The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

From the first Thaw to the end 235

Dostoevsky’s Underground Man could never have sustained such piercing, other-directed utterances from another voice center. He saw to it that no one needed him.

In Anna’s accounts, especially her rewrites of the constant vicious family squabbling, she is the heroine and sole provider. Reasons to sympathize with her certainly exist, although undercut by her own self-importance and preemptive irony. Aspiring writers – we know this from Dostoevsky – cannot be trusted. It is interesting that Western critics of The Time: Night overwhelmingly distrust Anna and consider her abusive, dishonest, and manipulative, whereas Russian readings can be quite compassionate. In one 2005 guide to contemporary literature for high school students, Anna is classified as a tragic figure, an “aging, poverty-stricken poetess” burdened by a criminal son, a depraved daughter, a senile mother, a sick grandson, and here she is a working woman, doing her best, alone and lonely – in a word, Petrushevskaya (says the female author of the guide) gives us nothing at all like playful postmodernism, only “harsh realism.”20

One day Anna comes home to find that her daughter, unhinged by their last fight, has taken all her children away. The apartment is deserted. At last Anna is completely alone and needed by no one: the authentic enabling condition for the Underground has arrived. At this point the manuscript breaks off. Doubtless Anna Adrianovna, as she falls silent, recalls the second poem in Akhmatova’s “Requiem,” a tiny lyric of four couplets, the last two of which read: “This woman is sick, / This woman is alone, / Husband in the grave, son in prison, / Pray for me.” The Time: Night is submitted to a publishing house anonymously by the daughter Alyona, and appears to be posthumous. But if this Anna, following her Tolstoyan prototype, has committed suicide in order to punish those who have ceased to need her, that story is discreetly in the margins.

In the vastlyexpandedpoolof Russian literaryplotsbyandaboutwomen, The Time: Night stands out not only because it is written so graphically on the body, where a great deal of the drama of female life is focused. Equally important, women are allowed to be tested and to fail on what was traditionally male terrain (honor, creativity, supporting a family), making use of men’s excuses. Anna Adrianovna doesn’t have a man of her own in sight, to save or to ruin, and she does not perish out of disappointed (or jealous, or unrequited) love – that powerful but narrow and hopelessly cliche´d plot. Is she a tragic figure, a superfluous one, a duplicitous one, perhaps even a comedy villain? As with all first-person narration under the star of Dostoevsky, no single answer suffices. But we can speak to the games being played. The interminable Underground identity game – “Here I am. But don’t pin me down. The real me is over here” – is to a certain extent endorsed by Dostoevsky. He cares that human