Genders 22. Ellen E. Berry
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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