Читать книгу Genders 22 - Ellen E. Berry - Страница 16

A 1988 essay by the literary critic Irina Sheveleva, entitled “The Feminine and the Maternal” offers a very clear example of the conservative construction of woman and the nation.⁷ For Sheveleva the feminine is identified with the home and the homeland. The essence of the feminine is the sense of belonging to a place and a people. In her discussion of women’s poetry Sheveleva writes that “the poetess does not only imprint ‘nature,’ she conveys the sense of her own native belonging” (166). The “earth, one’s own native tongue, and strong native roots” constitute for Sheveleva woman’s “dowry.” The familiar intimate landscape of the home is linked to the overarching ethnic construct of the national group and the political construct of the nation. Woman, as keeper of the home, bears, but does not define, the values of the nation. Sheveleva asks “To be the mistress of your own home —what could be more natural for a woman?” To be mistress means to be the home itself, “to bear its habits and customs in your blood” (166). The link between the home and the nation is enhanced by the woman’s reproductive function, by means of which she has access to “the most intimate secrets of being” (167). Sheveleva chastises the poet Bela Akhmadulina for writing that her baby makes it impossible for her to work, for there is no greater creative work for a woman than caring for a child. But significantly, this theme of the maternal is subordinate to the theme of the home and the native soil and speech. “To accuse women poets of nostalgic patriarchalism, of an attachment to an age-old image of home, of the hearth, is the same as accusing them of being women” (167). To paraphrase Sheveleva, the primary social problem facing Russia today is the need for women to return home, and the primary function of the woman poet is to preserve her “inherited native word.”

For all her concern with the home and the domestic as opposed to the public sphere, Sheveleva’s construction of the feminine places woman once again at the service of the nation. The domestic, in Sheveleva’s reading, does not mark out the space in which the individual is free from the state, as in traditional Western liberal ideology. For Western middle-class women, the domestic sphere became a prison, but for Soviet and Eastern bloc women and men, the family could be a refuge. In How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed Slavenka Drakulic writes: “When there is no space in society to express your individuality the family becomes the only territory in which one can form it, exercise it, prove it, express it.” But Drakulic goes on to say that “a family is too limiting, there is not space enough in it for self-expression either.”⁸ In more extreme conditions of the labor camp, the domestic offered a form of resistance. Evgenia Ginzburg, who spent seventeen years in the gulag for not denouncing someone, describes how the recreation of some smattering of a domestic space within the prison barracks offers the female prisoners a moment of reprieve from the police state of the prison.⁹ For some contemporary Russian feminists, the collapse of Soviet ideology with its emphasis on work, service, and its derogation of the private sphere, means the ideological possibility, if not the economic one, of abandoning the work force and returning home.¹⁰ Under the Soviet system, not working at a government-approved position was tantamount to the crime of “parasitism.” The poet Joseph Brodskii was charged with this crime. But for Sheveleva, in contrast, the domestic space, far from offering an alternative to the state, and by the same token, woman, the keeper of the domestic space, are both vessels which are to preserve the identity of the larger national entity, and reproduce its values and language. Indeed, there is no distinction between the public and the private, no moment or utterance that is free from the new totality of nation, blood, and soil that Sheveleva and others like her wish to reestablish for Russia. Sheveleva’s construction of the feminine and of the “homeland” denies history, sexuality, and rejects difference altogether. The notion of cultural or social intercourse with culturally distinct others as a constituent part of identity is conspicuously absent from her view. The same absence can be noted in other similar conservative writers publishing in Our Contemporary (“Nash sovremennik”), most notably Ksenia Mialo, a participant in a 1993 roundtable entitled “The State of the Russian Nation,” who advises “a strict Russocentrism in every word about our future” and urges “all Russians to concentrate on what is their own, their own, their own.”¹¹ This emphasis on homogeneity and inwardness, evidenced in Sheveleva’s statement that “for the sensation of the limitlessness of that which is one’s own one needs attachment to and rootedness in the earth”¹² offers a striking contrast to Bakhtin’s emphasis on the concept of exchange as constitutive of identity: “that which takes place on the boundary between one’s own and some one else’s consciousness, on the threshold.”¹³ In Sheveleva’s scheme, woman, who has no identity of her own, is the ideal receptacle for the language, culture, soil, and blood that she only inherits, but never forms. Modernity and even the process of historical change are rejected in favor of the endless reduplication of the same. A similar but more subtle framing of the question of woman and national identity can be found in Valentin Rasputin’s novella Farewell to Matera, published in 1976. Widely hailed as a masterpiece of “village prose,” the story tells of the imminent flooding of the Siberian island and village, both called “Matera” for the sake of misguided progress: the Angara river is to be altered as part of a reservoir connected to a new hydroelectric dam.¹⁴ The heroine of the tale, very untypically for Soviet literature, is an old woman named Dar’ia, who quietly resists the destruction of her village and way of life. As David Gillespie writes: “In the almost four decades since Stalin’s death, Rasputin’s Dar’ia still offers Soviet literature’s most profound rejection of the materialist dream of a technological Utopia.”¹⁵ In contrast to her grandson, who proclaims that man is master (“tsar” is the Russian word he uses) of nature, Dar’ia says that Matera was given to people in order that they might live from its resources and then pass it on to the next generation. Dar’ia thinks of herself and her fellow human beings not as “masters,” but as pitiful, weak, “little” creatures, who have forgotten “their place under God.”¹⁶ As Gillespie puts it, Dar’ia is the “repository of past values and traditions in the island.” Gillespie’s choice of words is significant: woman as womb is a “repository” and not a creator of culture. Dar’ia’s role as “repository” is expressed in her relation to her dead ancestors and to her house. She goes to the cemetery to ask forgiveness and guidance and there seemingly receives the ghostly answer that she must clean and prepare her house before it is destroyed. She comes to the conclusion that “truth lies in memory”; “he who has no memory has no life.”¹⁷ Rasputin’s Dar’ia can be seen as a fictitious embodiment of Sheveleva’s ideal women, for she has no other role than to be mistress of an albeit doomed house, and to “bear its habits and customs,” as Sheveleva writes, in her blood.

For Rasputin, as for Sheveleva, identity is given by place. In Farewell to Matera, the narrator comments that “you are not only that which you carry within you, but also that which is around you, and to lose it is sometimes more terrible than losing an arm or a leg … perhaps it is only this that is eternally passed on, like the holy spirit, from person to person, from fathers to children and from children to grandchildren, restraining and guarding them, directing and purifying them.”¹⁸ Among all the villagers, Dar’ia has best absorbed “what is around” her, what is passed from fathers and not mothers, to children. Dar’ia alone prepares her hut for its immolation. She whitewashes it and places fir branches in its corners, as if for a holiday, all the while sensing the meaningfulness of her actions. Dar’ia is mistress of her house, but not of Matera. That role is given to a mysterious poltergeist-like masculine figure called the “Master,” who prowls the island at night. The woman too old for childbearing or sexuality is the vessel for a masculine-given culture.

In her recent essay “Gynoglasnost: writing the feminine,” Barbara Heldt offers the following gender analysis of village prose:

Much of village prose is about the squandering of a female ecology, and concomitant male guilt. Although the Soviet system stands accused, it has a gender — a largely male bureaucracy is set against female Nature. In other words the Good Mother is Russia, but she is either dead or threatened with imminent destruction. The Wicked Stepmother is the Soviet Union who has taken her place and is destroying her children. Traces of the Good Mother can be found in very old women or a younger one who dies or is victimized.¹⁹

Heldt’s reading provides a necessary caution to those who might see Rasputin as offering a pro-feminist gynoecologism in Farewell to Matera. Only the aged Dar’ia is positively valued by the narrator; her middle-aged daughter-in-law, in contrast, who lives on the mainland, puts on weight, gets her hair cut in a fashionable style, and becomes interested in and knowledgeable about the illnesses from which she suffers. The narrator comments that the inhabitants of Matera have no time to be sick. The daughter-in-law’s knitting is fashionably lacy, and therefore full of holes, but Dar’ia’s is waterproof. It should be noted that the production of textiles, one of the most ancient womanly crafts, appears in traditional patriarchal societies as means of establishing, maintaining, and evaluating order, civil, domestic, and even cosmological. The woman weaving in the home is a sign that everything and everyone is in her place. The daughter-in-law’s flaws — fashion, illness, and fat — are all symptoms of the overdevelopment, excess, forgetfulness, and loss of homogeneity that comes from leaving Matera. In the story foreignness appears in the form of the government official in charge of the flooding, a character with the unattractive name of “Zhuk,” which means both “beetle” and “shyster,” who has a “dark gypsy face.” The gypsy, who has no native home, is the antinomy of Matera. “Matera,” with its associations of both “mother” and “mainland,” as Gillespie points out,²⁰ is a self-sufficient island, which has “enough spaciousness and wealth, and beauty, and wildness, and every kind of creature in twos.” Leaving the timelessness and geographic isolation of Matera and entering the historical present — at the time of the story’s publication, this meant the Soviet present — inevitably means evil and decay, which Rasputin expresses in specifically and traditionally anti-feminine terms. Both Plato and Tolstoy construe fashion as a sign of the excess of decadent urban culture.²¹

Rasputin’s “Cherchez la Femme,” published in 1990, returns to the gendered thematics of Farewell to Matera, but in a more explicit and direct way. Rasputin begins by quoting from the work of a little-known late nineteenth-century woman writer named N. A. Lukhmanova, whose work was praised, Rasputin adds, by the philosopher Vasilii Rozanov. Rasputin emphasizes that what he is about to quote was written by a woman. The Truth about Woman is uttered by a woman, but only one legitimized by a male. Lukhmanova describes a decline in female beauty, and an increase in women’s “nervousness to the point of hysteria … bordering on psychopathology.”²² Rasputin finds Lukhmanova’s observations to be true of Russian women today. Much has been written about the construction of the hysterical woman in fin-de-siecle Europe, both from the point of view of the hysteric and the doctor, but what is relevant here is the argument that the construction of hysteria was a way of reasserting patriarchal control over women at a time when feminism threatened that control.²³ A similar argument may be made about Rasputin, namely, that his assertion of a resurgence of hysteria is a means of reasserting control over women in post-totalitarian Russia, at a time when the possibility exists for the emergence of a non-Soviet feminism.

Rasputin’s cure for the new outbreak of the old pathology is not medical, as it was at the turn of the century, but moral. The age-old cure for hysteria, “wandering womb,” is marriage and pregnancy, or, in Rasputin’s terms, a return to the “essence” of womanhood, defined as “preservation” or “protection”: Shelter, warmth, tenderness, the satisfaction of needs, faithfulness, softness, flexibility, mercifulness — this is what a woman consists of. Feeding her family, caring for her husband, raising her children, being a good neighbor — this is the circle of her concerns.²⁴

Rasputin goes on to say that Russian woman’s true role is not “civic,” but “familial,” and that given Russian woman’s “character,” that role is “sacrificial.” For Rasputin, Dostoevsky’s self-sacrificing saintly prostitute Sonia Marmeladova is a prime example of Russian womanhood. That Rasputin chooses Sonia from all the other female characters in Crime and Punishment is significant. Raskolnikov’s sister, Dunia, who repels the lecherous Svidrigailov’s advances with a revolver, and who plans to start a publishing company with her fiance, Razumikhin, is apparently not a typical Russian woman.²⁵

Rasputin’s “cure” for the “pathology” of late twentieth-century Russian women is really a cure for the pathology of late twentieth-century Russia. Rasputin links the perceived decline in present-day Russian women to a perceived decline in Russian culture as a whole, the burden for which lies on women. The emphasis on “protection” is significant in this regard. From what is it that women are to protect their families, and by extension, all of Russia? From an unwanted intrusion of otherness and change. Translated into national terms, this means restoring and conserving the Russianness of Russia, protecting Russia from heterogeneity. The anxiety over “otherness” evidenced in Rasputin, Sheveleva, and as we will shortly see, another conservative writer, Belov, emerges fullblown as blatant anti-Semitism in their colleague at Our Contemporary, Igor Shafarevich, whose notorious essay “Russophobia” characterizes Jews as a hostile subnation within the greater nation of Russia.²⁶

The anxiety over otherness in Rasputin is not limited to questions of ethnic identity, but can be traced to the level of gender. A profound distrust of women’s otherness lies at the roots of the ideological construction of Rasputin’s Matera and “Cherchez la Femme.” Woman, let out of the house, is not simply dangerous to herself, but to man. In the myth of autochthony that writers like Rasputin seek to create, the original Russians would, like the sown men of ancient Thebes, spring into being without sexual intercourse, and the Russian nation would arise without communication or contact with the outside world — recall Ksenia Mialo’s emphasis on Russocentrism. This myth defines women as the first outsiders, the first nonnatives. They are emblematic of all difference and diversity.

Rasputin’s masculinist myth is concealed under an insistence on the proto-feminine origins of Russian culture: “at the foundations of our culture lie feminine principles.” He reminds his readers of the role of the cult of Mary as the protector of Russia, whose repeated intercession, it was believed, saved Russia from “enemies and misfortunes.” Rasputin writes: “Russia from time immemorial believed in itself as the Home of the Mother of God.”²⁷ According to Rasputin, modern Russian women have forgotten that they carry within them “the stamp of the mother of God.” The author’s vision of women eliminates actual historical Russian women, especially those who happen not to be Orthodox Christians. Extrapolating from Rasputin’s argument, a Russian “her-story” can be traced, in which each stage corresponds to a particular construction of Woman, who either serves, rejects, or betrays Man. Premodern, patriarchal Russia corresponds to Russia as the mother of God. Late nineteenth-and late twentieth-century Russia — each time period representing a collapse of Empire — corresponds to Russia the hysterical woman. A further parallel between these two periods is that in each, feminism begins to emerge. To restate the analysis given earlier, Rasputin’s diagnosis for each is the same: when women express desires of their own, they forget and deny their truest selves. In repressing their desire to be mothers and homemakers, women become hysterics. A close relative of the Hysteric is a figure that Rasputin calls the Goddess of Revenge and Destruction. Rasputin uses this label for several late nineteenth-century women revolutionaries — Vera Zasulich, who shot at the Governor General of St. Petersburg in 1878 and was acquitted by the jury, and the women who participated in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Mother Russia’s “sick” daughters turn on Father Tsar. The rage and repressed desire formerly expressed in the hysteric’s language of symptoms is turned outward, against Russia.

It seems that Rasputin fears a resurgence of female violence in the present, or rather, that this violence has infected society as whole. Late twentieth-century Russian society has become feminized in the sense that it has gone mad. Rasputin speaks of its “inability to provide itself with necessities, unwillingness to give of itself in work” and “violent passion for complete license.”²⁸ In this language of unbridled desire and unwillingness for sacrifice is a portrait of woman undomesticated. In accordance with the particular cast of his gender politics, Rasputin links the breakdown of post-Soviet Russian society as a whole with a perceived “breakdown” — this is Rasputin’s word — of Russian women in particular. Rasputin’s characterization of society’s “madness” follows immediately upon his description of the “tragic breakdown of woman,” portrayed in, among other literary works, Vasilii Belov’s Raising Children According to Doctor Spock.

Belov’s story chronicles the collapse of the Zorin family. The setting is an unnamed urban area. Zorin, a low-level construction supervisor with a drinking problem, is in constant conflict with his wife, Tonia, who works in a library and earns more than he. Tonia sees “a threat to her independence in his every action.”²⁹ He only wants closeness, she, only distance. The narrator’s and Zorin’s point of view are indistinguishable here. Zorin is passionately devoted to his little daughter, Lial’ka — unlike Tonia, who, in his words, wants to turn her into a “walking robot” by raising her in senseless obedience to Dr. Spock’s principles. “She has to urinate and move her bowels at a definite time of the day!” thinks the exasperated Zorin. For American readers, this portrait of Dr. Spock is somewhat startling, since Spock is known and even blamed for a lack of discipline in his approach to the upbringing of children. In the episode that marks the beginning of the end, Tonia takes Lial’ka for her regular evening walk even when the child is obviously feverish. The next day Zorin is called from the day-care center to bring her home. Shortly thereafter Lial’ka is hospitalized with pneumonia, and her mother refuses to stay overnight with her. Zorin leaves home. He spends a short time with his boss Fridburg, but feels uncomfortable with the “falsely hospitable atmosphere of the Jewish family.” Note the gratuitous anti-Semitism of the narrator’s characterization.

Near the end of the story, after having been fired from his job, in part due to the letters of complaint written against him by his wife, Zorin muses on the nature of women in general. There is something “fish-like and cold” in women, especially in their tolerance for abortions. He thinks about the “rusalki,” the powerful female figures in Russian folklore associated with water and woods, dangerous to men. Women who drowned were believed to become “rusalki.”³⁰ Zorin imagines his wife as a rusalka, who figuratively “drowned” in her job and in her quest for emancipation and then turned on him in revenge. Zorin thinks: “They put their husbands in prison and write denunciations against them.”³¹ The story’s final scene takes place on the street. Tonia beats Lial’ka for disobedience and walks off, leaving her to her father’s comforting embrace. From Rasputin’s and Belov’s point of view, the “tragic breakdown of modern woman” is not only her betrayal of man, but her violence against her children, born and unborn. Modern woman, in this view, is a threat to the future of Russia. Rasputin’s most recent word on Mother Russia can be found in the 1993 roundtable on “The State of the Russian Nation,” which I have already touched upon. Here Rasputin’s tone shifts to a lament over the collapse of the Russian empire. The passage is worth quoting in full:

Even now we do not know the condition of the Russian nation, whether she can still be found in one national body, or whether because of the most recent shocks, attacks, and hostilities, she has been shaken loose from it and scattered among Russian cities and villages which do not have any spiritual or blood ties among them. We will hope that things have not reached this point and that the national instinct and the national memory have not yet been beaten out of us forever. And if this is so, if the nation for all her tragic losses is alive — towards what should we turn for her ingathering, cure, and mobilization, if not to the national spirit, where shall we seek support, if not in national worth and national conscience?³²

The word that I have translated as “nation,” natsiia, is grammatically feminine. Rasputin avoids the term “narod” (people), which is grammatically masculine, and similarly the grammatically neutral “gosudarstvo,” which suggests a politically formed entity, and is usually translated as “government.” The passage reveals a certain confusion in its metaphors. It is difficult to say exactly what the difference is between the nation and the “national body.” It seems that the nation refers to a spiritual quality or identity, and the national body to the physical territory of the former Soviet Union or of Russia. However, Rasputin goes on to draw a distinction between the nation, on the one hand, and the national memory, the national spirit, and the national conscience, on the other, all of which must be relied upon for the “ingathering, cure, and mobilization” of the nation. It is not clear what is meant by the “national body” out from which the “nation” has been “shaken.”

The language of diaspora —the Russian nation is scattered among disparate villages and cities — and ingathering is clearly biblical. Compare, for example, Ezekiel 11:17: “Thus says the Lord God: I will gather you from the peoples, and assemble you out of the countries where you have been scattered” and 11:19: “And I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them.”

The prophetic subtext signals two themes: first, a messianic association of Russia with the biblical Israel, and secondly, Rasputin’s engendering of the Russian nation as feminine. Zion’s evil is expressed figuratively in many prophetic texts as harlotry. For example, Zion is an unfaithful wife, who has abandoned her husband, God, to play the harlot (Jeremiah 3:6). The pain which Zion then endures is compared to that of a woman abandoned by her lovers. Jeremiah continues: “and you, O desolate one, what do you mean that you dress in scarlet, that you deck yourself with ornaments of gold…. Your lovers despise you” (4:30). Diaspora, God’s punishment for the unfaithful nation (recall that Rasputin lists “faithfulness” as a specifically feminine virtue), can be seen as in feminine terms: the violation of the physical integrity of the body politic can be compared to a loss of virginity. The nation’s “whoring” and subsequent “rape” are two sides of the same coin. In terms of the conservative construction of Russian national identity, “whoring” means cultural intercourse with the West, from rock and roll to democratic pluralism, the abandonment of what conservatives call “historic Russia,” and more viscerally, what is referred to in conservative writing as the “sale of Russia,” the ceding of territory to Japan, for example, and the rise in prostitution between Russian women and foreigners for hard currency.³³

The historical processes that have taken place in the former Soviet Union since the collapse of Empire in 1991 are mythologized in biblical terms. The rhetorical strategy is similar to what we have seen earlier. The metaphor of the feminine nation is the prism through which events are evaluated. Diaspora is the ultimate punishment for the loss of the “good mother,” to use Barbara Heldt’s phrase, expressed in the valorization of such figures as Rasputin’s Dar’ia in Farewell to Matera, her replacement by hysterical and ultimately violent daughters, and the corresponding dual collapse of the Russian family and of national identity. The engendering of the Russian body politic as Mother Russia in conservative prose denies the possibility of representing women in anything other than a mythological light. Woman is either the pure Mother of God or the evil rusalka. Demystifying Mother Russia, however, opens up the possibility of alternative representations of women and their experience. Similarly, nonmythological representations of women may serve in turn to demystify Mother Russia. The next part of this essay examines these interrelated strategies in recent Russian writing, some of which are direct responses to Sheveleva, Rasputin, and other conservative writers, and some of which are responses to the broader phenomena of glasnost and the end of the Soviet Empire. A preliminary caveat is necessary. To search for “feminist” constructions of Russia and of the feminine in current Russian writing would be mistaken, for many reasons. Any essentializing construction of national or gender identity that neglects actual individual Russians and actual individual Russian women would simply be the other side of the conservative coin: a different content perhaps, but the same totalizing structure. We would be on more certain ground with writing that, while not necessarily “feminist,” is fragmentary, ironical, or critical, writing in which old women are not divinized and young women demonized. While not being able to offer an exhaustive survey of current Russian writing, we will discuss some examples, not all of them authored by women, that take this stance.