The process of producing urine and excrement contaminates and humiliates man, seeming to manifest how vain and meaningless are his attempts to rise beyond the level of an animal. It reminds man that he is an animal, a mortal being; it returns him to the soil. Man’s attitude towards sexual activity is reminiscent of that towards the activity of the digestive system. Sexual activity likewise lowers a human being and brings to naught his efforts to be spiritual and higher than the level of an animal. In retrospect, it becomes clear during the course of sexual relations that man and woman are like two gross and filthy animals, masses of flesh emanating a bad odor. Sex is opposed to spirituality, to culture, to everything that is human. In this context, it is worth mentioning an old Russian joke about a child who came into his parents’ bedroom while they were having sex. Observing them in disgust and shock, he says, “And these people tell me I shouldn’t pick my nose!” 153

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The sense of guilt and shame men feel following the sexual act derives from its being perceived as reducing a decent man to the state of a beast. Moreover, the baser and more consummate the degradation, the greater the pleasure it affords, and the more excruciating the subsequent sense of shame and guilt. But man’s attitude towards life and death is different than that towards the functioning of the digestive system or towards sexual activity. Man knows that he does not understand the mystery of life and death, but thinks that he understands that of the digestive system or of sex. Society attempts to deal with the problem of the digestive system and sex by instituting patterns of ethics, culture, and religion, but it is clear that these are unable to resolve the problems of man’s animalistic nature. Man’s transformation into an animal through sexual activity is beyond his understanding or control, thereby concretizing the fact that his life, like his death, is beyond his control. To this innate humiliation of the couple deriving from the nature of the sexual act per se, there must be added an additional humiliation of the man: in the Western tradition, the man controls his woman at home, and dominates her in the sexual act. This is not the case in Russian literature, where the woman is described as more powerful, assertive, and charismatic than the man, thereby making the sexual act between them, not a manifestation of his control of her, but rather of her control over him. This situation leads to a feeling of inferiority on his part and to his sensation of being humiliated by her. In Russian literature, the woman chooses the man, seducing him by means of emotional and sensual manipulations that mislead him. She guides his sexual drive according to her own will and desire, while he submits to her. The functions of the sexes are thus exchanged in Russian literature: the woman becomes the man and the man becomes a bad attempt at being a woman. He is castrated by the woman and cannot continue to live this way, but feels he must die. Alternatively, he must murder her, thereby enjoying what is from his viewpoint a form of dominating sex, in which he is the man. There is likewise a variety of other solutions by which he may find release from humiliation, such as refraining altogether from sex, taking vengeance on other women, harming himself, and so forth. Society does not allow the man to take revenge upon the woman who brought about his humiliation, but forces him to behave towards her in accordance with its laws. This causes the man to absorb the humiliation and to find his own value as a man reduced in his own eyes; on the other hand, the harsh limitations imposed by society free the man from needing to take vengeance upon the woman. In such a case, the man may enjoy the benefit of the doubt and tell himself that he failed to take revenge upon the woman due to restrictions imposed by society, rather than due to his personal weakness.

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The man thus ends up being castrated by omnipotent society, rather than by his charming little woman: a situation which, in the final analysis, is more dignified. In any event, the man can only achieve full satisfaction if he frees himself of the feelings of humiliation, guilt, and self-disgust that follow in the wake of his receiving physical sexual satisfaction—and release from these feelings is only possible if he erases his memory of sexual relations and cleans his conscience of them. This is done by eliminating the primary cause and witness to his sexual activity—the woman: by punishing her or by transferring his feelings of humiliation, guilt, and self-disgust by taking vengeance on her. The woman’s attitude towards sexual relations is different. Women either do not consider themselves degraded through the sexual act, or are more easily reconciled with it than are men. They are able to integrate high self-esteem with occasional degradation to a bestial state in sex, and can adopt an attitude of resignation and acceptance of such degradation. Unlike them, man has high transcendent ambitions, and such casual degradation in sex is perceived as a threat to his spiritual integrity. Man cannot reconcile these two poles nor can he accept their simultaneous presence within himself. Hence he must decide between his presumably lofty spiritual nature and the other, bestial, disgraceful and guilt-provoking nature within himself, in which the woman is accomplice. Man identifies himself with his spiritual self and rejects his bestial self. He tends to blame his degradation on the woman who, in his judgment, has brought his values to naught and robbed him of self-control. The woman thus becomes responsible for his degradation. She is worthy of the severest punishment, which she inevitably receives from the man with whom she entered into the sexual act.

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Index

Castration motif, 115–128; as defiance, 116–119; through consumer goods, 122–127. Chekhov, Anton, 15; “Drama” 5, 35–37; “The Grasshopper” 5, 72–73. Cherny, Sasha, 16, 25n45 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 14, 23n23; “What is to be Done?” 13 Classes, social, 13

Adultery. See Infidelity. Akhmatova, Anna, 16, 17, 24, 39, 141–143 Andersen, Hans Christian: “The Wild Swans” 92–93 Andreyev, Leonid, 16, 25n44 Apartments-as subject of intrigue 46– 48, 132–135 Arbuzov, Aleksey, 18, 25n57; “Tanya” 18 Babel, Isaak, 18, 25n53; “The Red Cavalry” 18 Belozerskaya, Nadezhda, 14, 24n27 Bely, Andrey, 16, 25n43; “Peterburg” 16 Bisexuality, 70 Blok, Aleksandr, 16, 24n38 Brothers, multiple; see Multiple brothers Bulgakov, Mikhail, “The White Guard” 5, 6, 88–94 Bunin, Ivan, 16, 25n47

Dante, Alighieri, 91 Degradation, sexual, 32 f. Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 14, 24n33, 91; Crime and Punishment 5, 14–15, 27–32; The Idiot 15; “Netochka Nezvanovna” 14. Dovlatov, Sergey, 19, 26n62; “The Zone” 6, 116–119 Emotional life (“l’education sentimentale”), 55 Enlightenment, 13

167

168

Index

Eunuch. See Castration “Exchange” of sex between man and woman, 37, 57, 65 Fadeyev, Aleksander, 18; Young Guard, 18 Family: “small” and “big”,19; saga, 138–141. Feminine Perspective, 7 Feminism, 20 Filosofova, Anna, 14, 24n26 Flaubert, Gustav: Madame Bovary, 53– 58; Comparison to Anna Karenina, 53–58. Folktales, 92–94 Gender studies, 5 Gippius, Zinaida, 16, 17, 24n41 Gladkov, Fyodor, 19, 26n59 “Cement” 19 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 91 Gogol, Nikolai, 12, 23n4, 91; Dead Souls 23n14; Taras Bulba, 12; Viy, or Spirit of Evil, 12. Goncharov, Ivan, 14, 24n35; The Precipice, 14 Gorky, Aleksey Maksimovich, 13, 16, 23n22; Mother, 18 Grekova, Irina, “The Hotel Manager” 8, 131, 144–148 Grossman, Vasily: Life and Fate 6, 104–108 Gumilyov, Nikolay, 17, 25n51

Kuprin, Aleksander, 16, 24n37; “The Duel”, 5, 16, 65–72 The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, 11 Lermontov, Mikhail, 14 Leskov, Nikolai: “Battle–Axe” 6, 87–88; “Lady Macbeth of Mtzesk District” 5, 58–60. Love, 11, 16, 55, 69, 135 Man: addiction to woman, 68–69; boredom with marriage, 54; castration, 3, 27, 37, 63, 103, 119, 122; degradation by women, 32; dependence upon woman, 5; desire for revenge, 3–4, 7; dignity, 28f., 37; “dreamer” type, 44–45, 66–68; fear of women, 86; feminine, 68; health problems, 48; humiliation, 3, 7, 27, 56–57, 60, 154; ineffectual dreamer, 44–45, 70; infantile, 86, 133–134; jealousy, 71; object, 131–148; raped by woman, 3, 36, 46–48, 63, 119; repression of ego, 7; spiritual being, 2–3; as weak, 14–15, 45, 48, 84, 133, 136, 148. Marinina, Aleksandra, 21, 26n74 Masculine women, 28–29 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 16, 25n48 Misogyny Motif, 1–4 Multiple brothers-folklore motif, 91–93 Murder, between man and woman, 27–38

Hoffman, August Heinrich, 91 Ideology as substitute for sex, 99–108 Incestuous element, see Oedipal Complex Individuality, 105–108 Infidelity, 5, 53–74 Katherine II, Empress, 11, 22n6–8 Khvoshchinskaya–Zayonchkovskaya, Nadezhda, 14, 24n31

Nabokov, Vladimir, 16, 25n49; Lolita 17 Nagibin, Yuri: “My Golden Mother–in– Law” 5, 6, 7, 119–122 Narbikova, Valeria, 21, 26n70 Nazis, 100–101 Nekrasov, Nikolai, 14, 23n19; “RedNosed Frost” 13 “New Amazons”, 20; The Forgiving, 20 Nihilism, 15

Index

Odoyevsky, Vladimir, 12, 22n10; Princess Mimi, 12; Princess Zizi, 12. Oedipal Complex, 30, 48, 67, 86, 137 Osipovich-Novodvorsky, Andrey, 14, 24n36; “A Sketch of Life”, 14 Ostrovsky, Aleksander, 12, 23n15; The Storm, 12; Without a Dowry, 12–13. Pavlenko, Pyotr, 19, 26n60; The Happiness, 19 Perestroika, 20 Petlura gang, 88–89 Petrushevskaya, Ludmila, 21, 26n75; Our Crowd, 21; “Three Girls in the Blue”, 21; “The Time: Night”, 7, 21, 131, 141–144. Platonov, Andrey, 18, 25n55; Chevengur, 18 Polovsty, 11, 22n3 Polyakov, Yuri 20, 26n69; “Paris Love of Kostya; Gumankov,” 6, 7, 122–127 Popov, Evgenii, 20, 26n68 Prostitution, 30–31 Pushkin, Aleksander, 14, 23n13, 54; Evgenii Onegin, 12 Rasputin, Valentin: “Farewell to Matyora”, 6, 108–110 Revolution, Russian, 16, 18 Romanticism in Europe, 11 Romanticism, Russian, 11–12, 23n12 Rubina, Dina: “On Upper Maslovka”, 7, 131, 135–138 Russian Civil War, 88, 89 Sadur, Nina, 21, 26n72 Saltykov–Shchedrin, Mikhail, 14, 24n32 Seduction by woman, 41–49 Self–sacrifice, feminine, 29 f. Sex: ambivalent feelings around, 4; as animal act, 2, 103, 153–155; as revenge on Soviet system, 7, 119– 122, 127–128; causing humiliation/

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shame/guilt 1, 7, 27–28, 33, 63, 149; “free” sex, 29, 121; friendship as substitute for, 18; low sex drive, 45; lust, 32–33, 60; necrophilia, 122; rape of man by woman, 36, 46; f.; revenge for, 4; shame, 3; surrogate for relations, 99–111; symbolic, 43; woman’s reaction to, 4. Shalamov, Varlam, 20, 26n65 Shcherbakova, Galina: “The Year of Tangerines” 7, 131, 132–135 “Silver Age”, 16, 20 Simonov, Konstantin, 18, 26n58; “The Common Tale”, 18 Sleptsov, Vasily, 23n20; “Foster–Girl”, 13 Social Realism, 16, 18 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 19, 26n61 Soviet Literature, post–war, 6, 99–111 Soviet Union, 16–17, 99–108: Opposition to/Criticism/Ridicule, 107–108, 115, 124 Stalin, Josef, 18 Stasova, Nadezhda, 14, 24n25 Suicide, 12, 58 “Superficial man”, 14, 94 Teffi, Nadezhda, 17, 25n52 Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich, 15, 24n34; Anna Karenina, 5, 15, 53–58; Comparison to Madame Bovary 53–58; “The Devil”, 5, 15, 32–35, 63; Father Sergius, 5, 15, 41–44; Resurrection, 15; War and Peace, 15. Tolstoya, Tatiana, 21, 26n73 Trifonov, Yuri: “The Exchange”, 5, 46–48 Trubnikova, Maria, 14, 23n24 Tsvetayeva, Marina, 16, 17, 24n40 Turgenev, Ivan S., 14, 16, 23n16, 83–87; “Fathers and Sons”, 85–87; Faust, 13, 23n17; “A Nest of Gentlefolk”, 61; “On the Eve”, 61, 84–85; “Rudin”, 6, 61, 83–84;

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Index

“The Torrents of Spring”, 5, 61–65; “Turgenev” maidens, 6, 83–85. Ukrainka, Lesia, 14, 24n30 Ulitskaya, Ludmila, Medea and Her Children, 131, 138–141 Vaneyeva, Larisa, 21, 26n71 “Vasilisa the Beautiful”, 92 Vasilyev, Boris: “The Dawns Here are Quiet. . . .”, 6, 99–103 Voinovich, Vladimir, 20, 26n66 Vovchok, Marko, 14, 24n29 Woman: aggressive, 3, 5, 6, 63; animallike, 3; deified, 16; domination over men, 34; emotional & psychological abuse, 5; fallen being, 12, 15; “good” and “bad” women, 28–31; “ideal” woman, 62, 103; in Communist society, 18; incarnation of evil, 15, 33 ff., 42–44, 48–49, 64–65, 71; in harmony with self, 2; in Russian Literature–Overview, 5, 11–21; intelligence or non–intelligence,

3, 85; involvement in public life, 13–14; “kept women”, 12; masculine qualities, 12; maternal function/ matriarch, 137–138, 139–141; obsession, 55; peasant women, 13, 108–110; power over man, 62–65; self-sacrificing, 18; as sex tools/ slaves, 117–119, 119–122; sexual predator, 41–49; spiritual threat to man, 35; as strong, 6, 83–95, 132– 135, 137, 154; symbol for Soviet regime, 127–128; traditional Russian, 91; violence towards, 43–44; Women writers, 12, 14, 16, 20–21, 131–148 Women’s movement in Russia, 16, 25n46 Women’s Study Group, Petersburg, 14 World War I, 88 World War II, 6, 19, 99–108, 110 Yaroslavna, 11 Yerofeyev, Venedict, 20, 26n67 Zoschenko, Mikhail: “The People”, 5, 44–45

About the Author

Prof. Rina Lapidus was born in 1959 in Moscow, in the former Soviet Union. She received her B.A., MA., and Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in the Departments of Hebrew Literature and Comparative Literature, completing her doctorate in 1986. Since then she has taught at various colleges and universities in Israel, including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. For the past twenty years she has been a member of the faculty of Bar-Ilan University in RamatGan. Lapidus has published books and numerous papers concerning various literatures, ranging from classical Rabbinic literature to 19th and 20th century Hebrew literature, Yiddish literature, and 19th and 20th century Russian literature. Her book, Between Snow and Desert Heat: Russian Influences on Hebrew Literature, has been published in English, as well as in both Russian and Hebrew.

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