The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

In this new climate, the Tolstoyan pole of post-Stalinist writing met its rival in a revived, more dialogic and ironical Dostoevskian pole. What seemed to appeal most was Dostoevsky’s apocalyptically dark side, a cynicism that endorsed neither the spiritual generosity of the positive characters (Sonya, Alyosha, the Elder Zosima) nor Bakhtin’s celebrated polyphony, which detected in Dostoevsky the optimistic unfinalizability of all utterances. The new Dostoevsky was a dead-ended Muse. Solzhenitsyn, in the terms laid down in his 1993 National Arts Club speech, would recognize in this newly fashionable desperate literature the “pessimistic relativism” inseparable, in his view, from postmodernism. These dark intonations pervade the work of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya.

The Underground Woman (Petrushevskaya)

Women in Russian literature, and Russian women as writers of literature, have not been a focus of the present book. A brief sketch of the legacy might therefore be useful. The Swiss author Madame de Stae¨l (1766–1817) and French novelist and feminist George Sand (1804–76) were both avidly read in

From the first Thaw to the end 231

nineteenth-century Russia, as elsewhere on the continent. But Russian authors and readers alike were soon captivated by two domestically produced ideal types: woman as Muse (Pushkin’s Tatyana Larina) and woman as religiously inflected “savior” of a sinning man (Dostoevsky’s Sonya Marmeladova). To some extent both became restrictive models, a fate hinted at by the title of one pioneering book that confronts this tradition head on, Terrible Perfection: Women in Russian Literature.14 Tolstoy broke with both models in his Anna Karenina (1879), arguably the first great Russian heroine in a title role who existed and suffered for her own sake, not as an index to lessons being learned by a man.

In the 1920s, the era of Gladkov’s Cement, a new paradigm emerges. Without a doubt Dasha Chumalova fails as the parent of an immediately present and needy child. But we should not ignore the fact that she succeeds, and was designed to succeed, as the mouthpiece for a radically new, more self-respecting sort of male–female love. Our horror at Nyurka’s starvation in the Children’s Home, while her mother attends political meetings and studies Marxism-Leninism, overshadows the final word that Dasha utters in the novel. She has just gathered her pillow and bundle and informed Gleb that the pretense of living together as husband and wife is over. Gleb is still raging, as he had been in the opening chapters: first at her withdrawal, now at her betrayal of him with Comrade Badin. He calls Badin a “worthless scoundrel” who has “gobbled up” both his wife and comrade Polya (p. 308) – and fingers his pistol. On this score, his “consciousness” has made no gains against “spontaneity.” But with sex as with everything else merely personal (except, temporarily, her daughter’s death), Dasha remains calm. “Love will always be love, Gleb, but it requires a new form,” she tells her husband. “I shall come to you, go on, my darling . . . We shall find each other again. But bound by other ties, Gleb?”

By the mid-1930s, the conservative Stalinist revolution firmly placed “family values” front and center. Although women had been liberated full-time into the urban workforce ever since the 1920s, in their socialist realist dimension they were increasingly depicted nursing babies in the sunlight or harvesting grain with scythes or tractors. World War II exacerbated the tensions inherent in those dual roles as robust, relaxed mother and economic producer. When so many men did not come home, women stayed on as engineers, doctors, factory workers, sharpshooters and machine-gunners. They became the “positive heroines” in literary plots that still tended to feature feeble, drunken, inconstant, and superfluous men. The Russian super-heroine does everything. She is both surgeon and street-sweeper. Heavy physical labor has long been part of her lot, and female sobriety and longevity an economic necessity. As one impatient female voice put it in the 1980s, “national disgrace” comes not when

232 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

women are idle trophy wives at home but when they are out shoveling icy snowdrifts and pouring asphalt “that is then pressed by a steamroller driven by a

man.”15