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

2. Perestroika and the Emergence of Women's Prose: Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Tat'iana Tolstaia, and Women's Anthologies

2 Perestroika and the Emergence of Women’s Prose Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Tat’iana Tolstaia, and Women’s Anthologies Non-mother. Non-housewife. Non-wife. . . . This is a world where everything is its opposite. Marina Abasheva One can pull an entire world out of a single word. Tat’iana Tolstaia On a rainy Moscow afternoon in May 1988 author Svetlana Vasilenko happened to meet Larisa Vaneeva, another prose writer. As the two women talked, they compared their lives—a series of menial jobs, no opportunities for publishing—and realized they knew many women writers who, having previously garnered praise for their work, could now find no interested publishers. Vasilenko’s and Vaneeva’s chance encounter led them to create one of a series of women’s literary anthologies that tried to correct this problem, in the process giving women’s writing an unprecedented prominence and notoriety.1 From the early 1960s until roughly 1984 female authors had appropriated byt as a cultural space for selectively documenting gendered problems within mainstream literature. Perestroika 58 (1985–91) was a cataclysmic period for Soviet culture as Mikhail Gorbachev unleashed a series of economic and political changes that curtailed the role of the state, effectively ending censorship while also dramatically lowering the standard of living for the intelligentsia and Soviet citizens as a whole. Having long dealt with the idea of everyday crisis, women authors now existed within a context of national upheavals refracted through the prism of the quotidian. Both newspapers and “thick” journals published increasingly scathing exposés of past and current problems. Unlike during the Thaw, public criticism of the state began with attacks on Stalinism but went on to challenge Lenin and the allegedly democratic October Revolution. The Chernobyl disaster, ethnic tensions, and ongoing anti-Soviet protests in Eastern Europe added to an atmosphere of imminent catastrophe. Appropriately enough, the first of these events to greatly influence women’s prose was one firmly rooted in byt: Gorbachev’s infamous sobriety campaign, which began in 1985 and was abandoned as a failure three years later. The policy both suspended the state’s tacit support for the heavy drinking of the Stagnation years and implied that this private yet visible activity was now (once again) grounds for public intervention. This effort was more serious than its predecessors and women writers became less circumspect in their descriptions of drinking. Women’s prose came to be associated with the vitriol and conflict of perestroika. The phenomenal success of the authors Liudmila Petrushevskaia (1938–) and Tat’iana Tolstaia (1951–), coupled with the publication of six women’s literary anthologies between 1989 and 1991, made female writers a visible and controversial feature of late-Soviet literature. Women authors responded to post-1985 cultural shifts while following the thematic precedents of the older Thaw and Stagnation authors who preceded them, using byt as common cultural context and focusing on female protagonists. Perestroika women’s prose, however, abandoned the staid verisimilitude of Baranskaia and Grekova, who adapted poorly to the new conditions and were all but forgotten by 1991; these authors’ conservative styles and virtuous heroines no longer captivated readers overwhelmed by political and cultural upheaval. After 1985 women’s prose, like Soviet society as a whole, Perestroika and the Emergence of Women’s Prose 59 introduced previously private, taboo, or politically suspect topics into the public arena for discussion, often digging into the past to do so.2 These themes, while shocking those readers accustomed to the more circumspect approach of previous decades, continued the post-Stalinist rhetoric of documentation by foregrounding an appeal to truth, contemporaneity, and the importance of the everyday. However, many of the era’s female authors now openly and systematically critiqued gender differences, claiming that the state neglected or even actively victimized women. Some writers (Petrushevskaia, Tolstaia, Nina Gorlanova) addressed this problem by emphasizing collective crisis over personal tragedy. Others (Vasilenko, Marina Karpova) directly attacked a state their narratives showed to be misogynistic. The appearance of women’s anthologies in both Moscow and the provinces created a prominent cultural space within which authors and critics could discuss women’s prose. These reactions to female writers raised now familiar issues of typicality and neutrality, anxieties inherited from socialist realism and appropriated by post-Stalinist women’s writing. Unlike in previous decades, however, critics used gender per se as an artistic and ideological criterion, with byt no longer serving as a...