Gender and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Russian Culture (review)

A striking Chagall-like cover masking and unmasking the naked truth about twentieth-century Russian notions of gender and national identity invites the reader into this book, which is ambitious in its sweep. The editors set the tone with their opening essay aptly titled “Lost in the Myths.” Covering several centuries’ worth of “dichotomized gender stereotypes” in Russia and other countries, they cite among others Sigmund Freud, Yurii Lotman, and the feminist critics who specialize in dichotomy deconstruction, such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. Noting with dismay the invisibility of gender in most recent works on Russian nationalism and state formation, Helena Goscilo and Andrea Lanoux rightly argue that such “a vital component of national identity” cannot be ignored (p. 9). They contrast this gap with the extensive literature outside Slavic studies on the gendered division between the masculine state and the feminine nation. The insights of this scholarship can be aptly applied to Russia, as in the contrast between the male pantheon of post-Catherine imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet leaders and the images of the genuine Mother Russia, or Moist Mother Earth, the soil that “doubled as both womb and tomb” (p. 3).

This ten-essay collection ranges far and wide, as if trying to make up in one volume for previous neglect of the topic. Goscilo’s penetrating examination of the multiple layers of public widowhood in Russia covers a great deal, including peasant imagery, popular culture, and iconic figures such as Anna Akhmatova, the widow as nation. Nadezhda Mandelstam, argues Goscilo, “combine[d] tradition and revolution in anomalous ways” (p. 65); the responses to Elena Bonner’s shepherding of Andrei Sakharov’s legacy reflect the diminished status of the widow in the post-Soviet period. Elizabeth Jones Hemenway surveys the 1920s memorial literature about prominent women Communists, concluding that such portraits honored their sacrifice while “constructing their saintly profiles to fit within the emerging portrait of the period’s rhetorically proclaimed Soviet national family” (p. 88). Lilya Kaganovsky critiques Nikolai Ekk’s 1931 film The Road to Life for its racism, coded homosexuality, and power/pleasure dynamic. Two essays address the post-Stalin period. Elena Prokhorova focuses on the Brezhnev era and the image of Soviet masculinity “after the Father” (p. 131). Michele Rivkin-Fish perceptively addresses the framing of Russia’s “demographic crisis” from Leonid Brezhnev to Vladimir Putin.

The editors wisely include a discussion of the structure of the Russian language as the lead essay. Valentina Zaitseva, in her insightful “National, Cultural, and Gender Identity in the Russian Language,” examines genderlect, “how the grammatical category of gender operates on various linguistic levels to contribute to both a unifying sense of national identity and a deep social divide between Russian men and women” (p. 30).

Language, both Russian and English, is very much the point here. Although some of the essays are jargon-heavy, the level of writing overall is quite impressive. Witty turns of phrase abound; puns are peppered throughout the volume.

The book reflects a healthy range of perspectives. In a provocative whirlwind tour of the application of the prostitution archetype to the post-Soviet world, Eliot Borenstein demonstrates how “the metaphorical prostitute disseminates ideology as a kind of ‘textually transmitted disease’” (p. 190). Countering Borenstein’s bleakness, Yana Hashamova in her survey of post-Soviet cinema postulates “a new dynamic that, however timidly, pushes against the traditional patriarchal structure” by showing “a decisive female presence, powerful mothers, and successful female professionals” (p. 197). Hashamova argues for the evolution of film themes since the Soviet collapse, from the chaos of the early years to the emergence of a new social order marked by “a greater variety of female roles and a traumatic adjustment of men to the most recent social changes” (p. 196). In a survey of the largely male homosexual public scene in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Luc Beaudoin stresses a...