Читать книгу Genders 22 - Ellen E. Berry - Страница 18

In a recent article entitled “The Russian Question,” the prominent liberal critic Natal’ia Ivanova draws attention to the conservative preoccupation with Russia as a monolithic idea, as opposed to Russia the many-sided historical reality.³⁷ She argues that hidden underneath the “spirituality” of such writers as Rasputin, who, as we have seen, call for a return to “Mother Russia,” to the soil, conceived as the source of identity (Sheveleva is another example), there is a perverse embodiment, in the sense that spiritual qualities are linked to a specific territory and a specific nation. The nation is not defined in terms of coexistence through citizenship, but by the link of blood. The “people” are thought of as a biological entity. According to Ivanova, this concept of the “body politic” minimizes the possibility of heterogeneity. For Ivanova gender politics plays a crucial role in the conservative construction of the so-called “Russian idea.” Love for Russia is eroticized in the publicistic writings of the conservative authors, whereas in their fiction romantic love is absent, and young women, and female sexuality in general, are portrayed in extremely negative terms. Ivanova writes “all the emotional content is oriented toward the fecund womb.” Sexuality is divorced from maternity. She goes on to say that in the writing of Rasputin and Belov “the more we are called on to love the Motherland, the less sexually mature is the relationship between the heroes to women as women.”³⁸ We have already discussed Rasputin’s horror at “modern” Russian women, be they of the late nineteenth or the late twentieth century. In Ivanova’s view, this eroticized love for Mother Russia, “insulted and injured by foreign rapists” is tantamount to symbolic incest. According to Ivanova, since the nationalists believe Mother Russia to have perished, their love for her is also equivalent to “necrofilia.” Ivanova polemically turns the tables on Rasputin, who sees sexual pathology in modern women. Ivanova “diagnoses” sexual pathology in Rasputin.