their families, and by extension, all of Russia? From an unwanted intrusion of otherness and change. Translated into national terms, this means restoring and conserving the Russianness of Russia, protecting Russia from heterogeneity. The anxiety over “otherness” evidenced in Rasputin, Sheveleva, and as we will shortly see, another conservative writer, Belov, emerges fullblown as blatant anti-Semitism in their colleague at Our Contemporary, Igor Shafarevich, whose notorious essay “Russophobia” characterizes Jews as a hostile subnation within the greater nation of Russia.26
The anxiety over otherness in Rasputin is not limited to questions of ethnic identity, but can be traced to the level of gender. A profound distrust of women’s otherness lies at the roots of the ideological construction of Rasputin’s Matera and “Cherchez la Femme.” Woman, let out of the house, is not simply dangerous to herself, but to man. In the myth of autochthony that writers like Rasputin seek to create, the original Russians would, like the sown men of ancient Thebes, spring into being without sexual intercourse, and the Russian nation would arise without communication or contact with the outside world — recall Ksenia Mialo’s emphasis on Russocentrism. This myth defines women as the first outsiders, the first nonnatives. They are emblematic of all difference and diversity.
Rasputin’s masculinist myth is concealed under an insistence on the proto-feminine origins of Russian culture: “at the foundations of our culture lie feminine principles.” He reminds his readers of the role of the cult of Mary as the protector of Russia, whose repeated intercession, it was believed, saved Russia from “enemies and misfortunes.” Rasputin writes: “Russia from time immemorial believed in itself as the Home of the Mother of God.”27 According to Rasputin, modern Russian women have forgotten that they carry within them “the stamp of the mother of God.” The author’s vision of women eliminates actual historical Russian women, especially those who happen not to be Orthodox Christians. Extrapolating from Rasputin’s argument, a Russian “her-story” can be traced, in which each stage corresponds to a particular construction of Woman, who either serves, rejects, or betrays Man. Premodern, patriarchal Russia corresponds to Russia as the mother of God. Late nineteenth-and late twentieth-century Russia — each time period representing a collapse of Empire — corresponds to Russia the hysterical woman. A further parallel between these two periods is that in each, feminism begins to emerge. To restate the analysis given earlier, Rasputin’s diagnosis for each is the same: when women express desires of their own, they forget and deny their truest selves. In repressing their desire to be mothers and homemakers, women become hysterics. A close relative of the Hysteric is a figure that Rasputin calls the Goddess of Revenge and Destruction. Rasputin uses this label for several late nineteenth-century women revolutionaries — Vera Zasulich, who shot at the Governor General of St. Petersburg in 1878 and was acquitted by the jury, and the women who participated in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Mother Russia’s “sick” daughters turn on Father Tsar. The rage and repressed desire formerly expressed in the hysteric’s language of symptoms is turned outward, against Russia.
It seems that Rasputin fears a resurgence of female violence in the present, or rather, that this violence has infected society as whole. Late twentieth-century Russian society has become feminized in the sense that it has gone mad. Rasputin speaks of its “inability to provide itself with necessities, unwillingness to give of itself in work” and “violent passion for complete license.”28 In this language of unbridled desire and unwillingness for sacrifice is a portrait of woman undomesticated. In accordance with the particular cast of his gender politics, Rasputin links the breakdown of post-Soviet Russian society as a whole with a perceived “breakdown” — this is Rasputin’s word — of Russian women in particular. Rasputin’s characterization of society’s “madness” follows immediately upon his description of the “tragic breakdown of woman,” portrayed in, among other literary works, Vasilii Belov’s Raising Children According to Doctor Spock.
Belov’s story chronicles the collapse of the Zorin family. The setting is an unnamed urban area. Zorin, a low-level construction supervisor with a drinking problem, is in constant conflict with his wife, Tonia, who works in a library and earns more than he. Tonia sees “a threat to her independence in his every action.”29 He only wants closeness, she, only distance. The narrator’s and Zorin’s point of view are indistinguishable here. Zorin is passionately devoted to his little daughter, Lial’ka — unlike Tonia, who, in his words, wants to turn her into a “walking robot” by raising her in senseless obedience to Dr. Spock’s principles. “She has to urinate and move her bowels at a definite time of the day!” thinks the exasperated Zorin. For American readers, this portrait of Dr. Spock is somewhat startling, since Spock is known and even blamed for a lack of discipline in his approach to the upbringing of children. In the episode that marks the beginning of the end, Tonia takes Lial’ka for her regular evening walk even when the child is obviously feverish. The next day Zorin is called from the day-care center to bring her home. Shortly thereafter Lial’ka is hospitalized with pneumonia, and her mother refuses to stay overnight with her. Zorin leaves home. He spends a short time with his boss Fridburg, but feels uncomfortable with the “falsely hospitable atmosphere of the Jewish family.” Note the gratuitous anti-Semitism of the narrator’s characterization.
Near the end of the story, after having been fired from his job, in part due to the letters of complaint written against him by his wife, Zorin muses on the nature of women in general. There is something “fish-like and cold” in women, especially in their tolerance for abortions. He thinks about the “rusalki,” the powerful female figures in Russian folklore associated with water and woods, dangerous to men. Women who drowned were believed to become “rusalki.”30 Zorin imagines his wife as a rusalka, who figuratively “drowned” in her job and in her quest for emancipation and then turned on him in revenge. Zorin thinks: “They put their husbands in prison and write denunciations against them.”31 The story’s final scene takes place on the street. Tonia beats Lial’ka for disobedience and walks off, leaving her to her father’s comforting embrace. From Rasputin’s and Belov’s point of view, the “tragic breakdown of modern woman” is not only her betrayal of man, but her violence against her children, born and unborn. Modern woman, in this view, is a threat to the future of Russia. Rasputin’s most recent word on Mother Russia can be found in the 1993 roundtable on “The State of the Russian Nation,” which I have already touched upon. Here Rasputin’s tone shifts to a lament over the collapse of the Russian empire. The passage is worth quoting in full:
Even now we do not know the condition of the Russian nation, whether she can still be found in one national body, or whether because of the most recent shocks, attacks, and hostilities, she has been shaken loose from it and scattered among Russian cities and villages which do not have any spiritual or blood ties among them. We will hope that things have not reached this point and that the national instinct and the national memory have not yet been beaten out of us forever. And if this is so, if the nation for all her tragic losses is alive — towards what should we turn for her ingathering, cure, and mobilization, if not to the national spirit, where shall we seek support, if not in national worth and national conscience?32
The word that I have translated as “nation,” natsiia, is grammatically feminine. Rasputin avoids the term “narod” (people), which is grammatically masculine, and similarly the grammatically neutral “gosudarstvo,” which suggests a politically formed entity, and is usually translated as “government.” The passage reveals a certain confusion in its metaphors. It is difficult to say exactly what the difference is between the nation and the “national body.” It seems that the nation refers to a spiritual quality or identity, and the national body to the physical territory of the former Soviet Union or of Russia. However, Rasputin goes on to draw a distinction between the nation, on the one hand, and the national memory, the national spirit, and the national conscience, on the other, all of which must be relied upon for the “ingathering, cure, and mobilization” of the nation. It is not clear what is meant by the “national body” out from which the “nation” has been “shaken.”
The language of diaspora
