Genders 22. Ellen E. Berry
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of woman represent “oppositionalist” writing. What strategies are deployed in this writing to defamiliarize Mother Russia? Of particular importance here will be the image of the female body.
I. MOTHER RUSSIA: TAKE ONE
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.