The Prose of Life: Russian Women Writers from Khrushchev to Putin

1. Documenting Women's Byt during the Thaw and Stagnation: Natal'ia Baranskaia and I. Grekova

1 Documenting Women’s Byt during the Thaw and Stagnation Natal’ia Baranskaia and I. Grekova Art is a strange thing. We notice it when it is reflected in great things, but from day to day we live surrounded by petty, forgotten , transitory little things. In a sense these, too, are art. I. Grekova The task of the artist is thus to find the immortal in the ephemeral. Iurii Trifonov In 1966 the deputy director of the Pushkin Memorial Museum in Moscow abruptly retired after officials criticized her for inviting dissident poet Joseph Brodsky to an exhibit featuring the photographs of the poet Anna Akhmatova and her family, all of whom had suffered under Stalin.1 Upon leaving her cherished position, the former director turned to a new pursuit: writing. Within three years her novella Nedelia kak nedelia (A Week Like Any Other, 1969) had redefined Russian women’s writing, and the author—Natal’ia Baranskaia—had become internationally famous. From the early 1960s to the mid-1980s female authors employed images of supposedly innocuous everyday life to raise 24 women’s issues in mainstream Soviet prose. Baranskaia (1907– 2004) and I. Grekova, the literary pseudonym of mathematician Elena Venttsel’ (1908–2002), used the post-Stalinist focus on documentation to depict a gendered quotidian existence illustrating the problems of female Soviet citizens. Their protagonists, drawn from the USSR’s showcased scientists and engineers, were usually single mothers or widows (as were the writers themselves).2 This similarity between creator and character parallels the strong relationship women’s writing tried to create between the quotidian and its fictional counterpart during the Thaw and Stagnation. Baranskaia and Grekova worked within their era’s emphasis on sincerity, documentation, and the new focus on the everyday to illustrate the divergent ethics of male and female characters and relations between the sexes. What resulted was a picture of numerous inequalities in Soviet society that, because of the writers’ modes of depiction, paradoxically legitimated some of the gender differences whose extremes the authors critiqued. Relying on what one critic snidely termed the “Procrustean bed of byt” seemingly limited options for representing women’s lives.3 Critics responding to this prose assessed its success in categories that unwittingly reproduced the authors’ tactics: a focus on byt as the main building block of narrative and the belief that fiction shows what is typical about Soviet reality. Such seemingly straightforward critical strategies revealed a host of cultural anxieties . These issues stemmed from the everyday as a women’s realm and the legacy of Stalinist socialist realism, with its quixotic claim to simultaneously depict and transform reality. Baranskaia and Grekova draw heavily on the daily lives of women, leading most critics (both Western and Russian) to restrict their discussion to assessing the sociological accuracy of their fictional images.4 This approach, while valid to a certain degree , is limiting and naive in its assumption that women’s writing is little more than the unproblematic representation of what happens outside the narrative (i.e., byt). Indeed, the reader’s con- flation of fiction with its actually existing referent is a key goal of women’s writing, warranting critical examination rather than facile acceptance. However, since the appeal to “real” social conditions is such a striking part of Baranskaia’s and Grekova’s approach , no discussion of their works would be complete without Women’s Byt during Thaw and Stagnation 25 a brief survey of the women’s experiences that the authors have selected to illustrate the female quotidian. During the Thaw and Stagnation the USSR professed gender equality while displaying a series of imbalances that, to varying degrees, surfaced in literature under the rubric byt. Despite the state’s policy of hiding, distorting, or simply never gathering unfavorable statistics, some figures suggest marked discrepancies between men’s and women’s quality of life. Both Baranskaia and Grekova were widows when their relatively late literary careers began. (Baranskaia’s second husband died in the Nazi invasion, while Grekova was widowed in 1955.) After 1945 there were twenty million more women than men in the Soviet Union. This gap, along with a woman’s longer life span, made males a “deficit ” item for the next generation, one to be carefully guarded if procured. The resulting obsession with the vanishing man had several results, none boding well for stable families or, for that matter, gender equality. Divorces increased...