Russian literature. A short introduction

half of the poem opposes to these conventional verbs and figures of speech a hyperbolic evocation of unutterable love, emotionally inarticulate, yet also the gift of a (masculine) Deity. The use of religious language in the final line is far from incidental, since this language stands both for sincerity and for ‘Russianness’ in the later Pushkin (as, for example, in one of his last poems, ‘Desert fathers and immaculate women’ (1836)). The effect is that ‘masculine’ sincerity displaces what can be seen, once the poem’s narrative is complete, as charming, ‘feminine’ artifice. The ‘feminine’ vocabulary of affect becomes the starting point rather than the end of inspiration. Its particularity is opposed to the universality of the ‘masculine’ religious text. Evoking feminine language, Pushkin at the same time refuses to be limited by it: ‘I loved you’ moves from ventriloquism of the beloved’s speech to assertion of another and very different set of linguistic values.

Pushkin was no misogynist. The writer would have been shocked to hear such a suggestion: in his day, the typical misogynist was a surly country squire or boorish merchant who thought that education would turn girls into bad wives, and believed it ‘unchristian for any grown man to sit at the feet of a female’. Traces of this attitude can be found in the work of some early nineteenth-century writers, including talents as brilliant as Gogol, but not in Pushkin’s own poetry or fiction, which is notable for its finely drawn and sympathetic portraits of women (the inspiration to women writers as well as men). But it is hard to argue with a historian who, after sifting through all the writer’s essays, reviews, and jottings, concluded that Pushkin (like many of his contemporaries) unreservedly admired only one woman author, Madame de Stael. There is a striking contrast, too, between the roles played by male and female addressees in his letters, verse epistles, and dedications to published works (the latter are the subjects of gallantry sometimes tinged with eroticism, while the former cover a far wider range, from confidants to debating partners, from rivals to confederates in debauchery).

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To argue along these lines does not mean placing Pushkin on a list of writers deserving critical annihilation, summoning him before what one senior American Slavist, writing in 1994, sarcastically termed ‘the stern tribunal of assistant professors’. Gender-aware criticism does not have to amount to ideologized proscription. Nor – to rebut another hostile argument occasionally used against it – does it require the imposition of modern views on texts from different eras. ‘Feminism’ refers to a geographically and historically limited phenomenon (a European movement, or series of movements, beginning in the sixteenth century). But sexual difference and sexual acts are an abiding obsession in all human societies. There is no evidence whatever that Pushkin was interested in, or even aware of, the feminism of his day (it is most unlikely that he had read, say, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women). He could not have anticipated the theories of Gayatri Spivak or Helene Cixous, any more than he could those of Marx and Lenin. But he was without doubt passionately interested in issues of sex and gender, in what he, along with most educated people of his day, considered an obvious but fascinating and awkward truth, that men and women were immutably different.

This opinion, and its corollary, the belief that feminine language and experience had particular significance, masculine language and experience universal significance, were also held by many female contemporaries of Pushkin’s. Evdokiya Rostopchina, for example, in her poem ‘Pushkin’s Notebook’ (1839), described the book not in order to suggest a sort of equivalence between Pushkin’s unpublished texts and the reluctance of women writers to enter print, but in order to underline the inferiority of feminine writing: ‘I am a woman! My intellect and inspiration/Should be bound by humble modesty.’ The poem ended with an apology that Rostopchina had dared to offer her ‘timid song’ in place of ‘Pushkin’s wondrous verse’: the two alternative paraphrases of the word ‘poetry’, ‘song’ and ‘verse’, emphasized the distance between the masculine and the feminine text.

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The assumption that ‘masculine’ expression or experience was universal, and ‘feminine’ expression or experience restricted in import, was a persistent force in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian culture. Women writers were associated first and foremost with certain well-defined cultural roles, above all the expression of emotion and the provision of guidance in personal ethics. To put it schematically, male writers were believed to offer enlightenment (prosveshchenie), women writers moral indoctrination (vospitanie). This belief could provide women writers with a strong sense of personal mission (as expressed, for instance, in Akhmatova’s resolute opposition to state-sanctioned murder, or in determination of memoirists such as Nadezhda Mandelstam or Evgeniya Ginzburg to act as witnesses to their times). A rather less considerable benefit was that it allowed women to become the voice of ‘Communist morality’ in the Socialist Realist novel. But although women writers could gain stature from conventional ideas about feminine identity, at the same time, if their writings were too concerned with the private sphere, which was perceived as women’s particular area of power, they were certain to attract criticism – as happened in the case even of orthodox Socialist Realist writers, such as Vera Panova. Long before Soviet censorship made producing work for the ‘desk drawer’ routine for all writers, women writers made a habit of this; they were also much more likely to publish anonymously or to adopt pseudonyms than men, and to present their writings as ‘found texts’ (publishing what was actually an original piece of fiction as though this were the diary of a tragically deceased young woman lately discovered in the secret drawer of her desk).

But all this did not stop some women writers from asserting themselves as independent artists, particularly in the early twentieth century, an era when women’s liberation was openly debated, and when critics sympathetic to feminism (for example, Elena Koltonovskaya and Zinaida Vengerova) took an explicit interest in women’s creativity. Women writers were also helped by the Russian Symbolists’ conviction that the human personality was androgynous in nature: now they could openly

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identify themselves with male predecessors, as well as female ones. ‘Monument’, interpreted as the testament of a beleaguered writer drawing comfort from the certainty of posthumous vindication, was a particular landmark for women poets who fiercely believed in their own unrecognized genius. (One such was Anna Akhmatova, as is shown by the passage from Requiem evoking her possible future monument that I quoted in Chapter 2.)

For all their aspirations to be treated as equals of their male contemporaries, however, it was still difficult for women writers to achieve elevation to the pantheon of literary greats, at any rate in critical commentaries with ambitions to evaluate the past rather than simply catalogue it. So, while women were well represented in bibliographies, and in the compilatory publications of positivist critics, such as V. V. Sipovsky’s two-volume History of the Russian Novel (1909), they (unlike minor male writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century) were largely excluded from the writings of the most brilliant group of early twentieth-century theorists, the Russian Formalists. The reasons for this lay in some of the Formalists’ governing assumptions about literary evolution, which they saw as driven by the efforts of a talented writer or writers. A gifted writer was sensitive to ‘automatization’, or the slide of literary techniques into cliche, at the very moment when it began happening; he (to use the appropriate pronoun) could raise what Tynyanov called ‘paraliterature’ (literaturnyi byt) to the level of real literature. Despite the Formalists’ own preferred term for their work, ‘descriptive poetics’, what they produced was really an interpretive poetics. Thus they were able to combine a detestation of biographical criticism (‘laundry list scholarship’) with reverence for the achievements of selected individuals – Derzhavin, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Tyutchev, Evgeny Baratynsky, and Konstantin Batyushkov (their main alteration to the canon of their own days at university was the admission of writers close to Pushkin, such as these last two). Women’s writing was not explicitly accounted for in any of the evolutionary models, but in practice it was usually assigned to the status of

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