The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

In Anna’s accounts, especially her rewrites of the constant vicious family squabbling, she is the heroine and sole provider. Reasons to sympathize with her certainly exist, although undercut by her own self-importance and preemptive irony. Aspiring writers – we know this from Dostoevsky – cannot be trusted. It is interesting that Western critics of The Time: Night overwhelmingly distrust Anna and consider her abusive, dishonest, and manipulative, whereas Russian readings can be quite compassionate. In one 2005 guide to contemporary literature for high school students, Anna is classified as a tragic figure, an “aging, poverty-stricken poetess” burdened by a criminal son, a depraved daughter, a senile mother, a sick grandson, and here she is a working woman, doing her best, alone and lonely – in a word, Petrushevskaya (says the female author of the guide) gives us nothing at all like playful postmodernism, only “harsh realism.”20

One day Anna comes home to find that her daughter, unhinged by their last fight, has taken all her children away. The apartment is deserted. At last Anna is completely alone and needed by no one: the authentic enabling condition for the Underground has arrived. At this point the manuscript breaks off. Doubtless Anna Adrianovna, as she falls silent, recalls the second poem in Akhmatova’s “Requiem,” a tiny lyric of four couplets, the last two of which read: “This woman is sick, / This woman is alone, / Husband in the grave, son in prison, / Pray for me.” The Time: Night is submitted to a publishing house anonymously by the daughter Alyona, and appears to be posthumous. But if this Anna, following her Tolstoyan prototype, has committed suicide in order to punish those who have ceased to need her, that story is discreetly in the margins.

In the vastlyexpandedpoolof Russian literaryplotsbyandaboutwomen, The Time: Night stands out not only because it is written so graphically on the body, where a great deal of the drama of female life is focused. Equally important, women are allowed to be tested and to fail on what was traditionally male terrain (honor, creativity, supporting a family), making use of men’s excuses. Anna Adrianovna doesn’t have a man of her own in sight, to save or to ruin, and she does not perish out of disappointed (or jealous, or unrequited) love – that powerful but narrow and hopelessly cliche´d plot. Is she a tragic figure, a superfluous one, a duplicitous one, perhaps even a comedy villain? As with all first-person narration under the star of Dostoevsky, no single answer suffices. But we can speak to the games being played. The interminable Underground identity game – “Here I am. But don’t pin me down. The real me is over here” – is to a certain extent endorsed by Dostoevsky. He cares that human

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beings not be manipulated or denied their freedom of choice. “Anna” might even be the conventional nomination for this burden of the flesh. In 1990, Viktor Erofeyev’s three-page story, “Anna’s Body,” appeared in an anthology of glasnost-era writings.21 The plot takes place mostly in bed, alone, during one of her nightmares, amid cigarettes and cognac, lamenting her lost youth and the lovers who had jilted her. Various parts of that body had been going out of control for some time: “Sometimes Anna felt that she was Anna Karenina, sometimes – Anna Akhmatova, sometimes just an Anna on the neck.” At the end of her reverie she turned off the light, “passed her dry tongue over her lips, and, as in an old fairy tale, gobbled up the man she loved.”

Viktor Erofeyev (b. 1947, not to be confused with Venedikt Erofeyev, 1933– 88, author of the phantasmagoric Moscow to the End of the Line) is a skilled male practitioner of “women’s prose.” It is no accident that his Anna in Bed eats her men, like some latter-day Baba Yaga. In Erofeyev’s novel Russian Beauty (1990), the high-class prostitute Irina Tarakanova, in search of true love, moves to Moscow, compromises a wide circle of Russian dissidents, then forms a mystical union with an elderly man whose child she conceives after he is already deceased. Hailed as both a “Russian Molly Bloom” and a “Russian Moll Flanders,” Erofeyev’s sex-queen also recalls a more local prototype updated to psychedelic dimensions: Martona, the “debauched woman” of Chulkov’s 1770 Comely Cook.