Russian literature. A short introduction

To argue along these lines does not mean placing Pushkin on a list of writers deserving critical annihilation, summoning him before what one senior American Slavist, writing in 1994, sarcastically termed ‘the stern tribunal of assistant professors’. Gender-aware criticism does not have to amount to ideologized proscription. Nor – to rebut another hostile argument occasionally used against it – does it require the imposition of modern views on texts from different eras. ‘Feminism’ refers to a geographically and historically limited phenomenon (a European movement, or series of movements, beginning in the sixteenth century). But sexual difference and sexual acts are an abiding obsession in all human societies. There is no evidence whatever that Pushkin was interested in, or even aware of, the feminism of his day (it is most unlikely that he had read, say, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women). He could not have anticipated the theories of Gayatri Spivak or Hélène Cixous, any more than he could those of Marx and Lenin. But he was without doubt passionately interested in issues of sex and gender, in what he, along with most educated people of his day, considered an obvious but fascinating and awkward truth, that men and women were immutably different.

This opinion, and its corollary, the belief that feminine language and experience had particular significance, masculine language and experience universal significance, were also held by many female contemporaries of Pushkin’s. Evdokiya Rostopchina, for example, in her poem ‘Pushkin’s Notebook’ (1839), described the book not in order to suggest a sort of equivalence between Pushkin’s unpublished texts and the reluctance of women writers to enter print, but in order to underline the inferiority of feminine writing: ‘I am a woman! My intellect and inspiration/Should be bound by humble modesty.’ The poem ended with an apology that Rostopchina had dared to offer her ‘timid song’ in place of ‘Pushkin’s wondrous verse’: the two alternative paraphrases of the word ‘poetry’, ‘song’ and ‘verse’, emphasized the distance between the masculine and the feminine text.