Engendering Byt: Russian Women's Writing and Everyday Life from I. Grekova to Liudmila Ulitskaia (original) (raw)
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Літературний процес, 2021
The subject of the study is the system of reticence techniques in the women’s autobiography of Oksana Ivanenko, the Ukrainian writer of the 20th century. Western theorists of women’s autobiography (Mary Mason, Estelle Jelinek) considered relativity, fragmentation, nonlinearity to be its defining qualities. However, the concept of Leigh Gilmore, who considered autobiography as a writing strategy that constructs its object, allows us to raise the question of the potential functions of constructive techniques in this text. These and other studies analyse the autobiographies of women in the Western world, leaving aside the writings of Eastern Europeans, however, the works of those who had to live under Soviet conditions are of particular interest for various reasons. The aim of the proposed study is to show the peculiarities of the creation and functioning of the women’s autobiographics (Gilmore’s self-representation) in ideological societies on the example of Ivanenko’s memoirs “Always in Life”. As a result of the study, it has been found that in Ivanenko’s memoirs the theme of creative selfrealization and literature in general pushes aside the narrative that Western theorists consider to be the main one for women’s biography: comprehending their own female experience (first of all, love, marriage, motherhood). The relativity, embodied in the genre of the essay, allowed the author to talk about oneself, when she wanted it, and at the right moment to return to the pseudo-object. The nonlinearity of the narrative helps emphasize advantageous moments and avoid coerced chronology. However, fragmentation and heterogeneity allow the woman writer not to build a holistic narrative about oneself, but to offer “flickering” content to readers. Thus, feeling ideological pressure, the author escaped memories not only of the difficult period in Ukrainian history, but also of important events in her life, ignoring her true experience. This means that an autobiographical work may be called upon not to record a true experience but to create a socially acceptable version of the writer.
Slavic Review, 2018
This study explores the ways in which Russian women writers responded to Sentimentalist conventions of authorship, challenging their conceptualisation of women as mute and passive beings. Its particular focus is on the works by Anna Naumova, Mariia Pospelova and Mariia Bolotnikova, three late-18 th-and early-19 thcentury Russian women authors who have only recently begun to receive some slight scholarly attention from Western European researchers in Russian Women's Studies. The study not only provides a close literary analysis of the writings by these women, it also applies political, social, and feminist theory, examining both the pitfalls and the opportunities encountered by women authors operating in the context of a Sentimentalist culture of feminisation strongly influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's writings. It argues that, while restricting women to essentialist conceptions, Sentimentalist discourse also offered female authors a means of acquiring symbolic authority, enabling them to claim social equality by appropriating the Sentimentalist re-evaluation of nature and the notion of natural rights. As they created self-images as authors, legitimising their writerly activities, provincial women writers in particular referred to their alleged closeness to nature. Excluded from the public sphere of politics by Sentimentalist culture, women also took advantage of the movement's focus on and elevated appreciation of the home and the family to draw attention to concerns of a more private nature. By examining literature produced at a time when Romantic ideals began to eclipse Sentimentalist aesthetics, the study illustrates the challenge of the Sentimentalist notion of women by several Russian women and their authoritative, autonomous and/or outspoken female characters.
Memorable Fiction: Evoking Emotions and Family Bonds in Post-Soviet Russian Women's Writing (2012)
Argument 2012: 2:1, 59-74
this article deals with women-centred prose texts of the 1990s and 2000s in Russia written by women, and focuses especially on generation narratives. by this term the author means fictional texts that explore generational relations within families, from the perspective of repressed experiences, feelings and attitudes in the soviet period. the selected texts are interpreted as narrating and conceptualizing the consequences of patriarchal ideology for relations between mothers and daughters and for reconstructing connections between soviet and post-soviet by revisiting and remembering especially the gaps and discontinuities between (female) generations. the cases discussed are Liudmila Petrushevskaia's 'povest' The Time: Night (Vremia noch, 1991), Liudmila Ulitskaia's novel Medeia i ee deti [Medea and her children] (1996) and elena chizhova's novel Vremia zhenshchin [the time of Women] (2009). these novels reflect on the one hand the woman-centredness and novelty of representation in women's prose writing in the post-soviet period. On the other hand, the author suggests that they reflect the diverse methods of representing the soviet era and experience through generation narratives. the texts reassess the past through intimate, tactile memories and perceptions, and their narration through generational plots draws attention to the process of working through, which needs to be done in contemporary Russia. the narratives touch upon the untold stories of those who suffered in silence or hid the family secrets from the officials, in order to save the family. the narration delves into the different layers of experience and memory, conceptualizing them in the form of multiple narrative perspectives constructing different generations and traditions. In this way they convey the 'secrets' hidden in the midst of everyday life routines and give voice to the often silent resistance of women towards patriarchal and repressive ideology. the new women's prose of the 1980s-90s and the subsequent trend of women-centred narratives and generation narratives employ conceptual metaphors of r e a s s e s s i n g, r e v i s i t i n g and r e m e m b e r i n g the cultural, experiential, and emotional aspects of the past, soviet lives.
Iconic Female Writers of Russia's Long-Twentieth Century
There is a Film Studies attribution counted to this course This course discusses important literature written by women and significant film by women and about women within, primarily, the canon of Russian and Soviet studies. Within this specialized area there are many ways that the syllabus intersects with women's and gender studies on a broader, transnational spectrum. Our course begins by discussing the challenges and specific qualities of female-authored works, and draws connections between female Russian authors and Western authors. Once we enter the period of the Soviet Union, the course offers a basic comparison: women of all races struggled for decades to justify leaving the sphere of domesticity to join the labor force; and once in the labor force, find equitable work; by contrast, in the USSR, women's place outside of home and family was rarely challenged. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and these developments drew North American suffragists, and female journalists, engineers, and artists to Russia. The African American actress Frances Williams moved to Moscow in 1934 to perform in a country that had supposedly eliminated racism in the time of International Friendship. This is one example of many in the course that will examine the roles, experiences, and representations of women and other marginalized groups while investigating the cultural construction of gender. Theoretical texts about feminism and gender complement primary readings, and student assignments will engage students in these theoretical texts and primary works of literature and film. Course description This course will draw from decades of cultural production, from the Silver Age to the post-Soviet period, to explore the articulation of feminist discourse in literature and film, as well as the development of feminism in Russia across the past 20th-century. We will discuss emergent social movements, and the power dynamics between different social and gender groups in private, public and political struggles for justice as we discuss the meaning of sexuality in Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Russian society. To this end, we will compare the progress and status of gender equality in North America, Europe and Russia, as these countries were home to some of the most radical social movements. In placing representations of the body in significant films, theatrical performances, dramas, novels and stories-from modernism to the post-Soviet period-this course will examine the cultural debates these bodies fostered in their socio-historical background. Contemporary works on the syllabus synthesize aesthetics and gender statements, offering the literature and visual art to help us understand how gender is constructed in post-Soviet society. The body, dress, gesture, and methods of embodiment (embodiment of cultural norms, gender roles, for instance) will be re-occurring themes in the literature and film that we discuss.
Displacement and (Post)memory in Post-Soviet Women's Writing
2022
The book examines prominent literary works from the past two decades by Russian women writers dealing with the Soviet past. It explores works such as Daniel Stein, Interpreter by Ludmilla Ulitskaya, The Time of Women by Elena Chizhova, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich, and In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, and uncovers connecting thematic structures and features. Focusing on the concepts of displacement and postmemory, the book shows how these works have given voice to those on the margins of society and of ‘great history’ whose resistance was often silent. In doing so, these women writers portray the everyday experiences and trauma of displaced women and girls during the second half of the twentieth century. This study offers new insights into the importance of these women writers’ work in creating and preserving cultural memory in post-Soviet Russia.