the state and the people or nation is not gender neutral. The state, be it Tsarist or Soviet, is constructed as masculine, and the people or nation as feminine. As Joanna Hubbs shows, the bifurcation between “Father Tsar” and “Mother Russia” can be traced back to the reign of Ivan the Terrible, but a similar division of roles persists throughout the Soviet period.1 Nina Perlina points out that although the Russian word for “revolution” is grammatically feminine, the historical revolution “was largely a masculine undertaking” and was mythologized as such.2
The radical Utopias projected by such revolutionary feminists as Aleksandra Kollantai did little to dislodge traditional Russian gender mythologies. Kollantai, writing in 1921, says that the pregnant woman “ceases to belong to herself — she is in service to the collective — she ‘produces’ out of her own flesh and blood a new unit of work, a new member of the labor republic.”3 According to Kollantai, the needs of the family will be provided by the state in the form of communal housing, communal kitchens, children’s homes, and day-care centers, making it possible for women to combine professional work and family life. This revolutionary restructuring of everyday life was never realized. Furthermore, notwithstanding Kollantai’s Marxist definition of motherhood not as reproduction but as production, Soviet ideology revitalized the traditional myth of Mother Russia.
Maia Turovskaia, a feminist critic writing in post-Soviet Russia, traces the representation of this mythology in films made during the time of Stalin. The 1939 film The Member of the Government constructs the heroine’s genealogy as a creature of the party of Lenin and Stalin — as Turovskaia puts it, as a creature of “an all-encompassing patriarchal Will.” Chosen to become a member of the Supreme Soviet, Aleksandra Sokolova proclaims: “Here I stand before you, a simple Russian woman [she uses the somewhat derogatory term “baba”], beaten by my husband, frightened by the priest, shot at by our enemies. … And the party and our Soviet power elevated us and me as well to this tribune.”4 Turovskaia shows how in the postwar film The Oath the heroine is transformed into a mythologized “Mother Russia.” The heroine presents a letter written by her husband to Lenin to his new incarnation, Stalin, and in so doing embodies, as Turovskaia puts it, “a purely Russian mythology: the Motherland [Rodinamat’] before the face of the Father of nations.”5
Far from disappearing with the last vestiges of Soviet power, this mythology of Mother Russia, together with certain related constructions of the feminine, have reappeared with particular force during recent years, against the backdrop of glasnost, perestroika, and the collapse of the Soviet empire.6 These political changes have also made possible the creation and publication of new forms of criticism, both literary and social. A new generation of writers has appeared, among whom women writers figure importantly. Collections specifically devoted to “women’s writing” — certainly a vague and problematic term — have been steadily published at least since the late 1980s.
This chapter seeks to provide an overview of the reconfiguration of Mother Russia and the responses, both direct and indirect, to her resurrection. I will begin with the writings of politically conservative authors, some of whom are well known outside Russia. I will show how the revision of Mother Russia is itself a response to the perception of a breakdown in the political, social, and natural order. I then turn to a specific response to these writings in the work of two very different authors, both of whom can loosely be identified as politically “liberal.” The last section of the essay examines the prose of several new Russian women authors, tracing how and to what extent their configurations of woman represent “oppositionalist” writing. What strategies are deployed in this writing to defamiliarize Mother Russia? Of particular importance here will be the image of the female body.
I. MOTHER RUSSIA: TAKE ONE
A 1988 essay by the literary critic Irina Sheveleva, entitled “The Feminine and the Maternal” offers a very clear example of the conservative construction of woman and the nation.7 For Sheveleva the feminine is identified with the home and the homeland. The essence of the feminine is the sense of belonging to a place and a people. In her discussion of women’s poetry Sheveleva writes that “the poetess does not only imprint ‘nature,’ she conveys the sense of her own native belonging” (166). The “earth, one’s own native tongue, and strong native roots” constitute for Sheveleva woman’s “dowry.” The familiar intimate landscape of the home is linked to the overarching ethnic construct of the national group and the political construct of the nation. Woman, as keeper of the home, bears, but does not define, the values of the nation. Sheveleva asks “To be the mistress of your own home —what could be more natural for a woman?” To be mistress means to be the home itself, “to bear its habits and customs in your blood” (166). The link between the home and the nation is enhanced by the woman’s reproductive function, by means of which she has access to “the most intimate secrets of being” (167). Sheveleva chastises the poet Bela Akhmadulina for writing that her baby makes it impossible for her to work, for there is no greater creative work for a woman than caring for a child. But significantly, this theme of the maternal is subordinate to the theme of the home and the native soil and speech. “To accuse women poets of nostalgic patriarchalism, of an attachment to an age-old image of home, of the hearth, is the same as accusing them of being women” (167). To paraphrase Sheveleva, the primary social problem facing Russia today is the need for women to return home, and the primary function of the woman poet is to preserve her “inherited native word.”
For all her concern with the home and the domestic as opposed to the public sphere, Sheveleva’s construction of the feminine places woman once again at the service of the nation. The domestic, in Sheveleva’s reading, does not mark out the space in which the individual is free from the state, as in traditional Western liberal ideology. For Western middle-class women, the domestic sphere became a prison, but for Soviet and Eastern bloc women and men, the family could be a refuge. In How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed Slavenka Drakulic writes: “When there is no space in society to express your individuality the family becomes the only territory in which one can form it, exercise it, prove it, express it.” But Drakulic goes on to say that “a family is too limiting, there is not space enough in it for self-expression either.”8 In more extreme conditions of the labor camp, the domestic offered a form of resistance. Evgenia Ginzburg, who spent seventeen years in the gulag for not denouncing someone, describes how the recreation of some smattering of a domestic space within the prison barracks offers the female prisoners a moment of reprieve from the police state of the prison.9 For some contemporary Russian feminists, the collapse of Soviet ideology with its emphasis on work, service, and its derogation of the private sphere, means the ideological possibility, if not the economic one, of abandoning the work force and returning home.10 Under the Soviet system, not working at a government-approved position was tantamount to the crime of “parasitism.” The poet Joseph Brodskii was charged with this crime. But for Sheveleva, in contrast, the domestic space, far from offering an alternative to the state, and by the same token, woman, the keeper of the domestic space, are both vessels which are to preserve the identity of the larger national entity, and reproduce its values and language. Indeed, there is no distinction between the public and the private, no moment or utterance that is free from the new totality of nation, blood, and soil that Sheveleva and others like her wish to reestablish for Russia. Sheveleva’s construction of the feminine and of the “homeland” denies history, sexuality, and rejects difference altogether. The notion of cultural or social intercourse with culturally distinct others as a constituent part of identity is conspicuously absent from her view. The same absence can be noted in other similar conservative writers publishing in Our Contemporary (“Nash sovremennik”), most notably Ksenia Mialo, a participant in a 1993 roundtable entitled “The State of the Russian Nation,” who advises “a strict Russocentrism in every word about our future” and urges “all Russians to concentrate on what is their own, their own, their own.”11 This emphasis on homogeneity and inwardness, evidenced in Sheveleva’s statement that “for the sensation of the limitlessness of that which is one’s own one
