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42 Chapter Two Wooing “My Rus’! My Wife!”: (Pre-)Revolutionary Russia I N T H E S U M M E R O F 1 9 1 8 , the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev expresses the following view of Russia in his Philosophy of Inequality (Filosofiia neravenstva): In the soul of the Russian people, the inner marriage never took place. . . . The Russian earth remained feminine, always posing as a bride, always expecting its bridegroom to arrive from outside. It yielded to several husbands that entered from without, but this never resulted in true marriage. . . . You, Russian boys, you intelligenty . . . with your feminine nature, constantly searched for spiritual marriage elsewhere. You never managed to reveal an innate masculine spirit . . . you borrowed it from the West, from Western male doctrines. (4:269–70 and 273–74)1 Berdiaev’s words are programmatic for a vehement debate that is conducted by leading Russian intellectuals between approximately the 1890s and the late 1920s. “The thoughts of its participants,” in the words of one scholar of early twentieth-century intellectual culture, “kept circling around one theme: the position of the intelligentsia in relation to the state and society.”2 At the time, this issue figures prominently in literary and philosophical texts, as well as in political essays, cartoons, memoirs, personal correspondence, and even (the reception of) music and painting. Central to the discussion is the element of self-critique: as a rule, those involved consider themselves representatives of the intelligentsia, which they criticize for its weakness and lack of initiative in the sociopolitical sphere. As previously shown, such a concern is not new within Russian cultural history. What distinguishes these discussions from earlier ones, however , is the tendency to render the subject explicitly in gender terms, as an amorous intrigue between a feminized Russia and a masculine intelligentsia and state. The implicit coalescence of the heroine with Russia in the Chapter Two 43 nineteenth-century novel is now replaced by a direct equivalence, by an equal sign, as it were, between Russia and femininity. The sudden popularity of this political gender allegory can be explained by the interaction of several factors. First, it should be regarded in the context of a general transition from “latent tropes” in realism to the “realized metaphors” that Renata Döring and Igor’ Smirnov have discerned in Russian Symbolism.3 In their view, the literature of this period can be classified as a “secondary artistic system,” in which “a situation from life . . . becomes a realized metaphor” and a work of literature tends to arise from “wordplay.”4 In such a system, social or political reality is depicted not primarily through realistic description, but rather through a play with earlier literary sources and metaphoric images. This turn away from realistic spheres is reflected in the “conversion” of a growing number of Russian intellectuals “to idealism , aestheticism, even religious mysticism”—all three being tendencies that are permeated by a symbolic view of the everyday world.5 The sociopolitical triangle of intelligentsia, state, and Russian people is discussed accordingly , in highly symbolic terms. Hence the concept of a future marriage between Russia and intelligentsia—influenced as it is by Gnostic and mystical notions of androgyny—cannot be understood in terms of traditional amorous affairs. Instead, it is envisioned as a mystical androgynous entity in which the masculine and the feminine halves merge to become substantially transformed. Another factor contributing to gendered readings of Russia is the interest in femininity that marks turn-of-the-century Russian philosophy.6 An important source for the authors discussed here is Sophiological philosophy —or, more specifically, the interaction between the feminine and the masculine within this philosophy. In the words of Olga Matich: “One of the central metaphysical concerns of the Silver Age was the transcendental mystery of sex.”7 The preoccupation with sexual relationships arises against the background of a general European focus on sex and irrationalism . In the fin de siècle era, both inside and outside Russia, readers devour theoretical-philosophical studies of sexuality, such as Otto Weininger’s 1903 Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter). As Evgenii Bershtein recently argued, in Russia the latter’s ideas did not merely affect thinking about sexuality per se, but served “as a source of ideas and categories for importing gender and sexuality into the literary analysis of . . . the revolution.”8 A factor that enhances the popularity of metaphors of Russia specifically as unattainable bride is the sense of sociopolitical crisis that pervades early twentieth-century Russian culture...

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