Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

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poem ‘Pushkin’s Notebook’ (1839), described the book not in order to suggest a sort of equivalence between Pushkin’s unpublished texts and the reluctance of women writers to enter print, but in order to underline the inferiority of feminine writing: ‘I am a woman!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.

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 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.)