Genders 22. Ellen E. Berry
Читать онлайн книгу.
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.
II. MOTHER RUSSIA: TAKE TWO
In 1992 the Russian emigré writer Fridrikh Gorenshtein published a short story entitled “Last Summer on the Volga” in the liberal journal The Banner (“Znavnia”). Gorenshtein, the author of a number of film scripts, including “Solarus” and “A Slave of Love,” began to attract critical attention in the former Soviet Union in 1991. “Last Summer on