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vii If a panoramic view of twentieth-century Russian intellectual thought were possible, then its range of symbolic representations of Russia as unattainable bride would certainly strike the eye. The “bride Russia” of Nikolai Berdiaev ’s philosophy, the equation of Russia with Lara in Doctor Zhivago, Vladimir Sorokin’s consummately Russian heroines: in their depiction of Russia, several twentieth-century literary, philosophical, political, and journalistic texts take recourse to the metaphor of an unattainable female beloved or bride-to-be. By and large, such bridal metaphors can be linked with an underlying sociopolitical tension that has its roots in the nineteenth century. They are traceable to what could be labeled a “crisis of identity” within the Russian intellectual elite. From the early nineteenth century onward, Russian aristocratic—and later nonaristocratic as well—intellectuals were haunted by a growing sense of alienation from both the Russian state and the common people. Although thoroughly westernized themselves, they tended to criticize the Russian state retrospectively, from the reign of Peter I on, as a foreign Western entity that had estranged itself from “genuine” Russian culture. This ambivalent attitude toward both the regime and the West coincided with their increasing distance from Russia’s native culture and population . Intellectual discourse revolved around the wish to bridge this distance and to create a new society that would be no less egalitarian than authentically Russian. That the dream of this “more Russian” society sprang from Romantic ideals of Western rather than Russian origin mattered little to its supporters.1 This paradoxical trend—the efforts of a westernized intellectual elite to defy the West (and its own “westernized” regime) in exchange for an imagined native Arcadia—is not exclusive to Russia. Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit recently argued that it is not all that different from antiWestern feelings among westernized urban intellectuals in modern Asia and the Middle East.2 Acknowledgments Acknowledgments viii Rather than zeroing in on these sociopolitical sentiments themselves, this study focuses on their transformation into a prominent gender metaphor around the turn of the twentieth century: namely, the representation of Russia as unattainable bride, which turned into a pivotal constituent of twentieth-century Russian intellectual thought. The bridal metaphor first attained supremacy in early twentieth-century literary, philosophical, and political debates—debates in which participants tended to envision their troubled self-views and worldviews in terms of a metaphoric amorous triangle . Within this triangle, the intelligentsia figured as Russia’s symbolic suitor, Russia took on the role of female beloved, and the “westernized” tsarist regime appeared as the false husband from whom the intelligentsia needed to liberate the feminized Russia. For obvious reasons, the intelligentsia’s symbolic “liberation of the bride” was doomed to remain a utopian dream as long as the Russian Empire continued to exist. Little surprise, then, that those pre-revolutionary thinkers who used the metaphor invariably portrayed themselves or the intelligentsia as Russia’s ineffectual suitors. After the fall of the tsarist government , however, one might have expected the concept of Russia as the intelligentsia’s unattainable, oppressed beloved to have gradually vanished. Yet nothing of the sort occurred. On the contrary, the tendency to conceive of Russia as a bride-to-be, and of both state and intelligentsia as her male suitors, remained a key aspect of twentieth-century Russian intellectual thought. Far from disappearing after the Revolution of 1917, the concept continues even today as a vital cultural myth within Russian literature, philosophy , journalism, and, to a lesser extent, cinema, visual arts, tattoos, cartoons , and popular discourse. In 2009 it possesses the status of a cultural cliché that writers, thinkers, and artists travesty only too eagerly. This study affords the metaphor’s development—from politically motivated image to object of postmodern parody—the meticulous exploration it merits. As a prelude to this exploration, I would like to thank the Netherlands Scientific Organization (NWO) for funding my research on the project, and the University of Groningen for providing me with a welcoming and inspiring professional environment. For the final product, I am grateful to various people for various reasons. First of all, I am indebted to Joost van Baak for his part of our perfect collaboration, for motivating discussions, and for his unwavering support and acute editorial eye. Many thanks to Sander Brouwer for directing my thoughts to this topic and for more intellectual inspiration and support than any student could hope to receive. I would also like to express my gratitude to Viktor Erofeev, Aleksandr Iakut, Timur...

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