Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

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, because it allowed Rostopchina to speak in the first place), one might miss the fact that, in describing 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 cliché is not necessarily a cliché.

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 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.

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)