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

3. The Artistry of Everyday Life: Liudmila Ulitskaia, Svetlana Vasilenko, and Post-Soviet Women's Anthologies

3 The Artistry of Everyday Life Liudmila Ulitskaia, Svetlana Vasilenko, and Post-Soviet Women’s Anthologies A woman’s gaze is always fixed, unexpected, and paradoxical. Svetlana Vasilenko I accept everything that is given. Liudmila Ulitskaia During the Brezhnev years one of the young workers in a Moscow genetics laboratory was discovered reading and retyping underground literature. Fearful that the entire lab would be closed, her superiors fired her, citing the need for a reduction in staff. The woman, who had graduated with a degree in biology, abandoned her long-standing interest and began to devote more time to writing, her other passion.1 In the 1990s this author— Liudmila Ulitskaia—began to gain international fame for her original prose, which fused everyday life with humane values, eventually winning the author Russia’s most prestigious literary prize. The ultimately fortuitous career change of Ulitskaia (1943–) recalls the literary path of Natal’ia Baranskaia, another author who brought byt to the attention of readers. These two writers, each of whom defined images of the quotidian, shared a common beginning: the government that distrusted them unwittingly spurred their development as authors. 99 During perestroika women’s prose had become a visible and voluble presence in Russian literature, accompanying hesitant academic discussion of feminism against a backdrop of conservative gender roles. Female authors used the era’s tendency toward negation and exposure to broach taboo topics of private life, demythologizing the intelligentsia and critiquing the state with brutal frankness. Whereas before 1985 authors and critics employed byt as a coded reference to women’s issues, during the last years of the Soviet Union supporters and opponents explicitly invoked gender as a criterion for artistic merit. After 1992 women’s prose and literature as a whole changed dramatically as the economic and cultural shifts of perestroika gave way to the rapid disintegration of the USSR, the chaos of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, and a shift toward conservatism under Vladimir Putin. High culture and the intelligentsia, its keeper, found themselves struggling to remain relevant and soluble, especially during the impoverished early 1990s.2 Women’s writing, however, was an intriguing exception. It—and particularly the prose of Ulitskaia—was phenomenally successful in the post-Soviet era. Tolstaia and Petrushevskaia likewise remained a staple of intellectual readers despite the nation’s lowered standard of living and reduced spending power.3 Novels such as Ulitskaia’s Medeia i ee deti (Medea and Her Children, 1996) and Durochka (Little Fool, 1996) by Svetlana Vasilenko (1956–) were well received in great part due to their use of transhistorical time, a temporality distinct from the chronotope of crisis dominating the works of earlier women writers. This change paralleled a more fluid depiction of male and female interaction (including homosexuality), roles authors grounded in individual emotion and experience rather than in gendered expectations. Critics debated the relationship between women’s prose and feminism as well as its place in the widening gap between elite and popular culture, a division in some ways bridged by female authors’ images of the quotidian. Such treatment posited reader awareness of the type of gendered issues first cautiously documented by Baranskaia and Grekova and then brutally scrutinized by women’s prose during perestroika. 100 The Artistry of Everyday Life Transhistorical Time: Humanizing Temporality Ulitskaia and Vasilenko are post-Soviet Russia’s two most original authors in terms of their depictions of byt. Such innovation in great part derives from imagining women’s temporality as both an everyday phenomenon and something transhistorical, wherein families bound by emotional or spiritual ties unite different eras. Using kinship to shape temporality implies an indirect approach to history, with the narrative examining key events through the female quotidian. This viewpoint envisions byt as an ordinary yet unbounded realm whose very insignificance contains the secrets of human character. Medeia i ee deti sharply diverges from the familial claustrophobia of a work such as Petrushevskaia’s Vremia noch’, where relatives suffer through an endless cycle of unlearned mistakes. In Ulitskaia’s novel the ironically named Medeia (Medea) shows that love is a different kind of continuity: her selflessness and kindness propel the narrative, which moves from the horrors of Stalinism to the turmoil of the 1990s. Medeia’s relationships with her numerous relatives unify the plot. Focusing on such a character , the narrative presents love as more familial than carnal. Medeia never has sex after her husband dies...