Russian literature. A short introduction

‘paraliterature’. For example, Lidiya Ginzburg’s authoritative study of nineteenth-century Realism, On Psychological Prose (1971), contrasted the talented writing of the political thinker and memoirist Aleksandr Herzen with the talented personality of his wife Natalya (also the author of autobiographical writings, but ones, Ginzburg apparently considered, of documentary rather than literary value).

The assumption of a hard-and-fast distinction between ‘literature’ and ‘everyday language’, ‘literature’ and ‘paraliterature’, effaced from view, in Formalist and post-Formalist criticism, the importance of mixed-genre texts in the work of women writers, such as the diary in verse (to be found in Rostopchina’s work as well as that of Akhmatova), and the significance in women writers’ work of paraliterary citations, such as references to everyday speech (for instance, the mundane comments of an unfaithful lover in Akhmatova’s early poetry). And, while Formalist critics’ disdain for biography was helpful to the study of women’s writing in some ways (Eikhenbaum’s brilliant 1923 study of Akhmatova, for instance, eschewed cliches about ‘feminine poetry’ in favour of a close reading of literary devices in her work), it meant that women writers could not be studied as women. Therefore, questions about whether literary devices had a different resonance when located in a text that was linguistically marked as feminine (by the use of feminine adjectives and verbal forms, say) remained unasked. Equally, the importance of biographical realia for many women writers (and indeed for male writers such as Blok and Mayakovsky, for whom the tortured masculine self was a major theme) was ignored. Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero, her great retrospective narrative poem about the ‘start of the twentieth century’ in 1913, is quite incomprehensible without some knowledge of the personalities in the poet’s circle, and the poet’s own experience, just as is Tsvetaeva’s Poem of the End; both Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva maintained personal cults of Pushkin not only as artist, but also as man, producing vehemently subjective and partisan accounts of his marriage to Natalya Goncharova. It is interesting to note as well that Tsvetaeva, in her essay ‘The Poet and the Critic’, mounted

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an open attack on Formalism, claiming that all her work was an attempt to represent the world and had nothing to do with ‘formal tasks’ in the abstract.

The ‘Big Four’ of Russian Poetry

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), Boris Pasternak (1890–1960), Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938), and Marina Tsvetaeva (1892– 1941) were four of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. All four suffered persecution under the Soviet regime. Mandel-stam died in a prison camp in 1938; Akhmatova’s first husband, Nikolay Gumilyov, was executed in 1921, and her son and third husband were imprisoned during the Great Purges, as were Tsvetaeva’s husband and daughter; Pasternak was subjected to vilification after the publication of Dr Zhivago, and the award to him of the Nobel Prize. At the same time, because all four (unlike, say, Nabokov) died in Russia, they could be discussed in public and republished during the post-Stalin era. In Western writings about Russian literature, the four are often grouped together as though they were members of a kind of informal but exclusive circle, something along the lines of the Bloomsbury group. Yet no group photograph or portrait of the four exists (in fact, there was never an occasion when all were in the same place at once). And while Akhmatova and Mandel-stam were linked by lasting friendship, the same cannot be said about any of the others (Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam had a short-term affair, but lost contact after Tsvetaeva’s emigration; Tsvetaeva and Pasternak’s relationship was intense, but carried on by letter, and most of the emotion was on Tsvetaeva’s side; Akhmatova and Pasternak felt at most wary respect for one another; Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva’s relations were decidedly strained). On the other hand, there were several other figures

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who were close in one way or another to at least one of the group – for example, Vladimir Mayakovsky, a major influence on Tsvetaeva and the addressee of a tribute by Akhmatova. The association, then, is as much a matter of myth as fact, helped along by a line of Akhmatova’s, ‘There aren’t many of us, three or four, maybe’, and also, perhaps, by the musical parallels in this combination of two male and two female voices, all with their own distinct timbres – like a four-part ensemble in one of Mozart’s operas, with Akhmatova playing mezzo to Tsvetaeva’s soprano, and Mandelstam tenor to Pasternak’s bass-baritone.

Women writers, then, did not necessarily fit any better into the analytical paradigms of Formalism than they did into politically engaged perceptions of writers as ‘masters of minds’. Since Formalism was, from the early 1960s, once again to be the single most dominant trend in the serious study of Russian literature, among Western critics as well as Russian ones, the rise of gender-oriented criticism in Britain, America, France, and Scandinavia during the 1970s at first had little impact on critical practices or on university courses, even in the West. However, in the mid-1980s, a few Western Slavists, mostly in America, started to make a systematic attempt to recover work by women writers. Barbara Heldt’s Terrible Perfection (1987) contrasted male writers’ suffocating view of women’s innate moral superiority with women writers’ own struggle to represent a richer and more challenging understanding of female identity. The Dictionary of Russian Women Writers (1994), edited by Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal, and Mary Zirin, brought hundreds of forgotten authors back to scholarly attention. By the late 1990s, the work of these and other writers had managed to create something approaching an alternative canon of Russian literature, one made up of women writers and shaped by a strongly individualist stress on self-assertion and self-examination (that is, on various forms of

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autobiography or fictionalized autobiography). Newly discovered or rediscovered writers included Karolina Pavlova, the early nineteenth-century poet Anna Bunina, the twentieth-century lesbian poet Sofiya Parnok, and the nineteenth-century prose writer Nadezhda Durova, author of the transvestite memoir The Memoirs of a Cavalry Maid. The priorities of gender criticism also inspired important re-readings of established writers, especially Tsvetaeva, who emerged as a pioneer of writing by Russian women about the female body.

At times, to be sure, a new kind of critical elision took place, this time of writers who could not easily be presented as proto-feminist rebels. A case in point was Rostopchina: one American feminist critic, for example, wrote of her ‘inordinate preoccupation [with] parties and dancing’ and her frivolous attitude to literature (‘writing for her [ . . . ] had the appeal of an agreeable hobby’). Yet there are grounds for arguing that Rostopchina’s pose of female dilettantism and modesty was in fact a way of facilitating entry to the potentially ‘immodest’ world of writing. In circumstances where the publication by women of literary work (as opposed to the production of poems, stories, and memoirs for circulation among close family and friends) was seen as tantamount to sexual exhibitionism if not prostitution, the adoption of a modest mask (a mask that was sometimes misleading in terms of a writer’s actual character) was a form of social insurance, and one that could sometimes allow women to write with impunity on ‘unfeminine’ subjects.

At the same time, the historicist argument should perhaps not be pressed too far: a critical reading that limits itself to working within the intellectual universe of a given literary text as consciously expressed, rather than attempting to explore deeper shades of meaning and nuance, can turn into a tautologous paraphrase and runs the risk also of smoothing out aberrant or dissonant elements. If one sees Rostopchina’s ‘Pushkin’s Notebook’ as nothing more than a docile recognition of feminine inferiority (albeit one that was expedient,

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because it allowed Rostopchina to speak in the first place), one might miss the fact that, in describing