Genders 22. Ellen E. Berry
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in which the body sloughs off its skin and mucous membranes. To render the human individual as only body is to kill, but to deprive the human being of unique embodiment is also to deny the possibility of selfhood.
In “The Sterile Zone” Irina Polianskaia, another recent woman author, also publishing in the collection The New Amazons, takes a different approach to the theme of women and the hospital, emphasizing not the physical, but the existential side of women’s experience there. A woman, the first-person narrator of the story, enters the hospital for an operation. She elcomes the chance to escape the constant oppressive presence of others in her daily life, in particular, her neighbor, with whom she must share a kitchen and bathroom, and who appears to the narrator as a tormentor, epitomizing her lack of privacy, and threatening her very existence as an individual. The narrator describes how the hospital stay will provide her with a unique opportunity for “complete solitude, inviolable independence”53 denied her by the political and economic conditions of life in Russia. The woman’s body is to be violated — by the surgeon’s knife — but her sense of self is enhanced. In the second part of the story, the narrator imagines another “sterile zone.” She pictures her father’s life in a labor camp many years earlier, and how the primitive scientific laboratory he might have been able to establish would have provided him with the same sense of well-being that she now experiences in her “sterile zone.” Only in the hospital and in the prison can the individual experience him- or herself as an autonomous being.
Polianskaia’s story, in one sense, recapitulates a theme familiar to readers of Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. The hospital and the prison provide the opportunity for spiritual renewal. In Dostoevsky’s “The Peasant Marei” and in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, for example, the first-person narrators describe a quasi-religious conversion and a sense of unity with all of suffering Russia. What distinguishes Polianskaia’s story is that the heroine finds a momentary release from the enforced collective existence that she ordinarily leads. Her sense of renewal is not in union with “Russia,” but independence from “Russia.” Her brief escape into individuality — a value highly criticized by Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Sheveleva, and Rasputin — comes at the cost of great physical suffering.
Polianskaia’s heroine undertakes a heroic quest for solitude and privacy (for which there is no adequate Russian word), and more fundamentally, a sense of autonomous selfhood. Given the distortions of life in Russia, she can only do this from her hospital bed. Polianskaia’s heroine wants to be able to define the boundaries of her own “I” without being subject to the unwanted and unpredictable intrusion of others. In contrast, in Belov’s Raising Children According to Doctor Spock, Tonia is vilified for her desire for independence. The question of autonomy brings us back to problems raised at the beginning of this essay. The revolutionary feminist Aleksandra Kollantai promoted the idea that the pregnant woman “ceases to belong to herself,” but belongs instead to the collective. In the Stalinist years, women were represented as the creation of an “all encompassing patriarchal will.” Throughout twentieth-century Russian history, the left and the right sought to harness women both physically and symbolically to a mythologized collectivity, whether it be the Socialist Russia or, as in the most recent conservative vision, a newly ingathered Mother Russia. The engendering of the Russian body politic as feminine renders individual women invisible and unrepresentable as such. The reembodying of women’s bodies — not in the pornographic images that have drawn so much attention in the press — and the reinvention of the idea of individuality may help to unravel trends that have held sway for so long.
NOTES
I am grateful to Bruce Rosenstock and Anna Kaladiouk for their helpful comments on this chapter.
1. See Joanna Hubbs, “From Saindy Son to Autocratic Father: The Myth of the Ruler” in Hubbs, Mother Russia: The Femine Myth in Russian Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 167–206.
2. See Nina Perlina, “From the Editors,” Russian Review 51, no. 2 (April 1992): v and 156 of the same issue, where Perlina discusses the symbolic adoption of the revolutionary heroine Larisa Reisner into a divinized and patriarchal Bolshevik Pantheon.
3. Aleksandra Kollontai, “Revoliutsia byta,” reprinted in Iskusstvo kino 6 (1991): 108.
4. Cited by Maia Turovskaia, “Zhenshchina i kino,” Iskusstvo kino 6 (1991): 136.
5. Ibid., 137. For more on gender roles and the culture of Stalinism, see Beth Holmgren, Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time: On Lydiia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelstam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 5–14.
6. For comparable trends in other parts of the world and other historical time periods, see Gender and History: Special Issue on Gender, Nationalisms and National Identities 5, no. 2 (Summer 1993), and in particular Samita Sen’s “Motherhood and Mothercraft: Gender and Nationalism in Bengal,” 231–43 and Beth Baron, “The Construction of National Honor in Egypt,” 244–55. For a comparable discussion of gender and nationalism in the Ukraine, see Solomea Pavlychko, “Between Feminism and Nationalism: New Women’s Groups in the Ukraine,” in Perestroika and Soviet Women, ed. Mary Buckley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 82–96.
7. Irina Sheveleva, “Zhenskoe i materinskoe …,” Nash sovremennik 3 (1988): 165–68. Further references to this work will be included parenthetically in the text.
8. Slavenka Drakulic, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 107.
9. See Evgenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967) and Within the Whirlwind, 1979.
10. See for example Larissa Lissyutkina, “Soviet Woman at the Crossroads of Perestroika,” in Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, ed. Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller (New York: Routledge, 1993), 274–86.
11. Ksenia Mialo, “V kakom sostoianii nakhoditsia russkaia natsiia,” Nash sovremennik 3 (1993): 153.
12. Sheveleva, “Zhenskoe i materinskoe,” 168.
13. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Appendix II,” in Bakthin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 287.
14. For a sympathetic study of village prose, see Kathleen F. Parthe, Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
15. David Gillespie, “A Paradise Lost? Siberia and Its Writers, 1960 to 1990,” in Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture, ed. Galya Diment and Yuri Slezkine (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), 253.
16. Valentin Rasputin, “Proshchanie s Materoi,” in Poslednii srok, Proshchanie s Materoi: Povesti i rasskazy (Moscow: Sovetsii pisatel’, 1985), 228.
17. Ibid., 285.
18. Ibid., 237.
19. Barbara Heldt, “Gynoglasnost: writing the feminine,” in Buckley, Perestroika and Soviet Women, 167.
20. Gillespie, 261.
21. For Plato, see Bruce Rosenstock, “Athena’s Cloak: Plato’s Critique of the Democratic City in the Republic,” forthcoming in Political Theory. The triad of fashion, illness, and fat appears in Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata.”
22. Cited by Rasputin, “Cherchez la Femme,” Nash sovremennik 3 (1990): 168.
23. See, for example, Chapter 6, “Feminism and Hysteria: The Daughter’s Disease,” of Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 145–64; and also In Doras Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
24. Rasputin, “Cherchez la