Genders 22. Ellen E. Berry
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along the Volga before leaving for Berlin. The narrator finds himself surrounded by “symbols” of Russia in the form of two women whom he encounters. These symbols are quite similar to what we have already seen in Rasputin and Belov, but they are given an ironic twist. It is very likely that Gorenshtein refers to Rasputin and Belov indirectly in a scene in which the narrator goes to a restaurant occupied mostly by drunks, who, while realizing that he is not a “local,” do not reject him. The narrator comments “in the company of ‘Russian wisemen’ you can’t sit incognito.”35 In other words, the “Russian wisemen,” or Russian nationalists, always keep tabs on who is who, who is Russian, who is Jewish, and so forth. “Last Summer on the Volga” as a whole, as we will see, is a parodic response to the “village prose” and postvillage prose of Rasputin and Belov. While in the restaurant the narrator meets a pale blonde, reduced to begging. She eats food left on other people’s plates and lives in a shack along the river with a doll for company and a suitcase full of scraps of bread, which she eats with damp gray salt wrapped in a rag. Because of her pallor, and a “lifeless” sinful quality about her, the narrator compares her to a “rusalka.” The woman, Liuba, tells the narrator that she has served time in a prison camp for the murder of her mother-in-law, and that she is stranded in this small town on the Volga because she does not have enough money to return to her village and family. The narrator decides that Liuba, “the beggar rusalka,” is a symbol of all of Russia.
The second symbol is an old woman with nondescript features, “the kind you see many of and therefore don’t notice.” What makes this particular old woman so striking is the “enormous pig’s head” she holds against her chest, close to her own head. The pig’s head gives the old woman “individuality.” The narrator is “amazed” at the correspondence between the physical features and expression of the old woman and the pig. It strikes him that the old woman is the perfect image for Liuba’s mother-in-law, the “criminal-victim.” Furthermore the old woman with the pig’s head is a “second hypostasis of Russia, who tramples on and consumes everything around her … and in the first place, herself” (50). The narrator concludes that the traditional image of the Russian maiden meeting the “black limousines” of the government officials with bread and salt should be replaced by his two hypostases of the old woman, “Mother-in-Law Russia” carrying an aspic made of her own head, and Liuba, bringing her bread crusts and “damp gray salt.”
The grotesque old woman is at once perpetrator and victim, a Mother Russia, or, as Gorenshtein mockingly puts it, “Mother-in-Law Russia,” who feeds not Father Tsar or Father Stalin, but Father Apparatchik with her own flesh. The contrasts between Gorenshtein’s “Mother-in-Law Russia” and Rasputin’s Dar’ia are striking. Gorenshtein’s old woman destroys her home by goading her daughter-in-law to murder; Dar’ia is the conservator of hearth and home. Dar’ia is very nearly fleshless and belongs more to the spirit world of her ancestors than to the here and now. Gorenshtein’s Mother-in-Law is emphatically corporeal; her alter ego, the pig’s head, has features that “swim in fat.” In her self-destroying and self-rejuvenating fleshiness, Gorenshtein’s Mother-in-Law carnivalizes the saintly spirituality of the old women of village prose.
The final irony of Gorenshtein’s “Last Summer on the Volga” is turned against the narrator himself. The rusalka-beggar Liuba turns out not to be what he first thought. When at the end of the story the narrator unfolds the piece of paper on which “Liuba” has written her address, he finds only the name written over and over, with pictures of the sun, moon, clouds, and crosses. “Liuba” had been playing a part, the part she knew was expected of her: the criminal victim with the heart of gold. The narrator’s second “hypostasis of Russia” steps out of her prescribed role, at the same time masking her true identity. Gorenshtein’s rusalka remains a cipher, unlike the vicious child abusing rusalka of Belov’s Raising Children According to Dr. Spock. “Liuba” ultimately rejects the narrator’s literary stereotypes.36
III. MOTHER RUSSIA DECONSTRUCTED
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.
IV. FROM MOTHER RUSSIA TO “LIVING IN RUSSIA” 39
Gorenshtein and Ivanova attack the myth of Mother Russia head on. Both can be said to use the techniques of carnivalization, in the sense that they lend a grotesque embodiment to the exalted spiritual love for Mother Russia touted in nationalist writing. Gorenshtein carnivalizes Mother Russia herself and Ivanova carnivalizes love for Mother Russia. Gorenshtein explicitly links his absurd “hypostases of Russia” with surrealist writing, and Ivanova’s claim about conservative incest and necrofilia can be seen in a similar light, as surrealist criticism. The technique of carnivalization figures importantly in the literary works of several prominent Russian women authors, including, for example, Tat’iana Tolstaia and Ludmila Petrushevskaia, both of whom have been translated into English.40 Helena Goscilo argues that these authors use the female body as a source of “rhetorical devices” that oppose the standard male-authored tropes. According to Goscilo, Petrushevskaia emphasizes “the body as a site of violence” and “hyperbolized ingestion and regurgitation.”41 Goscilo sees Tolstaia’s techniques of irony as a way of “descrediting the paradigm of stable home, marriage, motherhood, and domestic cares” — a paradigm that, as we have seen, has taken on a political edge in the works of Russian conservative nationalists.42
In contrast to this parodic and surrealist writing, the task of demythologizing Mother Russia is also being accomplished by realist writers who focus on everyday Russian life, and in particular, women writers who foreground aspects of women’s experience that previously had been ignored or suppressed in officially sanctioned literature. One aspect of this writing operates on the level of expose. It is now possible to publish work about the horrendous conditions in Russian hospitals, abortion clinics, prisons, and orphanages. Once forbidden topics are now old hat. In recent women’s writing, the theme of the hospital, and of the configuration of the body in illness, both in the hospital and without, is of particular significance.43
In the conservative writing that we discussed earlier, women’s physicality is either divinized or demonized, depending on whether we are speaking about maternity or sexuality. In Rasputin’s “Cherchez la Femme,” Russian woman is either likened to Mary, the mother of God, or to an allegorical