monolithic idea, as opposed to Russia the many-sided historical reality.37 She argues that hidden underneath the “spirituality” of such writers as Rasputin, who, as we have seen, call for a return to “Mother Russia,” to the soil, conceived as the source of identity (Sheveleva is another example), there is a perverse embodiment, in the sense that spiritual qualities are linked to a specific territory and a specific nation. The nation is not defined in terms of coexistence through citizenship, but by the link of blood. The “people” are thought of as a biological entity. According to Ivanova, this concept of the “body politic” minimizes the possibility of heterogeneity. For Ivanova gender politics plays a crucial role in the conservative construction of the so-called “Russian idea.” Love for Russia is eroticized in the publicistic writings of the conservative authors, whereas in their fiction romantic love is absent, and young women, and female sexuality in general, are portrayed in extremely negative terms. Ivanova writes “all the emotional content is oriented toward the fecund womb.” Sexuality is divorced from maternity. She goes on to say that in the writing of Rasputin and Belov “the more we are called on to love the Motherland, the less sexually mature is the relationship between the heroes to women as women.”38 We have already discussed Rasputin’s horror at “modern” Russian women, be they of the late nineteenth or the late twentieth century. In Ivanova’s view, this eroticized love for Mother Russia, “insulted and injured by foreign rapists” is tantamount to symbolic incest. According to Ivanova, since the nationalists believe Mother Russia to have perished, their love for her is also equivalent to “necrofilia.” Ivanova polemically turns the tables on Rasputin, who sees sexual pathology in modern women. Ivanova “diagnoses” sexual pathology in Rasputin.
IV. FROM MOTHER RUSSIA TO “LIVING IN RUSSIA” 39
Gorenshtein and Ivanova attack the myth of Mother Russia head on. Both can be said to use the techniques of carnivalization, in the sense that they lend a grotesque embodiment to the exalted spiritual love for Mother Russia touted in nationalist writing. Gorenshtein carnivalizes Mother Russia herself and Ivanova carnivalizes love for Mother Russia. Gorenshtein explicitly links his absurd “hypostases of Russia” with surrealist writing, and Ivanova’s claim about conservative incest and necrofilia can be seen in a similar light, as surrealist criticism. The technique of carnivalization figures importantly in the literary works of several prominent Russian women authors, including, for example, Tat’iana Tolstaia and Ludmila Petrushevskaia, both of whom have been translated into English.40 Helena Goscilo argues that these authors use the female body as a source of “rhetorical devices” that oppose the standard male-authored tropes. According to Goscilo, Petrushevskaia emphasizes “the body as a site of violence” and “hyperbolized ingestion and regurgitation.”41 Goscilo sees Tolstaia’s techniques of irony as a way of “descrediting the paradigm of stable home, marriage, motherhood, and domestic cares” — a paradigm that, as we have seen, has taken on a political edge in the works of Russian conservative nationalists.42
In contrast to this parodic and surrealist writing, the task of demythologizing Mother Russia is also being accomplished by realist writers who focus on everyday Russian life, and in particular, women writers who foreground aspects of women’s experience that previously had been ignored or suppressed in officially sanctioned literature. One aspect of this writing operates on the level of expose. It is now possible to publish work about the horrendous conditions in Russian hospitals, abortion clinics, prisons, and orphanages. Once forbidden topics are now old hat. In recent women’s writing, the theme of the hospital, and of the configuration of the body in illness, both in the hospital and without, is of particular significance.43
In the conservative writing that we discussed earlier, women’s physicality is either divinized or demonized, depending on whether we are speaking about maternity or sexuality. In Rasputin’s “Cherchez la Femme,” Russian woman is either likened to Mary, the mother of God, or to an allegorical Goddess of Destruction. It should be observed that the divinization of women’s ability to bear children is not unique to conservative or to male writers. As Julia Kristeva has observed, the feminine is consecrated as the maternal in Western culture, and Russian culture, with its emphasis on Mary as the Mother of God, is far from exceptional in this regard.44 Natal’ia Sukhanova’s story “Delos,” first published in the liberal journal The New World (Novyi mir) in 1988, is a case in point. Sukhanova, it should be noted, made her literary debut with this story. The narrator, a male obstetrician, philosophizes in the following terms about the pregnant woman:
I do not know anything more beautiful than a pregnant woman … what ideal — cosmic! — roundness of the belly burdened by new life. There is no miracle that is rounder or more even! The son of God also lay with his head down … in the weighdessness of the maternal waters. A world within a world … I do not know anything baser than the obligation to help a woman get rid of a baby!45
The pregnant woman, in this view, has aesthetic, cosmological, and Christian significance. But on the very next page, the same narrator castigates “literature” for its descriptions of maternity as “necessarily sacred.” If women are cruel, he reflects, then they are portrayed as “the children of hell.” He concludes: “But labor and pregnancy — it’s indecent to write about such things — men’s passion might be dulled.” The narrator’s paean to pregnancy is ironically undercut by his own characterization of literary stereotypes.46
The difference between Sukhanova and Rasputin is the political agenda. Rasputin links alleged female sexual pathology to female political violence. Furthermore Rasputin metaphorically projects the ills of the Russian nation onto the supposed sexual ills of modern women, who have abandoned their role as mothers and homemakers and therefore suffer from “hysteria.” These very same women are made to bear the symbolic blame for the waywardness of the Russian nation, expelled and dispersed from the national body. In Rasputin, woman’s body is a site for a contest about national identity. Women’s bodies as such and women as individuals are rendered invisible. Women and their bodies are usurped by the Body Politic. Women and their experience are absorbed by this forced symbolic service to the conservative vision of the Russian nation.
In contrast, the women’s writing that I am going to discuss thematizes the problem of women as individuals in conflict with the state and the oppressive conditions that it imposes on ordinary life. The hospital is the site where this conflict unfolds. In both stories to be discussed the hospital and the prison are explicitly linked. Iulia Voznesenskaia’s The Female Decameron (Zhenskii dekameron), first published in Russian in 1987 in Israel, offers an early example.47 Voznesenskaia was one of the founders of a feminist religious group, called “Mariia.” She spent time in Siberia for her work and was exiled from the former Soviet Union in 1980. Her writing is distinguished from the current generation of women writers in Russia in that it is itself a form of dissident activity. In The Female Decameron, ten Soviet women are quarantined in a maternity hospital due to an outbreak of a skin infection. To pass the time, they tell stories — about first love, revenge, jealousy, money, and whether it is better as one of a couple to be left or do the leaving. Among the women characters is a party worker who spouts clichés about the family as the fundamental building block of the state (9). This sort of party slogan is juxtaposed to the list of “forbidden topics” that the other women describe as part of their everyday experience: rape, labor camps (“a camp is a camp, whether it’s under the star or the swastika” [34]), crime, drug use, and abortion.
The work of Marina Palei explicitly takes up the connection between the hospital and the prison. Palei, one of the “new” women writers, spent some time as a medical student in Leningrad, but finished her studies at the literary institute instead. She has published in the “liberal” journals, in a 1991 anthology called The New Amazons, and has a collection of her own. In the preface to her “Day of the Catkins,” Marina Palei writes:
I only wanted to show the exceptional peculiarity of that
