Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

, and the award to him of the Nobel Prize. At the same time, because all four (unlike, say, Nabokov) died in Russia, they could be discussed in public and republished during the post-Stalin era. In Western writings about Russian literature, the four are often grouped together as though they were members of a kind of informal but exclusive circle, something along the lines of the Bloomsbury group. Yet no group photograph or portrait of the four exists (in fact, there was never an occasion when all were in the same place at once). And while Akhmatova and Mandelstam were linked by lasting friendship, the same cannot be said about any of the others (Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam had a short-term affair, but lost contact after Tsvetaeva’s emigration; Tsvetaeva and Pasternak’s relationship was intense, but carried on by letter, and most of the emotion was on Tsvetaeva’s side; Akhmatova and Pasternak felt at most wary respect for one another; Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva’s relations were decidedly strained). On the other hand, there were several other figures who were close in one way or another to at least one of the group – for example, Vladimir Mayakovsky, a major influence on Tsvetaeva and the addressee of a tribute by Akhmatova. The association, then, is as much a matter of myth as fact, helped along by a line of Akhmatova’s, ‘There aren’t many of us, three or four, maybe’, and also, perhaps, by the musical parallels in this combination of two male and two female voices, all with their own distinct timbres – like a four-part ensemble in one of Mozart’s operas, with Akhmatova playing mezzo to Tsvetaeva’s soprano, and Mandelstam tenor to Pasternak’s bass-baritone.

Women writers, then, did not necessarily fit any better into the analytical paradigms of Formalism than they did into politically engaged perceptions of writers as ‘masters of minds’. Since Formalism was, from the early 1960s, once again to be the single most dominant trend in the serious study of Russian literature, among Western critics as well as Russian ones, the rise of gender-oriented criticism in Britain, America, France, and Scandinavia during the 1970s at first had little impact on critical practices or on university courses, even in the West. However, in the mid-1980s, a few Western Slavists, mostly in America, started to make a systematic attempt to recover work by women writers. Barbara Heldt’s Terrible Perfection (1987) contrasted male writers’ suffocating view of women’s innate moral superiority with women writers’ own struggle to represent a richer and more challenging understanding of female identity. The Dictionary of Russian Women Writers (1994), edited by Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal, and Mary Zirin, brought hundreds of forgotten authors back to scholarly attention. By the late 1990s, the work of these and other writers had managed to create something approaching an alternative canon of Russian literature, one made up of women writers and shaped by a strongly individualist stress on self-assertion and self-examination (that is, on various forms of autobiography or fictionalized autobiography). Newly discovered or rediscovered writers included Karolina Pavlova, the early nineteenth-century poet Anna Bunina, the twentieth-century lesbian poet Sofiya Parnok, and the nineteenth-century prose writer Nadezhda Durova, author of the transvestite memoir The Memoirs of a Cavalry Maid. The priorities of gender criticism also inspired important re-readings of established writers, especially Tsvetaeva, who emerged as a pioneer of writing by Russian women about the female body.

At times, to be sure, a new kind of critical elision took place, this time of writers who could not easily be presented as proto-feminist rebels. A case in point was Rostopchina: one American feminist critic, for example, wrote of her ‘inordinate preoccupation [with] parties and dancing’ and her frivolous attitude to literature (‘writing for her [ . . . ] had the appeal of an agreeable hobby’). Yet there are grounds for arguing that Rostopchina’s pose of female dilettantism and modesty was in fact a way of facilitating entry to the potentially ‘immodest’ world of writing. In circumstances where the publication by women of literary work (as opposed to the production of poems, stories, and memoirs for circulation among close family and friends) was seen as tantamount to sexual exhibitionism if not prostitution, the adoption of a modest mask (a mask that was sometimes misleading in terms of a writer’s actual character) was a form of social insurance, and one that could sometimes allow women to write with impunity on ‘unfeminine’ subjects.