ADELE BARKER

Are Women Writing Women’s Writing in the Soviet Union Today? Tolstaya and Grekova

Soviet women writers have recently been paying the price of our unwillingness in the

West to contextualize them adequately. In America, at least, feminist critics have put

them into their own ideological strait jackets until they have become all but unrecog-

nizable. The desire to shape them into something familiar to the American feminist

experience has distorted their own unique qualities as Russian writers out of all

proportion. Despite the protestations of these writers who have declared flatly that they

refuse to be labeled “women writers,” we continue to mold them into something with

which we can identify because it is easier than facing up to the differences.

The simplest way to deal with the complicated differences between Soviet and

American women’s writing is to pretend that they do not exist. Recently American

feminists have taken up Natalya Baranskaya’s Nedelya kak nedelya (A Week Like Any Other

Week, 1969) as the hallmark of the so-called women’s movement in the Soviet Union.

The story chronicles the frustrations of a young Soviet wife and mother caught between

the heavy demands of job and home. Baranskaya’s piece feeds nicely into the western

feminist view of what women’s writing ought to be concerned with in the Soviet Union

today. The story, while important sociologically as the first literary work to confront the

double burden placed on Soviet women today, is, unfortunately, not typical of the kind

of writing being done by women writers working today in the Soviet Union. Much more

typical are the stories by Irina Grekova whose main characters are more often male and

who has gone on record as saying that she neither considers herself a woman writer nor

is interested in women’s issues. Likewise, Maiya Ganina eschews any identification

with women’s issues even though she has a greater number of women in her works than

Grekova. Despite their protestations, however, Soviet women writers are in danger of

being turned into closet feminists by western critics. Grekova’s novella Vdouy parokhod

(7’he Ship of Widows, 1981) is seen through Western eyes as a tract on women’s strength

and ability to make their way in the world apart from men. The story concerns a group

of women living in a communal flat during and after the war and collectively raising a

child that belongs to one of them. In attempting to place the story within a Western

feminist context, we ignore the simple historical truth that during the 1940s when this

story takes place the depletion in the male population as a result of war casualties

initiated a new wave of Party propaganda which urged that women be shown as able to

function happily and independently without men. Hence the feminism which we look

for in the text has less to do with Soviet women’s expanding consciousness than with

historical necessity and Party mandate during the war and post-war years. If we fail to

see this story within the context of the Party line during the 194Os, we fall into the naive

trap of seeing it as a feminist work, which it is not. Moreover, Grekova’s point in this

St L 1)tb.i 11 C:OMPAKA’I I\‘t. ~:O\l\lL~NlS,hl, \TOI XXI, Nos. 314, .4~,1 C’\l\/WIN7 I..K 1988, 357-364

OOW3592/88/03/4 0357-08 $03.00 0 1988 L’ niversity of Southern Califbrnia

story is not whether a woman can function without a man, I)ut how an egotistical

personality comes to exist even within a communal environment.

Ultimately, I think, when the dust settles, contemporary Soviet women writers will

have benefited from attempts by Western feminists to turn them into mirror images of

themselves because it has forced those of us who study them to take a hard look at wh)

these Soviet writers do not align themselves with Western feminist writing or with

bvomen’s writing in general. Is it simply a matter of time before the), catch up? Has

censorship prevented them from bvriting more like us or have they, accordina to official

Soviet thinking, long ago grappled with the issues with which Western feminists arc

struggling? Even as we ask these questions we are forced to rethink some of our own

assumptions about lvomen’s writing in general. For example, must contcmporar)

women’s literature automatically bc equated with feminism? HOVV do we define

w-omen’s writing to begin with? If a woman writer eschews the label “\~oman writer.”

does it mean that she is simply unconscious of the subtext of her own writing or that she

is still capitulating to a tradition of male writing and has not yet ii)und her voice?’ .I‘hcse

are complex questions mchich cannot be answered fully in this short space. What will be

explored here are the roots of the antipathy felt by both women writers and critics to tht

term “women’s writing” in the Soviet Union today and how that antipathy f’inds

expression in both camps.

Contemporary Soviet women writers view women’s writing at best with skepticisnl

and at worst with disdain. Their distaste for this label is a product both of the 19th

century literary tradition out of which they came as well as the complex and changing

Party line on literature over the past 70 years. 1,ike all writers in the Soviet Union thrsc,

women cut their teeth on the 19th century Russian classics. Irina Grekova has said that

thr 19th century masters, ‘r‘olstoy and Dostoevsky, were her bread (k/&h).’ l’hat

tradition was predominately male. Soviet writers today. whether male or female. are

still indebted to that tradition tilt- their literary models, their charactcrb, and their

narrative devices.

Alongside their obvious tic. to the 19th crntur!. male literary conventions. con-

temporary So\.ict M’omen writers sho\v an equally obvious reluctance to associate then-

sel\,cs too closely \vith prc-revolutionary women’s writing. There are scvrral reasons till

this. First of all, during the early years of Bolshevik rule and then again in the 1930s as

socialist realism became the accepted literary canon, writers were exhorted to put asidr

personal concerns in fa\,or of the greater glory of’ the state. Since that time at least t\vo

thaws ha\re taken place. punctuated by intermittent freezes. So\.ict writers are in the

process of witnessing another thaw under Gorbache\.. Still, hcn%e\.er. man) writers

today ha\,e inherited the old suspicion of literature that is too personal. CZontemporar>

Soviet women writers are the first to rqjcct prc-re\.olutionary ~Z’OIIICII‘~ writing preciscl)

because they \.ieiQ it as unabashedly personal. sentirrlental. and c’\.t’n trivial. ~I‘(, a

woman writing today much of’ ~,r-~-re\,olutiorlar~ women’s writing created debilitating

stereotypes li)r WOI~C‘II. Inderti, at a time when Fl‘olstoy and Dostoc\,sky were examining

the moral order of’ the universe and man’s relationship to God, writers such as Eltrra

Are Women Writing Women ‘s Writing in the Soviet Union Today? Tolstaya and Grekova 359

Gan (1814-1842), Karolina Pavlova (1807-1893), and Anastasya Verbitskaya ( 186 l-

1928) were concerned with issues that sooner related to the family and the bedroom than

to political and social questions. To the degree to which these writers were socially

involved at all, they preferred to write about women’s sexual emancipation than about

the so-called larger issues of the day. Pavlova and Gan created heroines whose actions,

however rebellious, never carried over into the political sphere. Their heroines never

became the same kind of social activists that their counterparts did in the West. Oddly

enough, it was the male writers of 19th-century Russia, in particular Nikolai Cherny-

shevsky and Ivan Turgenev, whose heroines were in the vanguard of social and political

reform. Perhaps because the 19th-century women writers wrote in the shadow of the

better known male writers of their day, perhaps because the worlds they inhabited were

narrower in scope than ours, or perhaps because they gravitated towards the genre of

sentimentalist literature, many of these women writers are dismissed today as having

trivialized their worlds.

Contemporary Soviet women writers might be less sensitive to the term “women’s

writing” were it truly a thing ofthe past. This tendency to retreat into the bedroom, as it

were, made a reappearance in Soviet literature in the 1950s as Stalinist literary canons

were gradually dismantled. In 1955 the sentimentalist heroine made her appearance in a

more modern guise in the novel Yelena by Ksenia Lvova. Lvova’s heroine finds that it is

not enough to be a model Soviet citizen and to be married to one at the same time. She

reverts to the world of the heart and embarks on an affair with a man in her laboratory

who, like herself, is married. Although Lvova’s Yelena had little claim to literary great-

ness, it enjoyed considerable popularity among the female part of the Russian reading

public, which seems to suggest that by the mid-1950s at least some part of the Soviet

readership was beginning to tire of tractor stories. If the Soviet reading public saw

Lvova’s Yelena merely as a welcome relief from the world of socialist realism, Natalya

Ilina, satirist and feuilletonist, saw the novel as a Soviet remake of 19th-century

women’s literature. In a collection of literary parodies she published in 1960 entitled

Vnimanie: opasnost (Attention: Danger), Ilina wrote a stunning parody of Lvova’s Yelena

who, at first glance, seems the incarnation of the new Soviet woman.3 Yelena pursues a

career, works on her dissertation in chemistry, and seems to have transcended the

sentimental frivolous concerns of her predecessors. Or has she? Yelena’s pursuit of her

cohort at the laboratory completely overshadows her pursuit of a degree. Ilina adeptly

reveals Yelena for what she is, namely a more modern updated version of the same

sentimental heroine who decorated the pages of 19th century women’s fiction.

It is thus with some justification that Soviet women writers today are not receptive to

what they perceive as women’s writing. Their sensitivity to this term and their con-

comitant fear of being placed in this category are felt both in their writings and in the

critical response to them. Irina Grekova (b. 1907), p reviously mentioned, and Tatyana

Tolstaya (b. 1951), a younger writer, represent two different ends of the spectrum on

how Soviet women writers are responding to the still powerful stigma of women’s

writing.

Irina Grekova came to writing late in her career when she was already a practising

mathematician who had earned the prestigious “doktorat” in mathematics. In Grekova’s

view her most successfully drawn characters are men because, as a mathematician, she

has spent most of her professional life in a male environment. Despite Grekova’s

360 %CIXf.S I& ~:OhlPARAl I\‘F‘ ~OMZ\lUKSISM

protestations, many of’ her heroines such as Kovaleva in Damsky master (Ladies Hnzr-

dresser, 1963) or Valentina Stepanovna in L&m LP gorode (Summer in the City, 1965) ha\,e

been depicted with considerable success. These same heroines, however. are always

members of the intelligentsia and always occupy high level positions in their prof’ession

Kovaleva, for example, is the director of’ an institute of cybernetics while L’alcntina

Stepanovna is the director of a library in Moscow. Grekova’s heroines reflect the milieu

within which she worked, and the fact that many of’them function in a male CiOJJliJlatNi

environment partially protects her from the charge that she is a mere “\z.oman’s writer”

whose characters spend their lives engaged in meaningless tasks.

Perhaps because Grekova has made no secret of’her distaste thr woman’s writing she

has been attacked as being a member of’this school by critics who ha\ e wanted to deflect

the reader’s attention from what Grekova was really writing about An example of’this

kind of’ critical attack came in 1967 when Grrkova published a novella entitled hh

ispytanzjakh (On j2funeuuerA) which dealt with a division of the Red Army at a secret test

site in 1952.” Grekova departed from accepted literary canons by depicting the Red

Army without the usual gloss (Inkirouka) reser\.ed thr the arm) and high ranking part)’

officials. She showed most of these officers as crude, lacking in education, and eager to

embark on af’f’airs the minute they are apart from their \vi\,es. Rather than attack

Grekova for her treatment of the Red Army whic.h would have sparked the curiosit). of

the reading public, the l-e\-icwcr, L. I. Skvortsov. reduced O?z .Manpuuers to a typical

example of’ women’s writing which he proceeded to define as a~1 o\.erindulgencc in

physical description and unnt’cessary detail.’ Rather than mention that OJIC’ of

Grekova’s characters was an inthrmer, another a .JcM’. anti a third a member of’ the

intelligentsia who is about to be purged he attempted to turn the story into an rxarnpl~ of

women’s writing as it has traditionally been understood in Russia. By using the term as

a vehicle tar his attack, SkvortsoL, struck ;I sensitive chord in Grrkova and simul-

taneously succeeded in detlecting his readers ’ attention from the real aim ot’the story.

Although most So\riet worJleJ~ writers today \vc,uld agree with C;rc,kova’s assessment

ot‘women’s writing. not all of them deal with their antipathy towards it by purging thei

text of female characters or taking pains to cnsurr that the reader sees them as ‘.,just OJlc

of the guys.” For example, the )‘c,ung writt,r ‘l‘atyana Y‘olsta)~a, ~~hosc first short star\

appeared in 1983, includes both positive artci negati\,c portraits oi’\vonlen in her rostrum

ot‘characters. Many of Tolstaya’s wonlen c.harac,tcrs pursue thy kinds of lives so of’ten

associated with the heroines of“‘women’s writing.” ‘l‘olstaya’s conlrnand oi’narrati\.c,

h owever, her handling of her writer’5 tools. allows her to create these negative

prototypes yet avoid any identification with tht‘l~l. Her star) Okhota nu mumon/a ( Ihc Huntfor the W’oulb Mammoth), 1985 provides an excellent example of this technique at

work.” The plot of’the story concerns a beautiful woman’s attenlpt to capture a husbarJd

for herself. Tolstaya creates a heroine, Zoya. who is both a parody of the 19th (YntuJ‘)

sentimental heroine and a representative ot \‘acuous midtllc class moralit!~ \\ hich

Tolstaya sees as prr\,alent in So\ irt society today.

l‘he plot of the story re\.olvcs around two 01 the oldest clic~his abut WOJ11~J1, narnrl\

that they arc in\ol\,ed in setting traps fill- rnrn and that thq perceive themscl\-ra as

Are Women Writing Women’s Writins in the Soviet Union Today? Tolstaya and Grekova 361

fragile objects to be handled with care. Tolstaya’s heroine buys right into the cliche and

debases herself in the eyes of the author as a result. Zoya’s aim in life is to trap

Vladimir, her woolly mammoth (so called because of his thick beard). So obsessed is she

with this goal that she fails to realize that he is basically repugnant to her. The title of the

story underscores Zoya’s predatory nature. In primitive times the hunt for the

mammoth was undertaken by men. In Tolstaya’s story Zoya is turned into a huntress,

and Vladimir becomes the prey, hence implying that it is Zoya’s aim to kill the prey or

emasculate the male. The metaphor of the prehistoric past continues throughout the

story as Zoya, consumed with the idea of marriage, becomes almost a fossilized remnant

of her former self as she loses her hold on reality altogether. At the end of the story, a

homing pigeon with a band on its leg perches on Zoya’s window sill. Her obsession with

marriage leads her to perceive the band as a wedding ring. In her mind’s eye Zoya

imagines the pigeon to be married:

Here, here, please! They even put a ring around this pigeon-this rotten, dirty bird.’

Tolstaya is quick to dissociate herself from her heroine. In the first paragraph she

describes Zoya:

A pretty name-Zoya, isn’t it? As if bees were buzzing. And she herself is pretty: good height and so forth. Details? Happy to oblige. The details: good legs, good figure,

good skin, nose, eyes, all good. A brunette. Why not a blonde? Because happiness is

not granted to everyone in life.8

At first glance Tolstaya seems to be describing Zoya as her heroine wants to be seen. In

fact, initially it is unclear who is speaking. Is it Zoya or the narrator? Whoever it is

seems to empathize with Zoya and share her value system. However, at second glance it

becomes clear that Tolstaya is actually mimicking the sentimentalist 19th century

heroine whom Zoya wishes to imitate. Furthermore, she dehumanizes her heroine by

reducing her to nothing more than the sum of her physical parts. Tolstaya’s prolonged

description of Zoya’s body is a parody of the protracted physical descriptions one finds

in sentimentalist literature written by such writers as Verbitskaya. Below is a passage in

which a Verbitskaya heroine looks at herself in the mirror:

She turned her head and saw herself in the big mirror set in the wardrobe. Her bare

hands were pressed against her breast-her beautiful arms-delicate hands, her

resilient form moving in waves from her shoulders.q

Zoya perceives herself as a sentimentalist heroine. In Tolstaya’s hands, however, she

succeeds merely in looking Philistine. If we compare Verbitskaya’s and Tolstaya’s

descriptions of their heroines, Tolstaya’s Zoya pales alongside the elaborate description

of her 19th century predecessor. Tolstaya reduces Zoya’s qualities to nothing more than

an inventory, a matter of fact reckoning of her physical components. In doing so she not

only demeans Zoya but the goal to which she aspires. Tolstaya debunks sentimentalist

aesthetics and its modern debased incarnation in Zoya by suggesting that behind all the

elaborate bodily description stands a dehumanized version of the character, reduced to

nothing more than the sum total of her physical parts.

7. Ibid., p. 121. 8. Ibrd., p. 117. 9. Quuotrd by Natalya llina in “K voprt~su o tradirsii i no~aturstve v zhanre ‘damskoi povrsti’,” .Vcq nw.

No. 3 (1963), 224-230.

Throughout her story Tolstaya never misses an opportunity to deflate the srnti- mentalist view of the world. When Zoya and Vladimir first meet, Tolstaya describes

the meeting as follows:

When Zoya first met Vladimir, the latter was simply stunned. Or well. in any c asc hr was pleasantly surprised.“’

This is an important moment in the story. Tolstaya could sirnply have said that

Vladimir was pleasantly surprised (przjatno udivlyon) and left it at that. She chose the

word for “stunned” (polryasen), however, which is part of’ the language of intense,

passionate experience. This is the language one would have found in sentimentalist

writing. “Stunned” is the word Zoya wants people to use in describing her. Tolstaya.

on the other hand, juxtaposes the two words, “stunned” and “pleasantly surprised”

both to debunk Zoya’s overinflated notions of’ herself’ and to deflate the whole senti-

mentalist world view which gives birth to characters such as Zoya in the first place.

Tolstaya is not only demolishing certain pre-revolutionary stereotypes in this story

but looking critically at contemporary Soviet literature which, in her view, still c’reates

these stereotypes, and at Soviet women themselves who fall prey to this kind of cliched

material. Despite being raised in a socialist state, heroines such as Zoya are still the

bearers of Victorian values which declared that a woman’s life was not complete without

a husband.

The devices which Tolstaya uses to distance herself’ from this kind ofcliched morality

show obvrious borrowings from at least two of her male literary predecessors. Her debt to

Nabokov and his use of the untrustworthy narrator can be seen in her manipulation of

the narrative voice which at one moment merges with that of the heroine and then

completely rejects any identification with her. Her debt to Gogol is also evident, and it is

appropriate that she chose this most misogynist of’ 19th-century writers to borrow from

in dehumanizing her heroine. Gogol’s own fear of, and consequent dislike of. women

caused him to reduce his female characters to inanimate ob.jects. One remembers his

hero Chichikov, in Dead So& “falling in love” with a woman whose face Gogol

compared to a freshly laid white egg or tht “Lady Delightful in Every Respect” from

the same novel who becomes a bird of prey as she spreads rumors about Chichikov

throughout the town. Tolstaya not only distances herself from her heroine but does so

using the devices of her rnale literary predecessors.

Most of“l‘olstaya’s heroines attempt, like Zoya, to escape from the world in which

they find themselves through fantasy or daydreams. It would be wrong, however, to

suggest that Tolstaya objects to these f’antasirsperse. In some of‘her other stories, retreat

into the world of’ fantasy and daydreams is often her characters’ only salvation from the

mundane world in which they live. The problem with Tolstaya’s heroines is that ev’en in

their greatest imaginative leaps they are unable to transcend their own Philistine

mentality and thus remain mired in the v’ery world they seek to escape. ‘l‘hey stand

squarely in the tradition of Flaubert’s Emma Hovary and Fl‘olstoy’s Anna Karenina

whose own romantic dreams are ultimately shattered by the limited, rather- v.ulgar.

imagination which both heroines bring to bear upon their dilemmas. in ‘l‘olstaya’s

hands the c,fassic strong woman figure degenerates into a manipulative commonplace

heroine.

‘l’ofstay.a’s 7he Hunt,for thr’.24ammoth suggests that the tendency to debase and trivialize

Are Women Writing Women ‘s Writing in the Soviet Union Today? Tolstaya and Grekova 363

one’s life, traditionally associated with women’s writing, is, for Tolstaya, less a function of the century one lives in than of the values one brings to one’s experience. Tolstaya’s most sympathetically drawn heroine, Shura, from the story Miluya Shura (Dear Shura, 1985) illustrates this point well. Ii Shura is an old woman, a relic of pre-revolutionary Russia, a woman whose image officially has no place in Soviet society today. The narrator, nevertheless, is drawn to her and listens as Shura reminisces about her life. Shura’s world revolved totally around her three husbands and the man who wanted to marry her but whom she rejected. She had no life apart from the men with whom she had been involved. Even the title of the story Dear Shuru is taken from the name which her erstwhile suitor used to call her. At first glance Shura seems to be exactly the type of character with whom contemporary Soviet women writers wish to avoid any identilica- tion. She seems the incarnation of the 19th century sentimental heroine whose concerns reached no farther than the bedroom. Tolstaya, however, identifies strongly with Shura in a way she was unwilling to with Zoya. So involved does she become in her heroine’s own story that she takes up Shura’s narrative where Shura leaves off and imagines herself sending a telegram to one of Shura’s suitors which Shura herself never sent:

Ivan Nikolayevich, wait! I’ll tell her. I’11 give her the message. Don’t leave. She’s coming, she’s coming. I promise you. She’s already made up her mind. She’s got the

ticket. I know, I swear. I saw it in the velvet album .I2

Tolstaya is drawn to Shura because of her authenticity. Unlike Zoya, she does not masquerade as something other than what she is, nor does her desire for a man arise out of a desire to manipulate and control. Tolstaya mourns the passing of such women as Shura, women whose actions sprang from a capacity to love rather than a desire to capture and control, women who were worthy of their own dreams. Through her image Tolstaya communicates the simple truth that the tendency to make one’s life vulgar and trivial is not a function of time or place but of one’s own inner being.

l’he critical response to this new and gifted writer, whose emergence has been one of the literary events of the 198Os, has brought much of the traditional antipathy to women’s writing to the surface. It has also revealed that the issue ofwomen’s writing has become a foil for an even more serious debate among Soviet writers today, namely the issue of talent versus hack-work. In an interview published in The Moscow News in 1987, Tolstaya made the point that women’s writing (“feminine prose” as she put it) is still alive and well in the Soviet Union today. She characterized it as “the confusion of daily routine with life, a saccharine quality, beauty smacking of a fancy goods store, and the author’s mercantile psychology.” Moreover, she added, “feminine prose today is mostly written by men. “*I’ Tolstaya’s point was that virtually any work which is super- ficial and which reflects the author’s own Philistine values can be classified as “feminine prose.” In saying this she was clearly directing her criticisms at the literature of dubious literary merit which is still being produced by members of the Writer’s Union today.

Tolstaya has since been attacked in the press for her remarks by members of the conservative literary establishment such as the critic and writer Pyotr Proskurin who responded angrily to her redefinition of “feminine prose” and to her disparaging remarks about the novel Vsyo vperedi (Everything is Ahead) by the conservative writer

11. Tatyana Tolstaya, “Milaya Shun,” OkQabr, No. 12 (1985), 113-117.

12. Ibid., p. 113. 13. “A Little Man is a Normal Man.” Interview with Tatyana Tolstaya conducted by Olga hjartynenko,

Moscoa~ iveu,\, No. 8 (1987), p. 10.

C’asilyi Belov who makes no secret of his misogynist views.” The controversy between

‘l‘olstaya and the deeply entrenched, male-dominated literary establishment relates only

superficially to her criticisms of Belov or even to her remarks about what constitutes

“feminine prose.” Subsumed within the gender issue is the larger one of talent. As

writers such as Tolstaya gradually redefine the term “women’s writing,” it is becoming

increasingly more difficult to pass the work of a woman writer off’as mere “women’s

writing.” To paraphrase Tolstaya, men write it too! Tolstaya, however, seems to have

become the focal point of a debate which transcends her own specific work, namely that

between those of undeniable literary talent and those whose acceptance into the literary

establishment years ago was due more to their Party stance than any inherent literary

proclivity.

Tolstaya was not the first to suggest that men’s writing might also contain the traits of

feminine prose. In an article published in ,Vo~y mir in 1963 entitled K voprosu o traditJii i

nouutorstw c’ zhanw 'damskoi fiovesti‘ (On the Question of Tradition and Innovation in the Genre oj-

‘The Women ‘5 Story’) Natalya Ilina, while pretending to show what great strides Soviet

literature had made, in fact. suggested that it was still perpetuating the same kind of

outmoded sentimentalism overloaded with physical description and hackneyed phrases

about love that characterized pre-revolutionary women’s writing.” Ilina noted, as an

aside, that the practitioners of such literature had come to include men as well as

women. Criticism of literary hack-work was still a sensiti1.c subject in the 1960s. Ilina

approached the topic through satire and thus was able to say what she wanted without

risking critical attack from the literary establishment. Times have changed. Kecently, in

the magazine Ogonyok, which stands in the vanguard of’,qlaJnoJt. Ilina was able to write

the article she could not ha1.e written in the 1960s. iti In a hard hitting attack on the

literary establishment, she accused it of supporting Party favorites over real literary

talent. The fact that such articles are being published argues \vcll for the future of

glasnost. However, as the criticism ofC;rekova in the 1960s and ‘l’olstaya in the 1980s has

shown, the issue of women’s writing still remains an cffecti\e disguise used to mask the

more important problems which each writer has brought to the surface. In that sense

,g/aJnos/ still has a long way to g:o in the sphere of literary criticism.