Russian literature. A short introduction

women as ‘bound’ (skovany) by modesty, Rostopchina uses an adjective that was customarily applied to Prometheus, whose rebellion against patriarchal control had made him a model for pre- Romantic and Romantic young men, from Goethe to Shelley. It is perhaps unlikely that Rostopchina intended to compare herself to Prometheus; however, it is possible that her choice of vocabulary unconsciously took issue with the prevailing view of tortured genius as necessarily masculine. Obviously, it would be foolish to base an entire interpretation of the poem on this one word, but the example illustrates that even a studiedly conventional text may on occasion ‘deautomatize’ language. Wrenched from its customary context, a cliche is not necessarily a cliche.

It is this variety of feminist criticism, one sensitive to linguistic nuance in Formalist tradition but also to historical and biographical context, that began to be practised among some Russian and Western critics in the late twentieth century. By the late 1990s, too, there were beginning to be signs of a shift in the standing of women writers in their homeland. They still might not (with the exception of Akhmatova) have their monuments, or (with the exception of Tsvetaeva, or again Akhmatova), their museums, but writers were beginning to be republished in Russia, as well as outside: Sofiya Parnok, Adelaida Gertsyk, Alla Golovina, and Zinaida Gippius were only four of the writers who now had book-length editions to themselves. To be sure, suspicion of feminizm remained widespread, a hangover from the Soviet Union’s cultural isolation (Russian writers and critics, unlike some of their counterparts in Poland, Yugoslavia, or the German Democratic Republic, had little direct access to Western cultural theory of any kind before the late 1980s), but also a result of ingrained suspicion of psychobiography; the feeling that feminizm was alien was not helped by the crudity of some early Russian attempts to propagandize it (blundering attacks on Lolita as pornography and the like). But as increasing familiarity with new kinds of cultural theory began to enliven and enrich the study of Russian

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literature inside Russia, which had endured something of a conceptual stasis for the last two decades of the twentieth century, and as the spread of post-Modernist ideas made the expression of a particular and partial, eccentric and individual, perspective a reputable choice for all writers, not just biographically female ones, a greater tolerance for women’s ‘marginal’ explorations of the self became possible. Symptomatic was the appearance of a serious and careful discussion of Western scholarship on women’s writing in the liveliest Russian literary-critical journal, New Literary Review, in 1997. All in all, the posthumous monument for which generations of Russian women writers had longed, an intellectual rather than a stone one, was beginning to seem, for at least some of them, a real possibility. Unlike some of the critical approaches discussed in this book, gender- aware criticism had never pretended to be the only proper or legitimate approach to literary texts, to offer final answers. It did not rank writers in terms of their ‘progressivity’ in feminist terms. But it could reasonably claim to have raised a new and interesting set of questions, and to have demonstrated (something that writers themselves had always known) that masculine and feminine identity was no more obvious or easy to understand than any other aspect of the human self as reflected in literature.

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Chapter 7

‘Every tribe and every tongue will name me’

Russian literature and ‘primitive culture’

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

(M. L. Gasparov, 2000)

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

The fact that the peoples of Central Asia are not included in Pushkin’s list of ‘tribes’ is easy to explain: the first Russian conquests there took place only in the mid-nineteenth century, and the region was not fully subjugated until the 1880s. But the list was not exhaustive even in terms

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of the Russian Empire of Pushkin’s day. ‘The Finns’ stand also for the Balts (Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians), and the Georgians and Armenians are not mentioned. This selection of ethnic groups is not at all accidental. Reference to the Georgians and the Armenians, literate peoples with a long history of Christianity, would have unsettled Pushkin’s representation of his poetry as a means of transmitting civilized values to savage peoples (the adjective ‘savage’ is in fact applied to the Tungus in ‘Monument’). Entertaining a Byronic fascination with Oriental exoticism in his early twenties, Pushkin had, from the point at which he wrote The Gypsies (1824), taken an ironical view of this, seeking to play down picturesque differences of ethnicity. The conclusion of The Gypsies stresses the universality of moral problems:

And everywhere are fatal passions, And there is no salvation from destiny.

An elder Gypsy proves an Enlightenment raisonneur who, quaintly, has even heard of Ovid (though not by name: he knows him only as a political exile banished from the Roman South to the Caucasian ‘North’). Still more striking is the muting of local colour through detail chosen for its relative mundanity. The Gypsy retinue includes a shackled dancing-bear such as might have been seen in many Russian villages; it is Aleko, the outsider, who is a wide-eyed idealist, his Gypsy wife Zemfira who acts out of practical self-interest. Similarly, in his travelogue Journey to Erzerum (1829), Pushkin wearily recorded the tedious difficulties of passing through the Caucasus: the unreliable transport and rapacious drivers; the dirty hotels and unattractive women; the sustained hostility of the Turks and the Caucasian tribesmen. The heroism and uprightness of the invading Russian forces can only emerge to advantage by comparison; the emphasis on the prospect of salvation through military intervention is the major difference between this text and Alexander William Kingslake’s Eothen (1841), the jaded tone being common to both. In the words of the linguist and scholar Peter France, Journey to Erzerum ‘pulls the carpet

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from under the Romantic primitivism of much Caucasian writing [ . . . ] meant as a parody of Chateaubriand’s Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem, it mocks the cliches of such travel literature’. At the same time, the text was in tune with the official ideologies of expanding Russian imperialism, according to which, in the geographer Mark Bassin’s words, the ‘stagnation’ with which Asia was credited ‘appeared to offer a suitably backward contrast to the creative and progressive dynamism of the West, a dynamism which Russia now claimed as its own’.

Yet so far as the imaginative world of Empire went, Journey to Erzerum was aberrant (as Pushkin himself seemed to sense: the text was published only in part before his death). Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s belief in the ‘noble savage’ still seduced many in the 1830s and 1840s; and the search for the exotic that characterized Romantic literature everywhere was, in Russia turned inward and applied to those parts of the Empire that had been colonized recently enough to have maintained a strong and sometimes threatening local