The Russian Memoir: History and Literature

Art and Prostokvasha: Avdot’ia Panaeva’s Work

Jehanne Gheith and Beth Holmgren Art and Prostokvasha: Avdot’ia Panaeva’s Work IN THE AGE OF Russian realism, writers and critics together welcomed the real-world material—the nationally or regionally specific characters, settings, speech, and artifacts—that memoirs inventoried for literary use. Realist fiction aspired to the memoir’s authenticity and particularity, and to that end often imported its thematic foci and representative strategies. Yet the same critics who cheered this seemingly democratic impulse in literature also arbitrated what and whose realia signified for inventory and import, and how such goods and practices should be displayed . The realist era marked Russian writers’ first collective attempt to inscribe the ambiguous phenomenon of byt, a concept that neutrally designates the daily round and human relations, yet also can connote a souldeadening materialism, a philistine immersion in the quotidian. A century later, novelist Iurii Trifonov, accused of “bytovizm,” would lament its lingering toxicity for Russian readers and critics (Trifonov 1987, 541–42). In both nineteenth and twentieth centuries, socially approved representation of byt in whatever literary form required expert, gloves-on handling, a projection of at once intimate knowledge and critical distance. As Russian women writers were to be told, they could not manage the job without contamination. Although women had published fiction regularly since the 1830s, they reportedly struggled against nature to achieve critical approval and transcendent value. The scope of their lives was deemed confining, their experience leveled by domestic concerns, and their creative faculties blinkered by biology. The king-maker critic Vissarion Belinskii made plain these perceived limitations in his 1840 review of Mariia Zhukova’s works: Men are, by nature, more all-embracing than women; men are gifted with the capacity to go beyond their individual personalities and enter all kinds of situations that they have not only never experienced, but cannot experience, while a woman is locked into herself, into her female and feminine spheres, and if she goes beyond these, then she becomes an abnormal creature. That is why a woman cannot be a great poet. (Belinskii 1978, 369)1 128 Acclaimed Russian realist masters such as the novelist Ivan Turgenev and the dramatist Aleksandr Ostrovskii volunteered corollary observations of women’s uncontrolled, emotionally driven creation, works that appear “unliterary, rushing straight from the heart, not thought through” (Turgenev 1956, 123).2 To paraphrase Ostrovskii’s more detailed taxonomy, women “naturally” write outraged feelings and unreconstructed byt: The works of female authors . . . differ from works of the male pen in that, while often inferior in artistry, they excel in their wealth of petty details, elusive psychological nuances, a particular kind of energy and fullness of feeling , very often high indignation. Women are wanting in quiet creation, cold humor, defined, finished images; on the other hand, they evince more of the touching, the denunciatory, the dramatic. It cannot be otherwise, for women are connected to the world more emotionally than men. (Ostrovskii 1952, 141) What these various male authorities in nineteenth-century Russia judged to be intellectually limited and emotionally overwrought we today revalue as alternative, equal, and sometimes subversive in value and approach. Instead of instilling critical distance, nineteenth-century women writers often reveled in emotional immediacy and intensity, investing their characters with many elements of their own identity and experience. Instead of staging politically allegorical battles between male generations (fathers and sons) or different social classes, these authors often spotlighted their “confined ,” socially assigned areas of expertise: individual psychology and the “female” worlds of domestic activities and social exchange. By focusing on family, on the mechanics of daily life, and on female characters as key players in literature and society, their writings—both fictional and nonfictional— evoked the art and argued the value of individual relationships and daily tasks. Let’s consider, then, the illustrative case of Avdot’ia Iakovlevna Panaeva (born Brianskaia, pseud. N. Stanitskii [1819/20–93]), a woman writer whose oeuvre spanned the entire realist period and articulated, first in fiction and finally in memoir, her provocative engagement with byt. The daughter of well-known actors, Panaeva spent her life and made her literary and social reputation in St. Petersburg, an urban center that enabled her contact with famous cultural figures and distinguished her experience from that of many women writers residing in and writing about the provinces (Zirin 1994, 74). At the age of eighteen, she fled her parents’ abusive home through marriagemisalliance with the writer and aristocrat, Ivan Panaev, and thereby was drawn into the publication and social scene...