simplicity reveals the basis of life and death, corresponds to the nature of the army barracks, the prison cell, the module of a spacecraft, the barracks of a concentration camp. … The list could be continued.48
The hospital, like the other institutions on Palei’s list (with the possible exception of the spaceship), is a place of punitive state control. The Foucauldian overtones of the hospital-prison link have been noted by several authors.49
It is significant that in Palei’s “The Day of the Catkins” the two patients are women. The first is dying of liver cancer, which has been discovered by the surgery she has just undergone. She is tormented by thirst, but is forbidden to drink for unexplained medical reasons. The orderly, a young woman studying to be a doctor, soaks some cotton in water and places it on the woman’s lips. She is embarrassed by the profuse gratitude she receives. When the dying woman asks to be taken out into the fresh air, the surgeon (a man) cruelly replies: “Soon! They’ll carry you out!” The woman is not told in any other way of her condition. The supervising nurse rebukes the orderly for wasting time on a dying patient. The second patient, an old woman operated on for a bowel obstruction, now suffers from uncontrollable diarrhea. Ignoring the nurse’s growing irritation at her, the orderly tirelessly and kindly cleans her and changes her bedding — in violation of the nurse’s order not to “waste linen.” Outside, the poplar catkins which covered the street and stuck to everything — the “dry hot sperm of summer” — have been washed away by rain.
In “Day of the Catkins” women’s bodies are the place where the state’s punitive control reveals itself in starkest terms. In the writing of Rasputin, Sheveleva, and Belov, the intersection between women and the state takes place on a mythological plane. The nation is constructed as feminine, and the supposed moral ills of women correspond to the ills of the nation. The actual conditions of women’s lives are ignored. Marina Palei redresses this silence. The Soviet state and the nationalist writers may find it convenient to glorify mythological images of Mother Russia, but those images belie the state’s brutality toward individual women’s suffering. What makes this brutality more horrifying is that it is an unexamined part of everyday life. To depart from it is a waste of the state’s time and resources. Palei restores the physicality of women’s bodies in nonmythological, “realist” terms. The women patients’ thirst, cold, dizziness, and incontinence all merit simple, humane care. Each of these ills is rendered as part of the physical business of living and dying. Women’s bodies are reembodied. In “The Nymph from the Canal” (“Kabiriia s obvodnogo kanala”) Palei continues her study of the female body in illness.50 The issues that she raises in this work go beyond the framework of Mother Russia. The story might be called an anti-bildungsroman of a young woman with the absurd name Raimonda Rybnaia (“Raimonda” was the name of a French revolutionary, “rybnaia” suggests “fish”). Raimonda discovers the pleasures of sex at an early age. Her capacity for pleasure is not diminished even as she suffers one illness after the other and ultimately dies. Using a series of remarkable images and philosophical digressions, Palei interrogates what Laura Mulvey, in her study of the pleasure of narrative cinema, has called the coding of woman as that which is to be looked at.51 Men are the “controllers of the gaze” and women, the objects on display. I call upon Mulvey’s work not only because it helps us understand what Palei is about in this story, but also because Palei explicitly refers to one of America’s most reproduced film icons. In one scene, a woman’s room is plastered with images from forensic medicine. Different types of bullet holes and strangulations are displayed. In one corner, referred to by the narrator as the “icon corner,” there is a prominent photograph of Marilyn Monroe. The representation of woman as an object of beauty and sexual desire is linked to violence. This violence is perpetrated by the “normal” police power of the state, by “Western” commercial culture, and by the now collapsed Soviet order. Palei subversively links the aesthetic gaze with the medical therapeutic gaze.52 The doctor is likened to a voyeur, and at one point in the story, the presence of the patient at a medical demonstration is compared to a striptease. To cut open the patient, and penetrate into the interior is to render palpable and quantifiable that which ultimately cannot be known. The state’s power and the intrusive therapies of medical science are intertwined. The main character is at once a product of this specularization — she cares mainly about her figure and her supply of cosmetics — but at the same time, she escapes from it. Raimonda suffers from a disease in which the body sloughs off its skin and mucous membranes. To render the human individual as only body is to kill, but to deprive the human being of unique embodiment is also to deny the possibility of selfhood.
In “The Sterile Zone” Irina Polianskaia, another recent woman author, also publishing in the collection The New Amazons, takes a different approach to the theme of women and the hospital, emphasizing not the physical, but the existential side of women’s experience there. A woman, the first-person narrator of the story, enters the hospital for an operation. She elcomes the chance to escape the constant oppressive presence of others in her daily life, in particular, her neighbor, with whom she must share a kitchen and bathroom, and who appears to the narrator as a tormentor, epitomizing her lack of privacy, and threatening her very existence as an individual. The narrator describes how the hospital stay will provide her with a unique opportunity for “complete solitude, inviolable independence”53 denied her by the political and economic conditions of life in Russia. The woman’s body is to be violated — by the surgeon’s knife — but her sense of self is enhanced. In the second part of the story, the narrator imagines another “sterile zone.” She pictures her father’s life in a labor camp many years earlier, and how the primitive scientific laboratory he might have been able to establish would have provided him with the same sense of well-being that she now experiences in her “sterile zone.” Only in the hospital and in the prison can the individual experience him- or herself as an autonomous being.
Polianskaia’s story, in one sense, recapitulates a theme familiar to readers of Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. The hospital and the prison provide the opportunity for spiritual renewal. In Dostoevsky’s “The Peasant Marei” and in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, for example, the first-person narrators describe a quasi-religious conversion and a sense of unity with all of suffering Russia. What distinguishes Polianskaia’s story is that the heroine finds a momentary release from the enforced collective existence that she ordinarily leads. Her sense of renewal is not in union with “Russia,” but independence from “Russia.” Her brief escape into individuality — a value highly criticized by Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Sheveleva, and Rasputin — comes at the cost of great physical suffering.
Polianskaia’s heroine undertakes a heroic quest for solitude and privacy (for which there is no adequate Russian word), and more fundamentally, a sense of autonomous selfhood. Given the distortions of life in Russia, she can only do this from her hospital bed. Polianskaia’s heroine wants to be able to define the boundaries of her own “I” without being subject to the unwanted and unpredictable intrusion of others. In contrast, in Belov’s Raising Children According to Doctor Spock, Tonia is vilified for her desire for independence. The question of autonomy brings us back to problems raised at the beginning of this essay. The revolutionary feminist Aleksandra Kollantai promoted the idea that the pregnant woman “ceases to belong to herself,” but belongs instead to the collective. In the Stalinist years, women were represented as the creation of an “all encompassing patriarchal will.” Throughout twentieth-century Russian history, the left and the right sought to harness women both physically and symbolically to a mythologized collectivity, whether it be the Socialist Russia or, as in the most recent conservative vision, a newly ingathered Mother Russia. The engendering of the Russian body politic as feminine renders individual women invisible and unrepresentable as such. The reembodying of women’s bodies — not in the pornographic images that have drawn so much attention in the press — and the reinvention of the idea of individuality may help to unravel trends that have held sway for so long.
NOTES
I am grateful to Bruce Rosenstock and Anna
