Russian Literature (17 page)

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conduct that was now required, rather than the subordination to universally recognized ethical and aesthetic constraints that had been
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the central demand of participants in mixed literary gatherings during the early nineteenth century.

Pushkin, though, was writing in an era when the relationship between literature and polite culture was still taken for granted, even if it was beginning to break down. He was one of the last major Russian writers to participate in aristocratic salons of the kind organized by Zinaida Volkonskaya (just as she was one of the last female aristocrats who was at any level a serious artist). Several of Pushkin’s writings –
Egyptian
Nights
,
Evgeny Onegin
, the novel fragment ‘The Guests Assembled at the Dacha’ (1828–30) – use the aristocratic salon as a setting for central scenes. The urbane tone cultivated in polite society was one of the registers routinely employed by the poet (as is shown by ‘And don’t dispute with fools’). Some of his most famous poems have the brilliant conventionality required by the salon (an example is the famous love
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16. Pushkin, doodled self-portrait in female dress. The poet made no attempt to flatter his unladylike profile: the effect of seeing it emerge from the bun and ringlets is amusingly incongruous.

poem ‘I remember the wonderful moment:/You appeared before me/

Like a fleeting vision’, which was to have a long drawing-room afterlife as a romance set to music by Glinka). Pushkin followed Karamzin, too, in his intensive interest in the psychology and language of women: this can be seen not only in the prominence of female protagonists in his work, but also in the fact that some of his ‘costumed confessions’ were made in female dress (as with the last line of ‘Monument’, where the advice to avoid demeaning squabbles fits with contemporary expectations that ladies remain calm under all circumstances).

At the same time, though, the inspiration that the salon offered Pushkin was often fused with unease, or even irritation, at the limits of polite language, and particularly at the demand that strong emotion be voiced in a safely conventional way. This unease can be sensed in another very famous love poem, ‘I loved you’ (1829):
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I loved you; love as yet, perhaps

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Has not burned out in my heart;

But may it trouble you no longer,

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I do not wish to sadden you with anything.

I loved you wordlessly, hopelessly,

Tormented now by timidity, now by jealousy;

I loved you so sincerely, so tenderly,

As God grant you be loved by another.

This poem is quintessentially ‘Pushkinian’ in its dignified plainness and apparently self-explanatory directness; it is sometimes used (not wholly accurately) as an instance of the poet’s distaste for metaphor. But in fact, there is a good deal more here than first meets the eye or the ear.

Among many buried associations is the point that the opening lines of the poem evoke ‘feminine language’ – the new language of the emotions that Sentimentalism had seen as women’s particular domain.

Great rhythmic emphasis is placed on verbs such as ‘to trouble’ and ‘to sadden’, as well as on the metaphor of love as flame (this hackneyed
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image is delicately suggested through the verb ‘to burn out’, usually used of lamps or candles). The second half of the poem opposes to these conventional verbs and figures of speech a hyperbolic evocation of unutterable love, emotionally inarticulate, yet also the gift of a (masculine) Deity. The use of religious language in the final line is far from incidental, since this language stands both for sincerity and for ‘Russianness’ in the later Pushkin (as, for example, in one of his last poems, ‘Desert fathers and immaculate women’ (1836)). The effect is that ‘masculine’ sincerity displaces what can be seen, once the poem’s narrative is complete, as charming, ‘feminine’ artifice. The ‘feminine’

vocabulary of affect becomes the starting point rather than the end of inspiration. Its particularity is opposed to the universality of the ‘masculine’ religious text. Evoking feminine language, Pushkin at the same time refuses to be limited by it: ‘I loved you’ moves from
‘An
ventriloquism of the beloved’s speech to assertion of another and very
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different set of linguistic values.

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Pushkin was no misogynist. The writer would have been shocked to hear
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such a suggestion: in his day, the typical misogynist was a surly country
with

squire or boorish merchant who thought that education would turn
fools’

girls into bad wives, and believed it ‘unchristian for any grown man to sit at the feet of a female’. Traces of this attitude can be found in the work of some early nineteenth-century writers, including talents as brilliant as Gogol, but not in Pushkin’s own poetry or fiction, which is notable for its finely drawn and sympathetic portraits of women (the inspiration to women writers as well as men). But it is hard to argue with a historian who, after sifting through all the writer’s essays, reviews, and jottings, concluded that Pushkin (like many of his contemporaries) unreservedly admired only one woman author, Madame de Staël. There is a striking contrast, too, between the roles played by male and female addressees in his letters, verse epistles, and dedications to published works (the latter are the subjects of gallantry sometimes tinged with eroticism, while the former cover a far wider range, from confidants to debating partners, from rivals to confederates in debauchery).

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To argue along these lines does not mean placing Pushkin on a list of writers deserving critical annihilation, summoning him before what one senior American Slavist, writing in 1994, sarcastically termed ‘the stern tribunal of assistant professors’. Gender-aware criticism does not have to amount to ideologized proscription. Nor – to rebut another hostile argument occasionally used against it – does it require the imposition of modern views on texts from different eras. ‘Feminism’

refers to a geographically and historically limited phenomenon (a European movement, or series of movements, beginning in the sixteenth century). But sexual difference and sexual acts are an abiding obsession in all human societies. There is no evidence whatever that Pushkin was interested in, or even aware of, the feminism of his day (it is most unlikely that he had read, say, Mary Wollstonecraft’s
A Vindication of the Rights of Women
). He could not have anticipated the theories of Gayatri Spivak or Hélène Cixous, any more than he could those of Marx and Lenin. But he was without
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doubt passionately interested in issues of sex and gender, in what he,
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along with most educated people of his day, considered an obvious but fascinating and awkward truth, that men and women were
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immutably different.

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.

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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
‘An
although women writers could gain stature from conventional ideas
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about feminine identity, at the same time, if their writings were too concerned with the private sphere, which was perceived as women’s
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particular area of power, they were certain to attract criticism – as
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happened in the case even of orthodox Socialist Realist writers, such as
with

Vera Panova. Long before Soviet censorship made producing work for
fools’

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
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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.) For all their aspirations to be treated as equals of their male contemporaries, however, it was still difficult for women writers to achieve elevation to the pantheon of literary greats, at any rate in critical commentaries with ambitions to evaluate the past rather than simply catalogue it. So, while women were well represented in bibliographies, and in the compilatory publications of positivist critics, such as V. V. Sipovsky’s two-volume
History of the Russian Novel
(1909), they (unlike minor male writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
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century) were largely excluded from the writings of the most brilliant
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group of early twentieth-century theorists, the Russian Formalists. The reasons for this lay in some of the Formalists’ governing assumptions
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about literary evolution, which they saw as driven by the efforts of a talented writer or writers. A gifted writer was sensitive to ‘automatization’, or the slide of literary techniques into cliché, at the very moment when it began happening; he (to use the appropriate pronoun) could raise what Tynyanov called ‘paraliterature’ (
literaturnyi
byt
) to the level of real literature. Despite the Formalists’ own preferred term for their work, ‘descriptive poetics’, what they produced was really an interpretive poetics. Thus they were able to combine a detestation of biographical criticism (‘laundry list scholarship’) with reverence for the achievements of selected individuals – Derzhavin, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Tyutchev, Evgeny Baratynsky, and Konstantin Batyushkov (their main alteration to the canon of their own days at university was the admission of writers close to Pushkin, such as these last two). Women’s writing was not explicitly accounted for in any of the evolutionary models, but in practice it was usually assigned to the status of
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‘paraliterature’. For example, Lidiya Ginzburg’s authoritative study of nineteenth-century Realism,
On Psychological Prose
(1971), contrasted the talented
writing
of the political thinker and memoirist Aleksandr Herzen with the talented
personality
of his wife Natalya (also the author of autobiographical writings, but ones, Ginzburg apparently considered, of documentary rather than literary value).