Narrative and Desire in Russian Literature, 1822–49 : The Feminine and the Masculine

Narrative and Desire in Russian Literature most readers will be the works by Mariya Zhukova and Elena Gan, two of the cohort of women writers who began to publish in the 1830s, but who have been scarcely republished since, and have had almost no critical writing devoted to them. Secondly, my own critical concerns have moved on somewhat. I now concentrate more specificaHy and directly on gender issues, looking at masculinity as weH as femininity, and have tried to incorporate some of the most recent developments of feminist literary criticism, especiaHy those to be found at the interface of semiotics and psychoanalysis. At the same time I have attempted to utilise a more typological approach to narrative (and to narrativity), to unearth the ancient patterns and models which underlie even relatively sophisticated works of fiction. I begin with Pushkin because it seems always necessary to begin with Pushkin. This truism, however, has a particular resonance for the present work. Pushkin not only stands as an enormous presence throughout nineteenth-century literature (and twentieth-century literature for that matter) but is also, by common consent, the father of modem Russian literature. 2 Given that many of my ensuing discussions will deal with familial relations, as weH as symbolic fathers, Pushkin's status as the engenderer of what followed is of peculiar importance. And, indeed, virtuaHy aH the texts here discussed, espe-ciaHy those of the 1830s, are deeply influenced by Pushkin. To a greater or lesser extent they can be read as rewritings, whether explicitly or implicitly, of Evgeny Onegin and other similar works by Pushkin. Each author was, as it were, at pains to prove herself or him~elf to be a dutiful daughter or son. 3 Pushkin may or may not be the 'first Russian feminist'4 as has been c1aimed: either way, he certainly was concerned, both in Evgeny Onegin and in the works discussed here, with notions of gender, with images of masculinity and femininity. The three Southern Poems can be seen as harbingers both of Onegin and of the later narratives in that many of the principal plot and character types of Russian Romanticism-early Realism are introduced here. The Prisoner of the Caucasus gives one of the first adumbrations of the 'superfluous man', the educated young Russian who is unable to respond to the test of love or to act decisively. The figure of the unnamed Circassian Woman can also be seen to prefigure both the 'strong heroine' and, at the same time, the self-sacrificing victim. Many of the society tales of the 1830s, and particularly those by Gan and Zhukova, construct their narrative architectonics on the principle of contrastive heroines. This desire In concentrating almost entirely on lesser, 'non-canonical', fiction in this formative period I had in mind a number of questions and projects. In such works, it can be argued, we see the themes of the period in a c1earer light. That is, in Onegin and Hero, for example, the sophistication of Pushkin and Lermontov lead to a great degree of ambivalence: the jury will always be out on the moral issues raised in these major novels. Like their eighteenth-century 'grandfathers', however, Gan, Zhukova and Odoevsky tend to make the authorial position more c1ear-cut. Equally the issues around gender tend to be presented more starkly. This is certainly true in the case of the two female writers, which leads on to further issues I have wished to raise en passant in this book. Did women authors in this period attempt to write 'as men', or was their response to these early formulations of the 'woman question'9 profoundly different from that of their male contemporaries? It seems to me, as I will argue more fully in later chapters, that Gan certainly did approach these issues differently from her contemporaries, particularly in her handling of plot paradigms and in her treatment of the creative woman, whereas Zhukova's 'femaleness' is much less apparent. Be that as it may, it is certainly the case that all of the writers considered in the following pages adopted the 'woman question' as one of their central concerns (and this inc1udes even the young Dostoevsky). This issue, it seems to me, should be ranked high amongst the 'accursed questions' which exercised and energised the intellectual and literary milieux of the 1830s and 1840s. In these regards, these seven Russian writers (along with many others, of course) were creating a uniquely indigenous tradition. At the same time, however, they were being deeply imitative in that the paradoxical place of woman in (male) culture is, of course, an ancient theme. That is, although exc1uded from the mansions of power, woman has been one of the central themes of art, precisely, indeed because of her problematical place in society. 'What does And this is why so many of the images of women that I will be discussing are not representations of characters but aseries of imbricated and irrecondlable images, pure representation, even pure sign.25 Given the relationality of gender which de Lauretis so convincingly argues for, it is clearly important in any discussion of gender to consider both polarities, the images of masculinity as well as of femininity. To a certain extent my earlier Women in Russian Literature touched upon masculinity, but in the present volume this aspect of representation will be much more of a constant. The images of masculinity which I will be discussing are much the same as those I have already sketched in my consideration of Pushkin's ground-Iaying work in his Southem Poems. The Old Man of The Gipsies is followed by the eponymous Baron Reykhman and, even more directly, by 'ask [ing] us to reflect on who controls the plot, who speaks with authority, who listens in silence and rage' .47 For the most part, in the present work, the woman' s voice, while not actually silenced (as is Mariya's in The Fountain 01 Bakhchisaray), struggles to be heard within an extremely androcentric discourse and narrative world. The work begins, of course, with a dedication to Nikolai Raevsky and these first 43 lines have a powerful determining effect on the themes and values of the rest of the poem. It becomes a kind of gift to Pushkin's friend, so that the tale of the Circassian woman is 'positioned so as to facilitate an exchange between men'.48 Pushkin addresses his (now distant) friend in terms of quasi-erotic intimacy: 'I rested in my heart -we "loved one another' (1.11),49 while thanking him for the 'peace' he had found with Raevsky during times of 'the heavy dream of love ' (11.8-10). Consequently, male bonding is immediately established as the norm, the given. 50 However, it is not only the love of two dose male friends that is celebrated in the work: male-bonding is seen as the norm on a more general level. The Dedication ends with the lines: 1 waited light-heartedly for better days; And the happiness of my friends Was a consolation for me. It is difficult to define Krutsifersky' s character: a tender nature, a loving one to the highest degree, a feminine and submissive na- Front Matter....Pages i-vii Introduction....Pages 1-10 Pushkin’s Southern Poems....Pages 11-49 V.F. Odoevsky and the Two Princesses....Pages 50-84 Elena Gan and A Futile Gift....Pages 85-138 Mariya Zhukova and Patriarchal Power....Pages 139-183 Alexander Herzen: Who Is To Blame?....Pages 184-213 The Law of the Father and Netochka Nezvanova....Pages 214-226 Back Matter....Pages 227-257 This volume contributes to the understanding of Russian literature in a formative period of its development, from 1820-1840. As well as studies of major writers such as Pushkin and Dostoevsky, the work offers analyses of the women writers Elena Gan and Mariya Zhukova.