A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature

Notes

Notes SONA STEPHAN HOISINGTON, INTRODUCTION 1. See, for example, Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Helena Goscilo, ed., Fruits ofHer plume: Essays on Contemporary Russian Women's Culture (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1993); Jane Costlow, Stephanie Sandler, and Judith Vowles, eds., Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1993); Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal , and MaryZirin, eds., Dictionary ofRussian Women Writers (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994); Toby W. Clyman and Diana Greene, eds., Women Writers in Russian Literature (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994). 2. For a critique of this kind of feminist criticism, which was popular in the early 1970s, see Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (reprint, New York: Routledge, 1990),42-49. 3. This, ofcourse, is not to deny that stereotyped images ofwomen do occur in literature, as recent feminist criticism attests, but all too often the problem is that we as readers are blinded by these stereotypes. As Virginia Woolf observed, "it is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality." 4. See, for example, Carolyn Heilbrun, Towards a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Knopf, 1973),49-51. 5. Carolyn Heilbrun, Towards a Recognition of Androgyny, 49, and Lee R. Edwards, "The Labors of Psyche: Towards a Theory of Female Heroism ," Critical Inquiry 6 (1979): 33-49. Edwards argues that the use of this term "eliminates the awkward distinction between the heroine as heroic figure and the heroine as conventional woman that has perplexed so much recent literary, especially feminist, analysis" (42). 6. The terms "feminist critique" and "gynocritics" were coined by Elaine Showalter. For her account ofthe history offeminist criticism, see "A Criticism of Our Own: Autonomy and Assimilation in Afro-American and Feminist Literary Theory," in Feminisms: An Anthology ofLiterary Theory 129 Notes to Pages 3-7 and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press), 168-88. 7. This point is made by Susan Suleiman in a different context in her essay, "(Re)Writing the Body: The Politics and Poetics of Female Eroticism ," in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985),22. CARYL EMERSON, TATIANA 1. For Belinsky on Tatiana, see V. G. Belinskii, "Evgenii Onegin" A. S. Pushkina (Moscow: GosIzdKhudLit, 1957), esp. 59-84 (Stat'ia 9-ia). Dostoevsky proclaimed in his Pushkin Speech (1880): "Perhaps Pushkin would have done better had he called his poem by Tatiana's name and not Onegin 's.... She utters the truth of the poem." Fyodor Dostoevsky, "Pushkin," in Sona Hoisington, ed. and trans., Russian Views ofPushkin's "Eugene Onegin " (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 56-67, esp. 59. 2. Interestingly, it is Belinsky in his Eighth Article on Pushkin (1844) who defends Onegin against the incipient Tatiana cult. "[T]he heart has its own laws," Belinsky writes. "Therefore, Onegin had a perfect right, without fearing the stem judgment of the critics, not to fall in love with the girl Tatyana and to fall in love with the woman. In neither case did he act morally or immorally.... There is nothing dreamy or fantastic about Onegin. He could be happy or unhappy only in reality and through reality." See Vissarion Belinsky, "Eugene Onegin: An Encyclopedia of Russian Life," in Hoisington , ed. and trans., Russian Views ofPushkin's "Eugene Onegin," 34,40. 3. For a survey of the ebbs and flows in Tatiana's critical image (as of the early 1970s), see Geraldine Kelley, 'The Characterization of Tafjana in Puskin's 'Evgenij Onegin'" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1976), esp. part 1. 4. Among those critics who have found unpersuasive the final meeting between the lovestruck Onegin and the Princess Tatiana, three will have special relevance for my reading: Nabokov, Little, and Gregg (see below). I lay aside Viktor Shklovsky's famous claim that the narrator's primary stance toward Tatiana throughout the novel-and in fact his stance toward plot in general-is parodic. Two factors suggest caution: (1) Tatiana (like all Pushkin's heroines after the mid-1820s) is smarter than the plots in which she finds herself and does not need the heavy hand of outside commentary to help her outgrow her setting; and (2) the early polemical Shklovsky tends to see parody everywhere; for him the work often serves to legitimate the device and not the other way around. See Viktor Shklovskij, "Pushkin and Sterne: Eugene Onegin" [1923], in Twentieth-Century Russian...