The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

38 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

three different spaces (Stalinist Moscow; Jerusalem during the crucifixion of Jesus; and some stratospheric metaphysical space undated and unmarked). The Master is tested and found wanting in fortitude – he cannot protect his novel againstthe hostileoutside world– but ultimately he is empowered,as awriter, to create the new word that alters Divine history. His mistress Margarita, who has bargained with Satan to get him back, emerges as a pravednitsa, a truth-bearer for whom loyalty and love do not merely work miracles, but are themselves the miracle.

Bulgakov’s Margarita, the unfaithful wife whose virtue is fidelity, and the saintly prostitute Sonya Marmeladova, whose “soul made flesh” hardly registers the degrading effects of her profession, are two models of the pravednitsa, or female carrier of truth. But there are others. Like Sonya, most have their source in Mary, Mother of God (in Eastern Christianity, Mary’s protective mercy is emphasized rather than her virginity). As did Rome, Russia domesticated this revered Marian image, but along somewhat different lines from the Western or Catholic Madonna, who was eroticized as early as Dante and became a cult in Europe during the Age of Chivalry. The Beautiful Lady arrived late in Russia, on the brink of the twentieth century. Even in her secularized guise, the Marian pravednitsa transcended sexuality as often as she incorporated it. Two of her most popular manifestations were as maiden or bride, and as mother.

As “bride” – even if this status exists only in the fantasies of the girl – the Russian heroine blended with the enlightened female protagonist created by the French feminist novelist George Sand (1804–76). This hybrid inspired a decade of stern, earnest female heroes, perfected by Ivan Turgenev in a triad of early novels: Rudin (1856), A Nest of Gentlefolk (1859), and On the Eve (1860). Each features a na¨ıvely idealistic woman who loves and resolves to serve (that is, to save) a flawed, weak, “superfluous,” and ultimately doomed man, who inevitably fails her. The Russian source for such heroines is Pushkin’s Tatyana Larina from Eugene Onegin. While pointedly not sacrificial, Tatyana’s path is, for a love story, dazzlingly renunciatory; traces of a saint’s life glint affectionately through her childhood. Unconsummated love stories – being simpler, more controllable, and in their own lofty way, more selfish – are characteristic of truth-carriers.

The pravednitsa did not have to be a maiden or a nun. Wives and mothers in Old Russia were revered and formally canonized. Maksim Gorky’s novel Mother(1907,firstpublished inthe USAinEnglish)became themost influential incarnationof theRussianmaternalsaint in its forward-looking, atheist variant. In this founding text in the “Bolshevik tradition of secular hagiography,” the sacrificial and salvational subtext is wholly restored.5 Through love for her revolutionist son, the mother Pelegeya Nilovna outgrows both the resignation