Gender Issues in Slavic Studies in the USA

Carol Ueland

Professor of Russian Emerita

Drew University

Title: Toby Clyman and Diana Greene’s Women Writers in Russian Literature: the expansion of Russian women’s literature across time, space and politics.

I, like Diana and Sharon, experienced my first years in the Columbia Slavic department in the late 70’s.  Like them, my pathway to a permanent position in Slavic was long and often interrupted.  Recently married I eventually moved from Queens to Morningside Heights and arrived already with S7000 of under graduate student loans.  When I started taking classes, I was also teaching high school Russian and shortly thereafter after had baby.  But like Sharon and Diana, although it took a terribly long time, the three of us eventually found permanent positions in the field.  Among the Barnard-Columbia faculty was one full-time woman faculty member, Marina Ledkovsky, who was an incredible mentor and a seminal figure in teaching about and publishing Russia women.  Some of my cohort at Columbia were also privileged to have a chance to learn about women writers from Barbara Heldt, who while a visiting scholar for a semester, led an informal study group on women in literature at what is now the Harriman Institute one afternoon a week.  It was not a lecture series by Barbara but a gathering where each of us (including Robin Feuer Miller, the late Ann Frydman and many others) developed a topic on gender which interested us and presented it to the group.  It was off the books—no course credit for either the students or teaching credit for Barbara. This experience had a lasting impact on my career and that of others. The copious footnotes in subsequent articles and books attest to the lasting impact of Heldt’s own book Terrible Perfection. Women and Russian Literature, published in 1987, which contributed to a new rise of interest in Russian women as both authors and subjects.  The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, preceded by the gradual erosion of censorship in the preceding Gorbachev era, created a new wave of interest in Russian women’s writing both past and present. In New York, in March of 1991 there was a three day conference at New York University called “Glasnost’ in Two Cultures”. The organizers included leading American feminist literary critics and scholars: Domna Stanton the author of three books and about thirty articles on feminism in France, Catherine Stimson then Dean at Rutgers and the editor of the feminist journal “Signs” and other notables including Mary Gordon, Patsy Yeager, the poet Marilyn Hacker. I won’t give a complete list of all participants but there was a group of American Slavists on the organizing committee: Marina Ledkovsky (Astman) Helena Goscilo, Amy Mandelker, Caryl Emerson, Svetland Boym, Nancy Condee, Jane Costlow, Cathy Nepomnyashchy, Stephanie Sandler, and myself.  With considerable difficulty, not to mention expense, a large contingent of Russian intellectuals including Natalya Ivanova, Tatyana Tolstaya, Nina Beliaeva, Lana Gogoberidze, and Nadezhda Azhgikhina were invited to the event. It was an explosive gathering but the need to expand what we experienced to others, through compiling new anthologies, the need for an enormous number of new translations and continuous face to face interactions and exchanges at university venues, etc. while an overwhelming task, also seemed possible now. The following years saw an output of new scholarly work on Russian women writers.   Of these the focus of my remarks today is the volume entitled “Women Writers in Russian Literature” which was published by Greenwood Press in 1994, and co-edited by Toby Clyman and Diana Greene.   This book, a collection of articles, the sort of needed expansion to both Western Russian scholars and non-Russian speaking readers of understudied Russian women poets and prose writers. 

The book was designed to appeal to both students and scholars of Russian literature as well as to other readers who were especially eager to read the works of contemporary Russian women writers and their precursors about whom little was written.  Almost every chapter reintroduces forgotten women writers, which was one of the main goals of the collection. Toby and Diana also spurred Slavic scholars to catch up on current feminist theory and scholarship.  In their introduction to the volume, the editors suggest that the underlying questions for us were: “Why have we never heard of these women writers before? Are they good writers? Can we speak of a separate women’s literary tradition?

 To prepare for this panel I gave myself the pleasure of reading the whole book-. It consists of 14 chapters written by a variety of scholars whose names I think we all recognize as pioneers, many of whom, like Diana, were among the founders of AWSS. Diana and Toby both credited the annual discussion group, “Women in Slavic Literature and Culture” at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as the initial spark for this volume.  The invited authors were at various levels in their careers: there were three Full Professors, Marina Ledkovsky, Helena Goscilo and Jane Taubman, 5 Associate Professors, three Assistant Professors and three independent scholars- i.e. a very diverse group, including the underemployed.   Women Writers in Russian Literature was not intended to be a history of Russian women’s writing (that task was undertaken by Adele Barker and Jehanne Geith in 2002 as well as by British scholars, such as Catriona Kelly and others.)  In this book while there are historical gaps between chapters, the articles appear In a loosely chronological order by genre—from an essay on late medieval women as oral performers to what was then “contemporary”: writers of the late 1980’s or early 90’s glasnost’.  Collecting the necessary biographical information, the Russian publications themselves and in some cases unpublished manuscripts was not as simple a task in the late 1980’s and early 1990s as attaching a pdf to an email message. Trips to Russia, in person meetings with writers either in the increasingly chaotic failing Soviet state or the also chaotic new Russian republic after 1991 was both exhilarating and scarry. One scholar who did a tremendous amount of this labor was Helena Goscilo, whose chapter in the book, “Paradigm Lost? Contemporary Women’s Fiction” is one of the book’s richest.

Diana and I shared a passion for poetry, and for the 19^th and 20^th centuries the book included three articles on Russian women poets:  Diana’s article “Nineteen-Century Women Poets: Critical Reception vs. Self-Definition.” Jane Taubman’s “Women Poets of the Silver Age” and “Women’s Poetry in the Soviet Union,” by yours truly.  Jane’s article proclaimed what our syllabi soon confirmed that “Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva stand among the giants of twentieth century world literature.” We’d made it! For the next generation of Russian women poets, however that became the problem.  The endless comparisons of their work to their two great precursors became their central dilemma, as I discuss in my own article, and which I will not expand on here.  As Iunna Morits wrote in a poem at that time, the measure of worth in Russian women’s poetry became one “akhmatovtsvet”.  The camaraderie and interaction between participants of this and other projects was extraordinary.  At the same time as Marina Ledkovsky wrote the first overview article about Russian women writers in the first three emigrations, she was also working on her Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, along with Charlotte Rosenthal and Mary Zirin, which, came out the same year, 1994.  I remember staying in a cheap hotel in Moscow, (where I had broken my foot on the treacherous streets of that time), receiving manuscripts and drafts of articles from Russian participants for both projects. Subsequent studies of women writers expanded rapidly after these two publications.

 I’d now like to talk about one discussion Diana and I had repeatedly, which was about description and naming, how to describe gender in two often incompatible languages by words that seem to have the same meaning but have widely varying resonances “Woman poet” was what was used in the title and in most articles for the Women Writers in Russian Literature volume. Today we hear just mostly use the description, “poet”, without any indication of gender, i.e. “the great poet Marina Tsvetaeva.”   However, because Russian is a language with a strict system of agreement by grammatical gender, there was a fluctuating history of the uses of final syllables to feminize a profession—the words like “докторша» commonly found much in 19^th century writings had seemingly disappeared.  More specifically our discussion was on how to get rid of the word “poetessa” and how to replace it. Our discussion went on for quite some time and ended up in articles that each of us later wrote for Mapping the Feminine. Russian Women and Cultural Differences, published in 2008 (but again preceded by a conference at Columbia in 2001) and edited by Hilda Hoogenboom, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Irina Reyman, which celebrated the work of Marina Ledkovsky. While the term “woman poet” ( zhenskii poet)  had been used in the title and in most articles for the Women Writers in Russian Literature ten years earlier, Diana’s article, “Poet, Poetessa, Zhenshchina-Poet: Job Titles and Comparable Worth” and my article “Pseudonyms and Personae of Marianna Kolosova: Creating a New Feminine Voice in Emigration” reflected our longtime conversations.  As Diana argued any modifier to the word “poet” (in either language) is also a marker of difference and implicitly represented inferiority, while in my article discussed a poet using multiple pseudonyms, both male and female, to represent conflicting notions of self through her use of chosen personae.  While by that time of the volume’s publication, the usage we heard was mostly the description, “poet”, without any indication of gender.  I don’t have time to trace the path of change in identity in Russian publications about women, except to note that it was more fraught because of the gendered nature of the language.  An anthology of women writers published in St. Petersburg in 2000, edited by such eminent scholars as M.L. Gasparov and Tatyana Nikolskaia, was still entitled Сто одна поэтесса серебряного века. I’ll end there but for those of you who are able to attend either in person or virtually the conference in Chicago, Hildfa Hoogenbaum has organized several other panels on Diana’s work.

Let me just end on a more personal note: Diana’s interest in scholarship never waned but after taking on the position of Slavic Librarian at New York University she became an invaluable resource for many of us.  When Ludmilla Trigos and I worked on the biographical series “Lives of Remarkable People” , it was for our book, itoften hard to get some individual biographies because the series was meant for everyday readers and not scholars therefore many academic libraries didn’t collect them.  Diana loved popular culture and just ordered them. Finally, Diana was just great fun to be with-- I miss her greatly.