The Prose of Life: Russian Women Writers from Kruschev to Putin (review)

There is a contemporary feminist project to rediscover and interpret the territory of Russian women’s writing, lost or forgotten within the strongly patriarchal tradition of Russian literature (Marsh 1). Benjamin Sutcliffe’s study of “the prose of life” in post-Soviet women’s literature is an impressive contribution to this revision, and to the critical literature on twentieth-century and contemporary women’s writing. Sutcliffe divides his study into three periods: the Thaw and Stagnation (early 1960s to mid-1980s); Perestroika (1985–1991); and the 1990s on. The connecting theme of his study is the topos of everyday life, or byt—women’s traditional arena, which has been undervalued and constrained in different and varying degrees by the ideologies of successive periods of Russian culture, from Orthodoxy through the Bolshevik revolution, Stalinism, the Thaw, Stagnation, and Perestroika.

The potential readership for this book is wide, encompassing feminists, students and scholars of women’s writing and of Russian literature and culture. For a non-specialist reader, the analysis would be more accessible if there were a chronological chart of political events, correlated with the cultural and literary history, or at least a succinct summary at the beginning of the study. As it is written, the cultural history is woven through the literary analysis and the reader has to glean this information piece by piece as the narrative progresses.

The organizing theme of the study is the binary of byt (everyday life) and bytie (spiritual and intellectual life), with emphasis on the former. In Russian culture, byt is consistently linked to women, whereas bytie is a masculine province. Byt is traditionally equated with a “corrosive banality” that threatens the “higher aspirations” of bytie, which is aligned with sweeping cultural changes such as Marxism, and the grand narratives of religion, politics and philosophy (Sutcliffe 4–5). Sutcliffe’s analysis focuses on how the theme of everyday life reflects the massive cultural changes that took place in this turbulent period, and on how women’s prose both mirrors and critiques the changing social and cultural milieu.

Byt is equated with passivity, reaction, mundanity, corporeality, ephemerality, and domesticity: the sum of these qualities is unworthiness and subordination to the male, with the vaunted gender egalitarianism of the Soviet Union proving to be “as illusory as its citizen’s political freedoms” (5). Although the feminine and everyday was considered secondary, it was also seen as crucial, from the intelligentsia’s point of view, as “a conduit to bytie” (6). The intelligentsia was in almost constant crisis during the Soviet era. The onus was on women to preserve normality and domesticity during the Stalinist terror and the war against Nazi Germany. This contradictory evaluation of the status of women and byt as subordinate yet crucial was maintained during the Thaw (1953–1968). The binary division continued during Stagnation (1969–1984), and kept byt and women’s contribution to culture and modernity largely unnoticed (7).

Sutcliffe explains that the Russian conception of byt is significantly different from Western counterparts. For instance, as Michel de Certeau interprets the practice of everyday life, it is an arena that allows subalterns resistance, wherein the tedium of material life can be leavened by individual choices, however small-scale and opportunistic. Disorder in this context can be “more liberating than threatening” (Sutcliffe 7). Further, the Birmingham School and the advent of cultural studies brought the everyday into focus, and since the 1980s it has been a fertile interdisciplinary field in the West for studies in gender, race, and related fields (8).

Russian scholarship has associated byt with resistance since the 1990s, a lag that Sutcliffe explains is attributable to the intelligentsia’s perception of the everyday as a gendered barrier to bytie, a continuation of the Eastern orthodox binary of body/female and soul/male (8). In this conservative paradigm, there is no neutral or middle ground (9). Sutcliffe’s study contributes to the claiming of a space in which...