American Contributions to the 14th International Congress of Slavists. Ohrid 2008

In Love with Alcohol: Russian Women's Writing and the Representation of Alcohol Abuse among Women

David M. Bethea, ed. American Contributions to the 14th International Congress of Slavists , Ohrid, September 2008. Vol. 2: Literature. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 155–166. In Love with Alcohol: Russian Women’s Writing and the Representation of Alcohol Abuse among Women Teresa Polowy The representation in fiction of social phenomena is a fascinating problematic. While the relationship is not direct and we must be aware of the “flight toward empiricism” that assumes “an unbroken continuity between ‘life’ and ‘text’” (Jacobus 1986: 108), the study of literature as a refractor and illuminator of attitudes and stereotypes, perceptions of self and others, is an important tool by which to obtain information about a given social issue. In this paper, I propose to use fiction as just such a tool to investigate the question of the increase in alcoholism among Russian women, which by the early 1980s, had almost doubled over two decades to reach 15 percent of the total number of alcoholics1 in Russia (White 1996: 40). The nature of my paper is interdisciplinary and predicated on the reciprocal interplay of literary, cultural, and social science insights. In her 1999 study Reading Alcoholisms, Jane Lilienfeld posits alcoholism as a “biopsychosocial illness” and a “multicausational disease” with a “physiological component” (1999: 4), a view with which I strongly agree.2 I will present several stories by Russian women written since 1980 which acknowledge the problem of female alcoholism in Russia with the expectation that these works will 1 The terms “alcoholic” and “alcoholism” used here are synonymous with the terms “alcohol dependent” and “alcohol dependence” as applied to Europeans and defined in the 1992 “ICD10 Classification of Mental and Behavioral Disorders” issued by the World Health Organization. “Alcohol dependence syndrome” is understood as: “A cluster of physiological, behavioral, and cognitive phenomena in which the use of alcohol takes on a much higher priority for a given individual than other behaviors that once had greater value. A central descriptive characteristic of the dependence syndrome is the desire (often strong, sometimes overpowering) to take alcohol. […] It is an essential characteristic of the dependence syndrome that either alcohol taking or a desire to take alcohol should be present; the subjective awareness of compulsion to use alcohol is most commonly seen during attempts to stop or control alcohol use.” 2 “[A]lcoholism occurs within an individual embedded in a family system that is located in a particular social class, historical time, and socioeconomic actualities. In its specificity, close attachment to historical, psychological, and cultural analyses, the biopsychosocial view has similarities to the approach used in cultural studies of literature” (Lilienfeld: 4). 156 TERESA POLOWY supplement the relative dearth of sociological and psychological data about heavy drinking by Russian women. Alcoholism is one of Russia’s oldest and most serious social problems, which over many generations has become an almost universally accepted facet of Russian daily life. Economist Vladimir Treml’s assessment of alcohol abuse during the Soviet period is equally applicable to Russia today: “The magnitude and scope of alcohol abuse and the severity if its impact on Soviet society are unique in terms of international experience” (1985: 56). Yet commentators have also noted that the alcohol problem in Russia has never been sufficiently or broadly enough conceived; in terms of policy, it has always been an appendage issue to larger and more politically significant initiatives, and its relationship to international experience with alcohol abuse was largely ignored (see especially Takala 2002: 296; White 1996: 188). Until 1991, alcohol abuse came under the jurisdiction of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs, thus there existed little summary data, overall statistics, and findings of epidemiological research on heavy drinking available for inclusion in any discussion of health issues in the USSR. Nonetheless, anecdotal evidence and reports in the media and some specialized literature, particularly during Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign of 1985–88, suggested just how significantly heavy drinking affected social and economic aspects of life in Russia. As early as 1992, figures began to emerge in Russia that proved there was cause for concern. In his book Russia Goes Dry, Stephen White cites a report of the State Statistical Commission published on September 23, 1993 in Nezavisimaia gazeta claiming that “the problem of alcoholism has ‘reemerged with new vigour’” (1996: 166). In this regard, White refers to articles published between November 1992 and July 1994 in Izvestiia, Moskovskaia pravda, and Rabochaia tribuna that put the alcoholism rate at between 10 and 50 percent of the national working population (1996...