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Angels of vengeance: the martyr-heroine and the crisis of the Russian realist novel
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Angels of vengeance: the martyr-heroine and the crisis of the Russian realist novel
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Angels of Vengeance: The Martyr-Heroine and the Crisis of the Russian Realist Novel
by
Natalia V. Dame
A Dissertation Presented to the
Faculty of the USC Graduate School
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in
Slavic Languages and Literatures
University of Southern California
August 2016
Acknowledgements
It has been said that it takes a village to raise a PhD. As a graduate student in the USC
Slavic Department, I have truly had a “village” of mentors. First and foremost, I would like to
thank my advisor, Sarah Pratt, for her invaluable help, continuous support, compelling vision,
and wonderful bedside manner. She was there for me every step of the way: from the inception
of the topic, through the ups and down of the writing process, and during the polishing of the
final manuscript. She always offered just the right amount of guidance and inspired me to be a
better writer. Her confidence in my research skills encouraged me to question the accepted
wisdom and grow as an independent thinker.
Thomas Seifrid has shaped my academic career in many exciting ways. His graduate
seminars on the Russian realist novel, early twentieth-century Russian literature, and Nabokov
provided me with a strong theoretical foundation for my dissertation. They also motivated me to
study the evolution of literary genres and interactions between literature and politics. Tom’s
extensive feedback on my manuscript added another dimension to the argument, and his
enthusiasm for my topic inspired me to develop it further.
My gratitude goes to Roberto Diaz, whose perceptive comments and continuous
encouragement helped me to revise the earlier drafts of my dissertation and stay on track. Marcus
Levitt’s seminar on the Russian satirical journals of 1905-06 showed me the value of an
interdisciplinary approach, and his lecture on women writers in eighteenth-century Russian
literature got me interested in exploring the Russian concept of the feminine. I thank Alexander
Zholkovsky for explaining how to analyze literary intertexts and Lada Panova for sharing her
work on the Divine Sophia. Both John Bowlt and Brad Damaré offered valuable ways to expand
my original dissertation proposal, and Greta Matzner-Gore made helpful suggestions for my last
chapter on Tolstoy. I give my special thanks to Tatiana Akishina for her emotional support and
to Susan Kechekian for her amazing ability to resolve any issue – be it a form to sign, a question
to answer, or a writer’s block to overcome. My appreciation also goes out to the graduate
students from the Slavic Department, whose friendship and intellectual companionship greatly
enhanced my graduate experience.
This dissertation was made possible through the generous funding from the Graduate
School of the University of Southern California, including the Bing Arnold Endowed Research
Fellowship and the Dissertation Completion Fellowship. I am especially grateful for the Gold
Family Research Fellowship and the Research Associateship at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, which enabled me to pursue my studies during the summer. I also thank the
Slavic Department and the Department of Comparative Literature at USC for providing me with
travel grants to present my research at Slavic national conferences.
I greatly appreciate all the support, guidance, and love I received from my family. Since I
was a child, my parents, Elena and Viacheslav, and my grandparents, Nina and Alexander,
fostered my study skills and developed my intellectual curiosity. I thank my father for the
countless hours of scholarly discussions about martyr-heroines, his unique ability to understand
my thinking, and his emotional intelligence. I thank my mother for her unwavering belief in my
path, motivational pep talks, and support of my career choices. My brother Mikhail strengthened
my love of literature with his inquisitive questions, and my mother-in-law Linda consistently
made me feel proud of my achievements. Finally, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to
my husband Matt, whose contributions are too many to name. He encouraged me to pursue a
PhD, kept up with my research, helped me brainstorm and edit, assuaged my doubts, and kept
my eyes on the prize. He is my intellectual inspiration. I dedicate this dissertation to him.
Table of Contents
Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………………..ii
Appendix ………………………………………………………………………………………...iii
Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………….....1
Chapter 1. Modernizing the Concept of the Feminine: The Cultural Origins of the ‘Martyr-
Heroine’ ……………………………………………………………………………..25
Chapter 2. The ‘Martyr-Heroine’ on Trial: The Historical Perspective ………………………...55
Chapter 3. Writing the ‘Martyr-Heroine’: A Literary Response by Polonsky, Turgenev,
and Korolenko …………………………………………………………………...…113
Chapter 4. Rewriting the ‘Martyr-Heroine’: The Prostitute in Garshin ………………………..183
Chapter 5. Embracing a Modern Concept of the Feminine: Martyrs and Prostitutes in
Tolstoy’s Resurrection ……………………………………………………………..278
Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………………..…360
Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………...373
ii
Abstract
This dissertation examines the destabilizing effect of the figure of the revolutionary martyr-
heroine on literary portrayals of the feminine in late nineteenth-century Russian fiction. It also
probes the relationship between the emerging narrative of the martyr-heroine and the crisis of
Russian realism. While scholars typically focus on the historical significance of female
revolutionaries, such as Vera Zasulich, Sofia Perovskaia, and Vera Figner, my project reveals a
broader cultural relevance of the myth of the martyr-heroine. This myth is closely tied to the
changing perception of the feminine in fin-de-siècle Russia. Drawing on a range of literary,
historical, and gender-focused scholarship, I argue that the figure of the martyr-heroine enables a
previously overlooked transition from the realist tropes of mother, wife, daughter, bride, and
adulteress to the symbolist tropes of the eternal feminine and the decadent femme fatale. This
transition undergoes three stages: the rejection of the patriarchal familial narrative in the new
character of the martyr-heroine by Polonsky, Turgenev, and Korolenko; the reassessment of the
fallen woman as a stand-in for the revolutionary feminine by Garshin; and the transformation of
female political and sexual transgression into the socially conscious and spiritually resurrected
Katiusha Maslova by Tolstoy.
As an important contributor to historical, social, cultural, and literary changes of the 1870s-
1890s, the notion of the martyr-heroine alters the way we think about the literary depiction of
female figures. First, it bridges the gap between seemingly unrelated realist and symbolist female
types and, in so doing, demonstrates the evolution of the Russian concept of the feminine.
Because of its subversive nature, the trope of the martyr-heroine also plays an important role in
the decline of the Russian realist novel. As late nineteenth-century Russian writers begin to
search for ways of portraying women beyond the established conventions of the time, the realist
narrative gives way to the symbolist and decadent aesthetics of Russian modernism, marking the
martyr-heroine ‘the Trojan horse’ of Russian realist fiction. Both a central component of the
modern concept of the Russian feminine and a key factor in Russian literary evolution, the
phenomenon of the martyr-heroine makes the complex interactions between literature and life,
gender and genre, and politics and culture an ever-stronger part of the fabric of Slavic studies.
iii
Appendix
The Development of the Modern Concept of the Russian Feminine:
A Chronology of Historical Events and Literary Works
1
History Literature
1825: the Decembrist revolt
1860s: the Woman Question; the Nihilist
movement
1861: Emancipation of the serfs
1866: Karakozov’s failed attempt to assassinate
Alexander II
1869: the Nechaev affair
1873-1875: Go to the People campaign
1876: Land and Liberty propagandist organization
1877: Trial of the Fifty; Bardina sentenced to nine
years hard labor in Siberia
1877-78: Trial of the 193
1878: Zasulich shoots General Trepov
1878: Zasulich acquitted
1879: People’s Will terrorist organization
(includes Perovskaia and Figner)
1881: Alexander II assassinated; Perovskaia
arrested and executed
1883: Figner arrested
1884: Figner imprisoned for twenty years
1859-1860s – Pisarev’s, Dobroliubov’s,
Chernyshevsky’s literary criticism
1860: Turgenev’s On the Eve
1863: Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done?
1866: Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment
1871-72: Dostoevsky’s Demons
1871-73: Nekrasov’s Russian Women
1873-77: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
1873-81: Solov’ev’s poems about Sophia, the Eternal
Feminine
1877: Turgenev’s Virgin Soil
1877: Polonsky’s The Prisoner
1877: Dostoevsky’s “The Certain Lot of the Future
Russian Woman” in “A Writer’s Diary”
1878: Garshin’s “An Incident”
1878: Turgenev’s The Threshold
1880: Korolenko’s The Strange One
1880: Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov
1885: Garshin’s “Nadezhda Nikolaevna”
1889: Tolstoy’s “The Devil”
1889: Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata
1897-98: Tolstoy’s What is Art?
1898: Tolstoy’s “Father Sergius”
1899: Tolstoy’s Resurrection
1
The structure of this appendix is informed by the “Chronology” appendix from The Cambridge Companion to
Modern Russian Culture. See Nicholas Rzhevsky, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), xiii-xliv.
1
Introduction
Gender is the discourse of Russian secularization and modernity. Accordingly, we
suggest, it is the feminine, and especially the female body, which mediates and
operates as the link between social and aesthetic discourses.
2
—Heyder and Rosenholm
But the most important and most beneficial role in the regeneration of Russian
society will certainly fall to the Russian woman.
3
—Dostoevsky
All new – good or bad – always begins with women.
4
—Turgenev
The Myth of Women in Russian Cultural Narrative
Placing women on a pedestal is a known hallmark of nineteenth-century Russian
literature and culture. In 1831, Russia’s famous poet Alexander Pushkin wrote, “There is no
doubt that Russian women are better educated, read more, and think more than the men, who are
busy with God knows what.”
5
More than thirty years later, another renowned poet Nikolai
Nekrasov extolled the bravery and stamina of Russian peasant women, who could easily “stop a
galloping horse and walk into a burning house.”
6
A similar degree of admiration was expressed
in 1877 by Fedor Dostoevsky, who argued that the Russian woman “contains one of our great
2
Caroline Heyder and Arja Rosenholm, “Feminisation as Functionalisation: the Presentation of Femininity by the
Sentimentalist Man,” in Women and Gender in 18th-century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn (Hampshire: Ashgate
Publishing Limited, 2003), 52.
3
Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, ed. Gary Saul Morson, trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2009), 452.
4
“Все новое - хорошее или дурное - всегда начинается с женщин.” See Ivan Turgenev, “A. V. Golovninu,” vol.
12 of Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos’mi tomakh. Pis’ma (Moscow-Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo
“Nauka,” 1966), 103.
5
Alexander Pushkin, Roslavlev, in Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings, trans. Ronald Wilks (London: Penguin
1998), 101.
6
Nikolai Nekrasov, “Moroz, Krasnyi nos,” vol. 2 of Izbrannoe v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe
izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1962), 93; my translation.
2
hopes, one of the pledges of our renewal.”
7
This belief was further supported by Ivan Turgenev
in his novel Virgin Soil (Nov’, 1877), in which the positive hero Solomin proclaimed “all you
Russian women are more able and on a higher plane than us men.”
8
Praised for her mental strength, moral excellence, and spiritual guidance, the Russian
woman appears to hold the key to nineteenth-century Russia’s cultural and ethical revival. This
dissertation identifies one more function of the Russian woman – that of a contributor to the
rejuvenation of Russian literature. The idea that gender plays an important role in Russian
cultural and literary transformations is by no means new.
9
Judith Vowles examines the
feminization of eighteenth-century Russian literature and culture as a symptom of “the rapid
Westernization and secularization of Russian society.”
10
Similarly, Gitta Hammarberg
demonstrates the significance of the feminine chronotope for the formation of the sentimentalist
canon in early nineteenth-century Russia.
11
Likewise, Caroline Heyder and Arja Rosenholm
evoke “the analogy between sentimentalist feminization and the discourse of the ‘woman
7
Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, 177.
8
Ivan Turgenev, Virgin Soil, trans. Michael Pursglove (Richmond, UK: Alma Classics, 2014), 192.
9
For more on the relationship between gender and Russian opera, see Inna Naroditskaia, Bewitching Russian
Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage (Oxford University Press, 2012). For more on the relationship between
gender and genre in European Romanticism, see Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge,
1993), 1-30.
10
Judith Vowles, “The ‘Feminization’ of Russian Literature: Women, Language, and Literature in
Eighteenth-Century Russia,” in Women Writers in Russian Literature, ed. Toby Clyman and Diana Greene (London:
Praeger, 1994), 35.
11
Gitta Hammarberg, “The Feminine Chronotope and Sentimentalist Canon Formation,” in Literature, Lives, and
Legality in Catherine’s Russia, ed. A. G. Cross and G. S. Smith (Nottingham: Astra, 1994), 103-20. For more on the
role of ‘feminization’ in breaking gender stereotypes in late eighteenth-century Russian society, see Gitta
Hammarberg, “Gender Ambivalence and Genre Anomalies in Late 18th – Early 19th-Century Russian Literature,”
Russian Literature 52, no. 1 (2002): 299–326.
3
question’ in the 1860s” to show how “the feminine chronotope” helps to construct the male
subject in nineteenth-century Russian culture.
12
While these works focus on “the functioning of woman as a symbol of social
transformation” in sentimentalism and early realism, the connection between the changing
perceptions of women and Russia’s transition from nineteenth-century realism to twentieth-
century modernism has not yet been analyzed.
13
This project addresses two aspects of this
transition – the disintegration of realist familial female tropes in the late 1870s-early 1880s and
the crisis of the Russian realist novel.
14
The purpose of my study is similarly two-fold: to
examine how the literary portrayals of women in the late 1870s-1890s affect the structure of the
realist narrative and to analyze the way these portrayals contribute to the emergence of the
modern concept of the Russian feminine. By demonstrating a close relationship between changes
in the depictions of literary heroines and changes in the structure of the literary narrative, my
argument highlights the significance of the concept of the feminine for Russian literature and
culture. More than that, it also identifies the concept as an important mechanism that not only
generates different female representations, but also enables shifts between literary movements
and genres.
The Concept of the Feminine
Whether manifested through female characters or interpreted as a means of literary
12
Heyder and Rosenholm, “Feminisation,” 52, 59.
13
Ibid., 58.
14
For more on the crisis of the realist novel, see Katherine Bowers and Ani Kokobobo, eds., Russian Writers and
the Fin de Siècle: The Twilight of Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Kate Holland, The
Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre in the 1870s (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2013).
4
evolution, the concept of the feminine defies a single definition. Scholars offer various
descriptions of this phenomenon, which range from discussing ‘the feminine’ as female
experience to analyzing ‘the feminine’ as a cultural construct.
15
A telling example of the first
approach is the psychoanalytic theory, according to which the concept of the feminine is seen as
“female space, […] shaped in large part by masculine projections and fantasies.”
16
The
perception of gender differences receives extensive treatment in the works of Julia Kristeva, who
identifies ‘the feminine’ with the semiotic and ‘the masculine’ with the symbolic space.
17
The
idea of gender opposition goes back to the turn-of-the-century theories of essentialism, which
argue that there exists “a pure or original femininity, a female essence, outside the boundaries of
the social” and “that the natural is repressed by the social.”
18
As opposed to the essentialists, the later constructionist scholars of gender state “that
essence is itself a historical construction” and “that the natural is produced by the social.”
19
To
illustrate, for the analyst Ann Ulanov, ‘the feminine’ no longer constitutes the woman’s identity
but is seen as “a mode of perception inherent in all men, all women, and all culture.”
20
The
gender theorist Judith Butler further emphasizes the socially constructed rather than biologically
determined view of ‘the feminine,’ writing that “there is no gender identity behind the
15
For an informative analysis of different approaches to discussing the concept of the feminine, see Kaye Alison
Gersch, “The Feminine in Body, Language and Spirituality” (PhD diss., University of Queensland, 2013).
16
Cynthia Schmidt-Cruz, Mothers, Lovers, and Others: The Short Stories of Julio Cortázar (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2004), 3.
17
Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
18
Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), 2-3.
19
Ibid.
20
Ann Belford Ulanov, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1971), 13.
5
expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constructed by the very ‘expressions’ that
are said to be its results.” Likewise, in her discussion about the Latin American women writers,
the literary scholar María Clark defines the concept of the feminine “as a construct of language
rather than an essentially feminine narrative mode based on a biological gender division.”
21
The absence of a single or accepted definition for the concept of the feminine suggests
the complexity and richness of the topic. Accordingly, my own vision partakes of these pieces,
but is not limited by any of them. In terms of language, I will use such expressions as the concept
of the feminine, the notion of the feminine, the principle of the feminine, and the idea of the
feminine interchangeably.
22
This is done to emphasize my focus on a larger philosophical
phenomenon rather than particular female types. As for my approach, I will examine the concept
of the feminine as a product of the dynamic interactions between the political, artistic, and
philosophical perceptions of women during a specific time period (1870s-1890s) in a particular
country (Russia). I locate these perceptions by analyzing female depictions and references to
women from a variety of sources, which include the historical documents, personal interviews,
diaries, media reports, literary texts, literary criticism, and non-fictional studies of the time.
21
María Clark, “Usurping Difference in the Feminine Fantastic from the Riverplate,” Studies in 20th Century
Literature 20, no. 1 (1996): 234.
22
What makes the discussion of the concept of the Russian feminine particularly complicated in English is the
semantic non-equivalence of the English terms, “the feminine” and “femininity,” with the Russian counterparts,
zhenstvennoe and zhenstvennost’. For example, Natalia Roudakova argues that “one of the major challenges […]
was the non-translatability into the Russian language of certain Western concepts, fundamental to the study of
gender.” See Natalia Roudakova and Deborah Ballard-Reisch, “Femininity and the Double Burden: Dialogues on
the Socialization of Russian Daughters into Womanhood,” Anthropology of East Europe Review 17, no. 1 (1999):
26. According to Roudakova, the semantic problem arises from the fact that “Russian does not distinguish between
sex and gender: both the biological reality and its psychological components are referred to as pol, which literally
means ‘sex.’ Given such non-differentiation, there is only one word in Russian – zhenstvennost – for both
‘femininity’ and ‘femaleness.’ Further, the words zhenstvennyi ‘feminine,’ zhenskii ‘female,’ and zhenshchina
‘woman’ stem from the same old Slavic root, ‘zhena’ which means both ‘wife’ and ‘woman’.” Ibid. This linguistic
feature makes it nearly impossible to discuss the concept of womanhood in Russian without evoking the role of a
wife and, possibly, a mother as the semantic residue of the term.
6
The composite nature of my approach is illustrated by the Venn diagram below. This
diagram presents the concept of the feminine as a meeting point where different historical,
religious, and literary discourses intersect. By showing how the concept engages various
disciplines at the same time, the graph highlights its mediating ability. Thanks to the diagram,
one may also visualize the notion of the feminine as a permeating and synthesizing phenomenon
without reducing it to a description of specific female behaviors or feminine traits. Last but not
least, the diagram suggests that the concept of the feminine is not only constructed by social and
cultural narratives, but is also able to affect these narratives in response. Because of its dual
function, the concept becomes an important ideological force that strongly resonates in Russian
realist and modernist philosophy and art and, for that matter, requires a quick overview of its
literary origins and cultural evolution.
7
The Modern Concept of the Russian Feminine
It is difficult to identify the exact point when nineteenth-century Russian writers begin to
tell the story of the modern concept of the feminine.
23
Does it start in 1825 when Pushkin’s
heroine Tatiana rejects the role of Onegin’s lover for moral reasons and, according to
Dostoevsky, becomes “the apotheosis of Russian womanhood?”
24
Or in 1860 when Turgenev’s
heroine Elena decides to marry a Bulgarian revolutionary Insarov and foregoes the comforts of
her Russian home for an unknown fate as a nurse on a Bulgarian battlefield? Or, perhaps, in
1866 when Dostoevsky’s saintly prostitute Sonia sells her body to provide for her family, then
makes further sacrifices to follow the convicted murderer Raskol’nikov to Siberia? As the list of
strong, independent, brave, and sacrificial heroines continues in the works of other nineteenth-
century Russian writers, it becomes even harder to detect when and how the Russian heroine
moves past the paradigm of the realist novel to a new form that encompasses the contradictory
and ambiguous impulses of modernism.
25
23
In Russian literary thought, the term “the feminine” (zhenstvennoe) goes back to the beginning of the nineteenth
century and its main promoter, the romantic poet Zhukovsky, who, in turn, borrows it from Goethe’s Faust: “Das
ewig weibliche ziht uns hinan” – “The eternal feminine draws us upward” [Вечно женственное влечет нас ввысь].
According to the Russian literary encyclopedia of 1925, “In Russian the word ‘the feminine’ (zhenstvennost’) is
relatively new; for example, the poet Zhukovsky wrote about female beauty: ‘she [the woman] only needs to acquire
what the German language beautifully refers to as Weiblichkeit and for which our language still does not have an
expression.” See Literaturnaia entsiklopediia Online, s.v. “vechno zhenstvennoe,” accessed June 15, 2014,
http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enc_literature/5690/%D0%92%D0%B5%D1%87%D0%BD%D0%BE.
24
F. M. Dostoevsky, “Pushkin (ocherk),” vol. 26 of Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad:
Izdatel’stvo Nauka, 1984), 141.
25
For more on the role of gender in modernism, see Bonnie Scott, ed., Gender and Modernism, 3 vols. (New York:
Routledge, 2008); Bonnie Scott, ed., The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990); Bonnie Scott, ed., Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); and Lisa Rado, ed., Modernism, Gender, and Culture: A Cultural
Studies Approach (New York: Routledge, 1997).
8
One of the ways in which scholars examine the evolution of Russian female characters is
by creating a genealogy of feminine tropes.
26
While helpful, these tropes do not explain the
cultural and historical complexities of the Russian concept of the feminine. Neither do they
provide a larger interpretative framework to help us understand the transitions between realist
and symbolist portrayals of the feminine. What happens to the strong woman of the realist
narrative towards the end of the nineteenth century? How do we get from Pushkin’s Tatiana,
Turgenev’s Elena, and Dostoevsky’s Sonia to the Symbolist version of Goethe’s Eternal
Feminine and the femme fatale of the decadents? Or, to make an even larger assumption, could
Nabokov’s Lolita be a descendant of Pushkin’s Tatiana and, by association, the progeny of the
Russian modernist portrayals of women?
27
These are precisely the questions that lie at the heart
of this study and inform its focus on late nineteenth-century Russian literary heroines as
transitional figures between traditional and modern perceptions of the feminine in fin-de-siècle
Russia.
Because of a close interaction between Russian philosophy, literature, and life, the
discussion about the changing perceptions of the feminine in late nineteenth-century Russian
fiction would be incomplete without contextualizing these perceptions in the history and culture
of the period. Most inquiries into the nature of the feminine in late imperial Russia either
investigate female protagonists in the works of Russian authors or address the 1860s “woman
26
See Frank Seeley, “Dostoevsky’s Women,” The Slavonic and East European Review 39 (1960): 291-312; Ruth
Benson, Women in Tolstoy: The Ideal and the Erotic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); George Siegel,
“The Fallen Woman in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature,” Harvard Slavic Studies 5 (1970): 81-10; and Olga
Matich, “A Typology of Fallen Women in Nineteenth Century Russian Literature,” vol. 2 of American
Contributions to the Ninth International Congress of Slavists, ed. Paul Debreczeny (Columbus: Slavica, 1983), 325-
43.
27
For more on the distinction between modernity as a larger historical and cultural period and modernism as the last
artistic phase of this period, see Mikhail Epshtein, Postmodern v russkoi literature (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola,
2005), 14-15.
9
question” and the 1870s women’s liberation movement. Some studies use a more
interdisciplinary approach and contextualize literary depictions of women within a philosophical
or historical background.
28
However, the relationship between the larger notion of the feminine
and the depictions of women in the culture, history, and literature of the 1870s through the 1890s
is yet to be examined.
29
So is the complex interaction between female portrayals and the
mechanisms of the Russian realist novel, whose decline, thus far, has not been viewed in the
context of the changing perceptions of women.
The Martyr-Heroine: A Living Person, a Literary Trope, a Concept
To accomplish these tasks, another Venn diagram may be helpful. This time the diagram
illustrates particular philosophical notions, historical instances, and literary narratives of the
1870s-1890s that appear to have produced a significant resonance in the Russian milieu of the
time and may have contributed to a different view of women.
30
28
See Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle
Russia (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992); Jennifer Presto, Beyond the Flesh: Alexander Blok,
Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation of Sex (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008); Olga
Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (Madison: The University of Wisconsin
Press, 2005); Otto Boele, Erotic Nihilism in Late Imperial Russia: The Case of Mikhail Artsybashev’s “Sanin”
(Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2009); Jenny Kaminer, Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The
Bad Mother in Russian Culture (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014); Galina Rylkova, The Archaeology
of Anxiety: The Russian Silver Age and Its Legacy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007).
29
There appear to be four main areas of concentration in contemporary Slavic gender scholarship, and different
groups of scholars associated with each. One group of researchers investigates the genesis of such popular cultural
metaphors as Mother Russia (Joanna Hubbs and Adele Barker), feminized Russia (Oleg Riabov) and unattainable
Bride Russia (Ellen Rutten). The second group focuses on gender constructs in the works of individual male Russian
writers such as Leskov (Inès de Morogues), Dostoevsky (Katherine Briggs and Susanne Fusso), Tolstoy (Ruth
Benson and Marie Sémon), and Blok (Olga Matich and Jennifer Presto). The third group explores female Russian
writers and their perception of gender differences in the context of male-dominated authorial discourse (Diana
Burgin, Pamela Davidson, Helena Goscilo, Rosalind Marsh, Arja Rosenholm, and Charlotte Rosenthal, to mention
just a few). Finally, such scholars as Richard Stites, Barbara Engel, Christine Worobec, Barbara Clements, and Arja
Rosenholm investigate the historical and cultural aspects of women’s emancipation in nineteenth-century Russia.
30
The list is by no means exhaustive, but is meant to show the general political, ethical, and cultural frameworks of
late nineteenth-century Russia.
10
As seen from the diagram, the point of intersection for these narratives is found in the
phenomenon of the ‘martyr-heroine’ – an important yet understudied Russian concept of a
rebellious female figure, which opposes the established narrative about women in the context of
the family. While the interval between 1870s and 1890s harbors many different manifestations of
the feminine, it is the notion of the martyr-heroine that acts as a bridge between the “new
woman” of the 1860s and the emancipated woman of the 1900s. This notion manifests itself on
different levels – in the historical revolutionary women of the 1870s-1880s; through the crisis of
female representation in realist fiction; and via the cultural changes in the perception of women
as objects of sexual gratification and means of procreation. Accordingly, I will use the term
‘martyr-heroine’ in three ways: to refer to a real-life woman (she); to describe a literary character
(she) or a literary trope (it); and to discuss an abstract concept or a myth of the revolutionary
feminine (it).
11
The broad cultural relevance of this myth can be seen in sources ranging from serious
journals to trashy tabloids, and from the works of major writers, such as Tolstoy and Turgenev,
to those of lesser authors, such as Polonsky, Korolenko, and Garshin. The fact that the story of
the martyr-heroine is not only created by journalists, attorneys, and other revolutionaries, but is
also addressed by the novelists, philosophers, and critics of the day suggests the appeal and the
timeliness of the topic. More than that, it also shows a strong extraliterary influence of political
events on Russian fiction, which quickly responds to the appearance of revolutionary women
with a narrative of its own and, in so doing, highlights a close-knit interaction between Russian
politics and literature.
By expanding the perspective of the martyr-heroine from a historical character to an
important literary influence and cultural construct, this study reassesses the relationship between
Russian life and literature in a new light. How do female revolutionaries find their way from
trials, prisons, and the courtroom into the barometer of Russian culture – Russian literature?
What is the connection between flesh-and-blood revolutionaries and the literary works inspired
by their dedication to the cause? How does the previous paradigm of the sacrificial feminine
respond to the image of a real female revolutionary? Thanks to the notion of the martyr-heroine,
one gains an insight into a unique historic period, when literature and history conflate through
the representations of the feminine and provide yet another example of the intense interaction
between Russian literary models and human life.
31
31
For more on the symbiotic relationship between life and literature in nineteenth-century Russian culture, see Irina
Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1988); Boris Gasparov, introduction to The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, ed. Alexander
D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 13-29; Iurii Lotman, “The
Poetics of Everyday Behavior in Eighteenth-Century Russian Culture,” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural
History, ed. Alexander D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 95-
149; Lidiia Ginzburg, “The ‘Human Document’ and the Formation of Character,” in The Semiotics of Russian
Cultural History, ed. Alexander D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
12
The Martyr-Heroine, Modernity, and Modernism
As an important aspect of historical, social, and literary transformations of the 1870s-
1890s, the martyr-heroine emerges as an ideal lens through which to examine the evolution of
the modern concept of the Russian feminine and the downfall of the Russian realist novel. The
fundamentally subversive nature of the martyr-heroine reflects some of the most common
features of modernity, such as emancipation, alienation from traditional family and social
structures, a sense of selfhood and autonomy, and a strong ideological fervor.
32
Just as the
Russian revolutionary women of the 1870s-1880s attack the patriarchy, act in history, and assert
their agency, so do the real and fictional modern women of the early 1900s, who subvert familial
relations and revolt against the system by pursuing revolutionary martyrdom, venturing into the
public sphere, or exploring their sexuality.
33
While the martyr-heroine is by no means the only
factor that contributes to the female emancipation, political activism, and radicalization in early
twentieth-century Russia, it is undeniably one of the few viable examples of female revolt made
visible in the public spaces of the courtroom and the scaffold.
1985), 188-224; Iurii Tynianov, “O literaturnoi evoliutsii,” in Arkhaisty i novatory (Priboi, 1929; repr., Ann Arbor:
Ardis, 1985), 30-47.
32
For more on the construction of modernity, see G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller
(Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1998); Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Horace B.
Samuel (Mineola: Dover Publishers, 2003); Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans.
Talcott Parsons (Mineola: Dover Publishers, 2003); and Max Simon Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1993). For critical scholarship on modernity, see Anthony Giddens, Consequences of
Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of
Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London and New York: Verso, 1997), Michael Foucault, The Order of
Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2002); Hans
Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985); Charles
Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1971); Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993); Rita Felski,
The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); and Epshtein, Postmodern.
33
Laura Engelstein talks about “the emergence of the vocal ‘New Woman’ – that Western gender rebel” and the
“emergence of women and female sexuality into respectable public sphere” in early twentieth-century Russian
culture. See Engelstein, The Keys, 12.
13
Standing at the threshold between the nineteenth and twentieth-century literary
representations of the feminine, the martyr-heroine enables a transition from the standard realist
tropes of mother, wife, daughter, and a lover to the trope of the eternal – and sometimes infernal
– feminine. Because of its mediating function, the martyr-heroine elucidates the move from
Realism to Symbolism not as an abrupt makeover, but as a gradual shift, challenging the
accepted view of this interim phase as “ridiculous” and unworthy to be examined as “a separate
period at all.”
34
By bridging the gap between different literary movements, the martyr-heroine
reestablishes the value of this period as instrumental for our understanding of the symbolist
obsession with the eternal feminine as a phenomenon grounded in the realist crisis of female
representation.
Further evidence for this hypothesis is found in the coincident timing between the
breakdown of familial female tropes in the Russian realist fiction of the early 1880s-1890s and
the renewed interest in European Romantic/Gnostic myth of Divine Sophia in the poetic and
philosophical works of Vladimir Solov’ev from the late 1870s-early 1880s.
35
Given that
Solov’ev is considered the father of Russian symbolism and a reviver of its guiding principle of
the Eternal feminine, his decision to turn to this principle in the midst of increased female
revolutionary activism is far from accidental. By responding to the disintegration of the realist
34
Andrew Wachtel, “Telling Stories about Russian Literature,” Modern Philology 90, no. 3 (1993): 402.
35
For the Symbolists, Sophia’s godlike essence was meant to provide the necessary inspiration for a poet and allow
for his transcendence into a higher spiritual reality. For more on Solov’ev and the Eternal Feminine, see Samuel
Cioran, Vladimir Solov’ev and the Knighthood of the Divine Sophia (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press,
1977); Judith Kornblatt, Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2009); Judith Kornblatt, “The Transfiguration of Plato in the Erotic Philosophy of Vladimir Solov’ev,”
Religion and Literature 24, no. 2 (1992): 35-50; Mikhail Sergeev, Sophiology in Russian Orthodoxy: Solov’ev,
Bulgakov, Losskii and Berdiaev (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006). For more on Sophia’s genealogy, see Lada
Panova, vol 2 of Russkii Egipet. Aleksandriiskaia poetika Mikhaila Kuzmina (Moscow: Vodolei Publishers and
Progress-Pleiada, 2006).
14
novel with an abstract concept of the Eternal Feminine or the world soul, Solov’ev not only
demonstrates his awareness of the changing perception of the feminine, but also reveals the need
for a different narrative approach to the portrayal of women. Although the image of the martyr-
heroine never directly appears on the pages of Solov’ev’s proto-symbolist works, the fact that it
destabilizes the familial female hierarchy of the realist novel reveals its subtle contribution to the
non-familial, metaphysical depiction of women in the early twentieth-century Russian art.
The martyr-heroine’s ability to enact changes in realist female representations is all the
more important when examined in the context of the disintegration of realism in Russian
literature. Not only does the trope of the martyr-heroine subvert the familial orientation of
Goncharov’s, Turgenev’s, Tolstoy’s, and Dostoevsky’s female characters, but it also undermines
the marriage plot of the realist novel. Unwilling to get married, disinterested in adultery, and
averse to prostitution, the martyr-heroine resists the traditional definition of women through
family and sexuality and, in so doing, prevents any productive development of the realist
narrative. Without a suitable plot to accommodate the martyr-heroine’s anti-familial rebellious
content, the realist novel, in turn, reveals its inability to adapt to Russia’s fluctuating reality and,
as a result, loses its prominence as the creator of prophetic Russian heroines. Since the new
heroine of the day, the revolutionary martyr-heroine, is neither a marriage material, nor a fallen
woman, it is not surprising that she cannot be the protagonist in the realist novel. What is
remarkable, though, is that by acting as the antagonist to the novel’s larger patriarchal narrative,
the martyr-heroine does, in fact, become a key figure in its decline.
Approaching the Martyr-Heroine: Theory and Practice
Because of the interdisciplinary scope of my study, its theoretical framework is based on
15
Russian cultural and intellectual history and less on Western gender scholarship, which is not
always adaptable to a Russian cultural paradigm. Drawing from several important works of
feminist criticism, this dissertation engages with more general gender-related concepts, such as
the unspeakable nature of the feminine and, especially, female violence in the patriarchal system;
the ambiguity of the concept of the feminine; the objectification and the binary perception of
literary heroines; and the view of women as the ‘Other’.
36
However, this engagement is both
partial and selective, with a goal “to confront the Russian literary canon as a rich source of
motifs and myths about the two sexes, not in order to label and dismiss even the most
misogynistic literary classics, but to apprehend them in all their human dimensions.”
37
A similarly revisionist approach to Western gender criticism is offered by a Slavic
scholar of the symbolist Russian feminine, David Borgmeyer:
Rather than exalting the demonic representations of women as expressions of
female power rooted in male anxiety over the uncontrollable feminine or
universally demonizing the virtuous feminine as merely another apparatus of
36
See Maggie Humm, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Feminist Literary Criticism (New York: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1994); Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1985); Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: New
York, 1985); Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4
(1976): 875-93; Kristeva, Revolution; Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New
York: Vintage Books, 1989); Emanuela Bianchi, “Receptacle/Chōra: Figuring the Errant Feminine in Plato’s
Timaeus,” Hypatia 21, no. 4 (2006): 124-146; Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
37
Rosalind Marsh, “An Image of Their Own?: Feminism, Revisionism and Russian Culture,” in
Women and Russian Culture: Projections and Self-Perceptions, ed. Rosalind Marsh (New York: Berghahn Books,
1998), 32.
16
misogynistic control, there needs to be an approach offering insights about the
purposes of the representation of the feminine and femininity in particular ways.
38
Whereas Borgmeyer finds a way around feminist scholarship by distinguishing “between real
and ideal women, represented in art, literature, and other products of creative, elite culture,” this
study does so by identifying the gap between Western and Russian cultural, political, and
philosophical models.
39
Since Western gender criticism is a product of a specifically Western focus on logic, law,
pragmatism, individualism, and political representation, its interpretation of a woman’s role often
turns into a study of male misogyny or a fight for female civil and political rights.
40
While these
themes are also important for the Russian society, they do not fully explain how the Russians’
penchant for the mystical and the irrational affects their perception of women. Nor do they
account for Russia’s synthesis of religion and philosophy, as a result of which Russian
38
David Borgmeyer, “Sophia, the Wisdom of God: Conceptions of the Divine Feminine in Russian Culture, 1880-
1917,” PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2004, 189.
39
Ibid. For more on the dynamic interaction between the Russian and the Western cultural models, see Simon
Franklin and Emma Widdis, eds., National Identity in Russian Culture: An Introduction (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2004); Rzhevsky, ed., The Cambridge; Lina Steiner, For Humanity's Sake: The Bildungsroman in
Russian Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd, eds., Russian
Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); James H. Billington, The Icon and the
Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1970).
40
See Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Penguin Books,
1990); Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Halls, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order
in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Robyn Warhol-Down and Diane Price Herndl, eds.,
Feminisms Redux: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
2009); Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989); Nancy
Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytical Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Teresa De Lauretis,
Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); and Teresa De
Lauretis, Figures of Resistance: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. Patricia White (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2007).
17
philosophers and religious thinkers often use the female tropes of a mother, wife, bride, or
Divine Sophia to assess their relationship with Russia and express larger social concerns.
41
For example, given that “the core of the Pan-Slavic myth is connected with the
matriarchy, and the most cherished values are presented in terms of the Mother image,” the study
of the Russian feminine would be incomplete without addressing this oldest, most popular and
influential feminine metaphor in Russian culture.
42
Similarly, another important trope to consider
is the image of the beloved, bride, or wife, which, according to Ellen Rutten, is at the center of a
tragic liaison between Russia and the two competing male suitors: the fin-de-siècle intelligentsia
and the autocratic state.
43
Likewise, when discussing the Russian fin-de-siècle period, the notion
of the Eternal Feminine or Sophia is more than just a Symbolist obsession with particular types
41
For more about Russia as a feminine entity in Russian literature, see Joanna Hubbs, Mother Russia: The Feminine
Myth in Russian Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1988); Adele Barker, The Mother Syndrome in the
Russian Folk Imagination (Columbus: Slavica Publishers, 1986); Linda Edmondson, Feminism in Russia, 1900-17
(Stanford: Stanford California Press, 1984), Oleg Riabov, Russkaia filosofiia zhenstvennosti (XI-XX veka) (Ivanovo:
Izdatel’skii tsentr “Iunona,” 1999); Oleg Riabov, Zhenshchina i zhenstvennost’ v filosofii Serebrianogo veka
(Ivanovo: Ivanovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1997); Ellen Rutten, Unattainable Bride Russia: Gendering
Nation, State, and Intelligentsia in Russian Intellectual Culture (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010);
Faith Wigzell, “Nikolai Leskov, Gender and Russianness,” in Gender and Sexuality in Russian Civilization, ed.
Peter I. Barta (New York: Taylor and Francis Books Ltd, 2001), 105-20; Kaminer, Women.
42
Harry Slochower, “The Pan-Slavic Image of the Earth Mother: The Brothers Karamazov,” in Mythopoesis: Mythic
Patterns in the Literary Classics (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 246. Based on the pre-Christian
Russian cult of the Damp Mother Earth (Mat’ syra zemlia) and the later Russian Orthodox veneration of the Mother
of God (Bogoroditsa), the image of the Mother unveils the “feminine face” of Russia’s mythology – “a mythology
in which woman plays a central role.” See Hubbs, Mother, xvii. The Mother trope, for example, has overshadowed
the Virgin trope in the Russian Orthodox perception of Mary, who is celebrated primarily for her maternal function
rather than her perpetual virginity. For more on the Virgin trope in Western culture, see Marina Warner, Alone of All
Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). It is also through the Mother
trope that the abstract grammatical category of gender for the noun “Russia” acquires its first concrete feminine role
in Russian culture. See Wigzell, “Nikolai,” 110. Once endowed with the functions of reproduction, nursing, and
nurturing, “Russia” (Rus’), like “motherland” (rodina) is not simply feminine but, more specifically, possesses
strong maternal overtones, often being popularly termed Mother Russia (Matushka Rus’).” See Wigzell, “Nikolai,”
107. Finally, the Mother image is an important token of exchange in intellectual discussions about the fate of Russia.
These discussions include the writings by the sixteenth-century Prince Andrei Kurbskii, the twentieth-century
Russian writer and philosopher Vasilii Rozanov, and the twentieth-century Russian religious philosophers Georgii
Fedotov and Nikolai Berdiaev, to mention just a few.
43
See Rutten, Unattainable, xvi. While participating in an “amorous rivalry for the same feminine entity,” the
intelligentsia often feels impotent and unable to free the Bride Russia from her symbolic husband, “the state.” See
Rutten, Unattainable, 4.
18
of female portrayals, but an important expression of modernist aesthetics and an epistemological
phenomenon.
While the concept of the feminine plays a significant role in Russian intellectual and
religious thought, it also functions as a literary medium, through which Russian authors negotiate
with the previous literary tradition and overcome the proverbial “anxiety of influence.”
44
To
illustrate, in the nineteenth-century Russian literary tradition a woman often enables the writer to
facilitate the plot and resolve narrative tensions by helping a male character to realize his faulty
nature and/or achieve a higher spiritual status.
45
Since the breadth of functions performed by the
concept of the Russian feminine is not encompassed by Western gender scholarship, it is unable
to offer a culturally sensitive interpretative paradigm for the study of women in Russian culture.
Therefore, instead of trying to fit the martyr-heroine into the Procrustean bed of feminist
criticism, this project uses a culturological (kul’turologicheskii) approach, which contextualizes
the modern Russian concept of the feminine and its main component, the martyr-heroine, as a
product of specifically Russian religious, social, and artistic influences.
Analyzing the Martyr-Heroine: Culture, History, Literature
Given its three-way emphasis on the cultural, historical, and literary manifestations of the
martyr-heroine, this dissertation consists of three conceptual parts and five chapters. The first
part and Chapter 1 frames the context of the discussion by examining cultural mechanisms that
underlie changes in the public perception of the feminine. Mapping the road from the
44
See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997).
45
For example, Tatiana Larina allows Onegin to experience the passion of love, Natalia Lasunskaia exposes the
shortcomings of Rudin’s inability to act, Sonia Marmeladova shows Raskol’nikov the way to spiritual redemption,
and Natasha Rostova creates a family paradise for Pierre.
19
emancipated women of the 1860s to female revolutionaries of the 1870s, it focuses on the
genealogy of the martyr-heroine and the relationship between martyrdom and gender. The
chapter also introduces several important notions, such as women’s agency, victimization,
sacrifice, public service, and violence, which are to be applied to the subsequent discussion of
the martyr-heroine in Russian history and literature.
After establishing the cultural foundation of the martyr-heroine, the second part and
Chapter 2 examines three real-life representatives of female revolutionary martyrdom: the
propagandist Bardina in 1877, the martyr-avenger Zasulich 1878, and the terrorist Perovskaia in
1881. Each trial not only helped shape the concept of the martyr-heroine in the eyes of the
Russian public, but also contributed to the perception of the revolutionary women as modern
subjects – “a powerful symbol of both the dangers and the promises of the modern age.”
46
Culminating in the trial of Perovskaia – the martyr-heroine par excellence, this chapter
approaches the historical martyr-heroine as a product of the cultural narrative of female
emancipation, martyrdom, and violence and a possible source of the fin-de-siècle ambivalence
about the saintly/wicked nature of the feminine.
By using these three trials as a conceptual framework, the third part of the dissertation
discusses the ensuing crisis of the traditional feminine tropes in late nineteenth-century Russian
literature. After the violent real-life stories of Zasulich and Perovskaia, there seemed to be no
more place for Natashas and Sonias of Russian realist fiction. Faced with changing social
conditions, Russian writers responded to the changing concept of the feminine with an
experimental narrative of their own. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 each focus on one of these three
formative moments – the appearance of the revolutionary martyr-heroine in the works of
46
Felski, The Gender, 3.
20
Polonsky, Turgenev, and Korolenko from 1877 through 1880; its fictionalization through the
familiar trope of prostitution in Garshin’s stories “An Incident” and “Nadezhda Nikolaevna”
published in 1878 and 1884; and its maturation and transformation in Tolstoy’s novel
Resurrection (Voskresenie) published in 1899.
Neither the choice nor the grouping of these literary pieces is accidental. Not only do they
all investigate the concept of the martyr-heroine, but the timing of their publications suggests a
connection between the trials of revolutionary women and the crisis of realist female types in late
nineteenth-century Russian literature. On the one hand, this connection allows us to
contextualize the writers’ retreat from the traditional familial tropes of mother, wife, bride, and
daughter as prompted by the emergence of real martyr-heroines. On the other hand, an awareness
of the gradual increase in female revolutionary violence also helps us to approach the modern
Russian concept of the feminine as a work in progress rather than a finished product.
What kind of female portrayals appeared in literature after each trial? How did the turn to
revolutionary violence on the part of the female defendants change subsequent literary depictions
of the feminine? And, more specifically, what legacy did the nineteenth-century martyr-heroine
leave for the portrayals of the feminine in twentieth-century Russian fiction? These questions
inform the structure of these three chapters, which use the trials of real martyr-heroines as an
important criterion for dividing literary depictions of the feminine into three groups – before
publicized female acts of deadly violence in Polonsky, Turgenev, and Korolenko; before and
after Perovskaia’s assassination of the tsar in Garshin; and a later re-assessment of both
portrayals in Tolstoy.
Chapter 3 examines the first literary response to the revolutionary martyr-heroine in
Polonsky’s poem The Prisoner (Uznitsa, 1877), Turgenev’s narrative poem The Threshold
21
(Porog, 1878), and Korolenko’s story The Strange One (Chudnáia, 1880). Each writer attempts
to create a new trope of the martyr-heroine and, in so doing, departs from the familial canon of
realist female characters. The fact that these works are motivated by real-life women – the
female propagandists Figner and Ulanovskaia from the trial of the Fifty in 1877 and the symbolic
avenger Zasulich in 1878 – makes them especially important for reassessing the role of historical
models in changing the Russian literary landscape. By examining the transfer of a new historical
phenomenon onto the literary text, this chapter demonstrates how the former’s subversive nature
deconstructs the latter’s unity, marking the martyr-heroine as the Trojan horse of Russian realist
fiction.
While Figner, Zasulich, and Ulanovskaia inspired Russian authors to infuse their female
protagonists with revolutionary aspirations, the literary reaction to the arrival of the ultimate
martyr-heroine – the terrorist Sofia Perovskaia – was not as pronounced. One of the reasons for
the major writers’ reservations on the subject of Perovskaia could have been their concern for
personal safety. In the face of Alexander III’s repressive measures against supporters of radical
movements, it was not surprising that most Russian writers were reluctant to fictionalize a
female regicide or to venerate her sacrifice. However, fear of Alexander III’s wrath was in all
probability not the only cause that prevented famous Russian writers from responding to the trial
of Perovskaia. Another possible reason for the dearth of late nineteenth-century literary heroines
patterned on Perovskaia lies in the violent nature of both Perovskaia’s crime and her subsequent
execution.
The fact that Perovskaia appears as a male victimizer rather than a victimized female
explains not only the writers’ reservations about Perovskaia as a model of a new concept of the
feminine, but also the difficulty of their struggle to incorporate her act of deadly violence into the
22
existing Russian narrative of the feminine.
47
Having become a historical martyr-heroine par
excellence, Perovskaia could not be translated into a specifically literary martyr-heroine as easily
as her revolutionary predecessors, thus supporting Pamela Grieman’s argument about the
unnarratability of feminine terrorism in realist literature.
48
In her analysis of the revolutionary
feminine in British realist novels, Grieman shows that “the cultural taboo against the
representation of feminist violence results in the fictional inscription of appropriately ‘feminine’
maternal and nurturing values onto the female protagonists.”
49
Russian authors in the latter part
of the nineteenth century, as opposed to British writers, eschew the motherhood trope and begin
to approach female revolutionary violence head on, through the intermediary narrative of
prostitution.
Chapter 4 examines two most telling examples of this narrative, Garshin’s pre-Perovskaia
story “An Incident” (“Proisshestvie, 1878) and post-Perovskaia novella “Nadezhda Nikolaevna”
(“Nadezhda Nikolaevna,” 1884). Whereas in “An Incident” the connection between the
prostitute and violence is not yet pronounced, this is no longer the case for “Nadezhda
Nikolaevna,” in which the male artist chooses a prostitute to paint the French revolutionary
assassin Charlotte Corday.
50
By employing a traditional paradigm of feminine transgression,
Garshin domesticates the issue of female terrorism as a familiar phenomenon. Although
47
Even an ardent supporter of female radicals, a revolutionary writer Stepniak-Kravchinsky makes a male
revolutionary Andrei Kozhukhov rather than his wife Tania an attempted assassin of the Tsar in his novel The
Career of a Nihilist published in 1886. See S. Stepniak-Kravchinsky, The Career of a Nihilist (London: Walter
Scott, 1890).
48
Pamela, Grieman, “Representing the Unnarratable: “Feminist Terrorism” and the Problem of Realism in the
Novel” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2010), v-vi.
49
Ibid., v.
50
For more about Charlotte Corday as an important example of female revolutionary violence in Garshin’s story,
see Lynn Patyk, “‘The Double-Edged Sword of Word and Deed’: Revolutionary Terrorism and Russian Literary
Culture” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2006).
23
Garshin’s novella is not a direct response to the case of Perovskaia, it is, nevertheless,
representative of the 1880s post-Perovskaia crisis of the traditional perception of the feminine, in
that it provides an alternative to the direct portrayal of the radical martyr-heroine by resorting to
prostitution, rather than terrorist violence, as a more palatable form of female transgression.
Garshin’s attempt to make a connection between female revolutionary martyrdom and
prostitution resonated fifteen years later in Tolstoy’s final major novel Resurrection. Chapter 5
approaches Resurrection as a critical re-evaluation of realist feminine tropes and a reassessment
of the 1870s-1880s martyr-heroine, whose narrative of public service, self-sacrifice for the cause,
and ultimate dedication emerges in Tolstoy’s portrayal of exiled female revolutionaries. In its
attempt to provide a plausible answer to the late nineteenth-century crisis of the realist strong
woman, Resurrection shows the transformation of the traditional prostitute and the current
martyr-heroine into a modern woman, personified by a reformed and liberated Katiusha
Maslova. Maslova’s eventual departure from traditional female roles of wife, mother, daughter,
and prostitute into the commune of revolutionary exiles demonstrates a way to avoid familial
tropes without sacrificing narrative verisimilitude.
More than a response to the Russian realist crisis of female representation, Resurrection
also attempts to solve Tolstoy’s own problematic relationship with the concept of the feminine.
The writer’s ambivalence about the changing gender dynamics is exemplified by the death and
sexualization of female characters in his later works, such as Anna Karenina (Anna Karenina,
1873-77), “The Devil” (“D’iavol,” 1889), The Kreutzer Sonata (Kreitserova sonata, 1889), and
“Father Sergius” (“Otets Sergii,” 1898). This chapter first investigates Tolstoy’s crisis of
traditional female representations as a symptom of his post-conversion rejection of art. Then, it
examines the writer’s resolution of both predicaments in his last large-scale novel Resurrection.
24
The chapter concludes that by making Maslova a symbol of his future hope for humankind,
Tolstoy not only demonstrates the renaissance of the feminine principle in his narrative realm,
but also revitalizes the genre of the novel for the turn-of-the-century Russian authors.
51
When viewed as a part of a complex cultural phenomenon, the emergence of the martyr-
heroine in late nineteenth-century Russian society becomes more than a simple historical
occurrence. Given the resonance of these female acts of political rebellion, the study of the
martyr-heroine as a cultural construct is long overdue. Bringing attention to this crucial concept,
my dissertation expands the scholarly map of female cultural and literary portraiture to include
the martyr-heroine as an integral part of the Russian fin-de-siècle thinking and writing about
women. It is precisely my focus on the martyr-heroine – as a main contributor to the modern
Russian concept of the feminine and an important catalyst for the decline of the realist novel –
that advances our understanding of gender in Russian culture and encompasses my contribution
to knowledge.
51
For more on Tolstoy as the precursor for the Russian neo-realist writers of the early twentieth century, such as
Gorky, Andreev, Artsybashev, see D. S. Mirsky, Contemporary Russian Literature, 1881-1925 (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1926), 104-105; Ronald LeBlanc, Slavic Sins of the Flesh: Food, Sex, and Carnal Appetite in Nineteenth-
Century Russian Fiction (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009), 176-77; and Frederick White,
“Peering into the Abyss: Andreev’s Rejoinder to Tolstoi’s Kreutzer Sonata,” Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue
Canadienne des Slavistes 50, no. 3/4 (2008): 471-86.
25
Chapter 1
Modernizing the Concept of the Feminine:
The Cultural Origins of the ‘Martyr-Heroine’
It is amazing how seldom both literary historians and sociologists have focused
their attention on the problem of women’s emancipation in Russian literature and
society of the nineteenth century. This is all the more surprising when one realizes
that the social and political changes at that time are almost best portrayed in the
motif of the emancipated woman.
52
—Carolina de Maegd-Soep
Heroism in self-abnegation makes the Russian Woman.
53
—Arja Rosenholm
The Moment of Change
The period of the 1870s and 1880s in Russian history has been known by many names —
Pavel Zaionchkovskii calls it “the crisis of autocracy,” the Soviet encyclopedia speaks of “the
revolutionary situation,” Charles Ziegler examines Russia’s “entrance into the industrial age,”
Andrzej Walicki focuses on Russian populism, while Richard Stites and Barbara Engel study the
growth of female revolutionary radicalism.
54
By highlighting different facets of this turbulent
moment in Russian history, scholars not only suggest its transitionary nature, but also emphasize
its larger effect on changes in Russia’s political, ideological, and cultural atmosphere. Aptly
summed up as the age of “mounting pessimism,” the 1870s-1880s can therefore be examined as
52
Carolina de Maegd-Soep, The Emancipation of Women in Russian Literature and Society, trans. Carolina de
Maegd-Soep and Jos Coessens (Ghent: Ghent State University, 1978), 11.
53
Arja Rosenholm, Gendering Awakening: Femininity and the Russian Woman Question of the 1860s (Helsinki:
Kikimora Publications, 1999), 48.
54
Pavel Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia na rubezhe 1870–1880-kh godov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo MGU,
1964); Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 3rd ed., s.v. “revoliutsionnaia situatsiia;” Charles E. Ziegler, The History
of Russia, 2nd ed. (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Press, 2009), 58; Andrzej Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism:
Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969); Richard Stites, The
Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1978); Barbara Engel, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century
Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
26
the foundation for the upcoming political calamities as well as for the cultural renaissance of
early twentieth-century Russia.
55
Perhaps, one of the most trenchant descriptions of this period comes from the Russian
writer and philosopher Konstantin Leont’ev. Faced with the uncertain future and plagued by the
unresolved political, social, and economic dilemmas of his age, Leont’ev wrote in 1880:
Russia is now in the grip of a quiet, slow decay. One of those Great Russian
processes is taking place, which with us always precedes a profound historic
upheaval – the baptism of the Kiev people in the Dnieper, Peter’s destruction of
national traditions, and finally the present state of affairs, essentially a transition
towards something different.
56
While Leont’ev does not explicitly discuss the place of women in the “transition towards
something different,” each of his “Great Russian processes” incidentally features famous female
figures who play an important role in facilitating the said “historic upheavals.”
To a person familiar with the history of Russia, Leont’ev’s first two “Great Russian
processes” evoke women who become essential catalysts for great reforms: the princess Olga for
the Christianization of Kievan Rus’ by Vladimir and the regent Sophia for the Westernization of
55
Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880-1930 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2008), 63. For more on the period’s importance for the fin-de-siècle Russian culture, see
Rosamund Bartlett and Linda Edmondson, “Collapse and Creation: Issues of Identity and the Russian Fin de
Siècle,” in Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881-1940, ed. Catriona Kelly and David
Shepherd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 165-224; Ani Kokobobo and Katherine Bowers, “Introduction:
The Fin-de-Siècle Mood in Russian Literature,” in Russian Writers and the Fin de Siècle: The Twilight of Realism,
ed. Katherine Bowers and Ani Kokobobo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1-12.
56
Cited in Richard Hare, Pioneers of Russian Social Thought: Studies of Non-Marxian Formation in Nineteenth-
Century Russia and of Its Partial Revival in the Soviet Union (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977), 292.
27
Russia by her half-brother, who would become known as “Peter the Great.”
57
Leont’ev’s third
“Great Russian process” is also marked by the appearance of important female figures, such as
the revolutionaries Sofia Bardina, Vera Zasulich, and Sofia Perovskaia, who make a strong
contribution to the success of the Russian revolutionary program with its culmination in the 1917
Bolshevik Revolution.
58
With women acting as the vital members of the revolutionary opposition
in the 1870s and 1880s, Leont’ev’s reference to the “transition towards something different” is
significant not only in terms of the adjustments in a Russian political climate, but also in view of
the public perception of women as catalysts of change. Given a sharp increase in female
revolutionary activity during Leont’ev’s “present state of affairs,” the model of the female
revolutionary martyrdom offers a particularly useful vantage point for examining this period as
the harbinger of the changing perception of the feminine in late nineteenth-century Russian
culture.
This chapter investigates the main factors that contribute to the rise of the revolutionary
martyr-heroine in literature and real life. It begins by introducing the pinnacle of female
revolutionary martyrdom, Sofia Perovskaia, as the synthesis of the previous models of the 1860s-
1870s female emancipation. Then the chapter unpacks the concept of the martyr-heroine by
focusing on its religious, literary, and cultural genealogy. In particular, it discusses the
57
See Francis Butler, “Olga’s Conversion and the Construction of Chronicle Narrative,” The Russian Review 67
(2008): 230-42 and Lindsey Hughes, Sophia, Regent of Russia, 1657-1704 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1990).
58
Other known female revolutionaries include Figner, Subbotina, Kaminskaia, Gelfman, Spiridonova, to name just a
few. Vladimir Lenin was one of many theorists to recognize the importance of women’s participation in the
revolution, “from the experience of all liberation movements, it can be noted that the success of revolution can be
measured by the extent of the involvement of women in it.” See V. I. Lenin, vol 37 of Polnoe sobranie sochinenii,
5th ed. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1963), 186. Sally Boniece also argues that
“historians such as Barbara Alpern Engel, Maureen Perrie, Amy Knight, Beate Fieseler, and Barbara Evans
Clements have established that women’s contribution to the Russian revolutionary movement was significant.” See
Sally Boniece, “The Spiridonova Case, 1906: Terror, Myth, and Martyrdom,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and
Eurasian History 4, no. 3 (2003): 582.
28
relationship between gender and martyrdom and the function of female figures in literature, with
an emphasis on the radical critics of the late 1850-early 1860s – Dmitrii Pisarev and Nikolai
Dobroliubov. By locating the origins of the martyr-heroine in Russian religious culture, realist
literature, and radical literary criticism, this chapter aims to contextualize the martyr-heroine as
an intermediary concept between patriarchal and modern perceptions of the feminine – a concept
whose traditional values of female suffering and sacrifice inform its modern features of female
agency and public service.
The Road from Female Students (Kursistki) to Female Terrorists (Terroristki)
On April 3, 1881 an unprecedented event took place on Semenovskaia Square in Saint
Petersburg as Russia witnessed the execution of Sofia Perovskaia for the murder of Tsar
Alexander II. The Semenovskaia Square had definitely seen its fair share of public executions for
political crimes and, in fact, was the very place of Dostoevsky’s mock execution in 1849.
However, it had never before served as the site for the execution of a female revolutionary—a
spectacle that both signified and generated a change in the public view of the feminine. Having
become “the first Russian woman to be executed for a political crime,” Perovskaia called into
question not only the accepted role of women as mothers and wives, but also the very values of
the patriarchal state, in which “the public space was man’s space.”
59
Acting as a modern subject
in her rebellion against patriarchy, Perovskaia also acquired the status of “the first female martyr
59
Barbara Engel, Women in Russia, 1700-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 83 and Barbara
Engel, “Transformation versus Tradition,” in Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, ed.
Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Engel, and Christine D. Worobec (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991), 136. While there were other precedents when Russian women were punished as a threat to the state, their
violations were not motivated by a revolutionary political agenda, but were based on the opposing religious beliefs
(Boiarynia Morozova) or a personal claim to the throne (Peter’s half-sister, Sophia).
29
in the pantheon of revolutionary saints”—thus, marking the notion of the martyr-heroine as a
distinctly modern phenomenon.
60
Given the public resonance of Perovskaia’s trial, it would not be an exaggeration to
presume that the figure of Perovskaia serves as a breaking point between the traditional
nineteenth-century and the modern twentieth-century perceptions of women. An important
contributor to the new concept of the feminine, Perovskaia represents both a culmination of the
1870s discourse about the “New Woman” and the foundation for the later veneration of the
feminine principle by the Silver Age generation. In fact, one of the descendants of this
generation, the literary scholar Lidiia Ginzburg, specifically lists Perovskaia among the role
models of her peers, “who recited by heart decadent poems, worshipped Sofia Perovskaia and
admitted that Pugachev—is also correct.”
61
Ginzburg’s allusion to Perovskaia is further
examined by Jane Harris, who likewise suggests that “the image of Sofia Perovskaia, who in
addition incorporated the ideal of ‘self-sacrifice,’ subsequently gained even greater moral force
for her [Ginzburg’s] generation.”
62
The legend of Perovskaia emerged as a result of a long transformation of the concept of
the feminine from the religious homebound Russian woman into the public agent of
60
Ana Siljak, Angel of Vengeance: The Girl Who Shot the Governor of St. Petersburg and Sparked the Age of
Assassination (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2008), 278. For more on the terrorist as a modern subject, see Claudia
Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2009). For more on sacrifice as an important constituent of the modern Russian woman in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian culture, see Rosenholm, Gendering, 47-51 and L. Mikheeva, “The
Phenomena of Sacrifice and Femininity: Tarkovsky’s Symptom in Contemporary Russian Cinema,” Topos: Journal
for Philosophical and Cultural Studies 3, no. 25 (2010): 228-62.
61
“[человек среды…], которая твердила наизусть декадентские стихи, поклонялась Софье Перовской и
допускала, что Пугачев - это тоже правильно.” See Lidiia Ginzburg, “Eshche raz o starom i novom (Pokolenie na
povorote),” in Tynianovskii sbornik: Vtorye Tynianovskie chteniia, ed. M. Chudakova (Riga: “Zinatne,” 1986), 140.
62
Jane Gary Harris, “Lidiia Ginzburg: Images of the Intelligentsia,” in The Russian Memoir: History and Literature,
ed. Beth Holmgren (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 18-19.
30
revolutionary terrorism. There are two aspects of this change that need to be addressed, namely,
the general transformation from the 1860s female student and nihilist to the 1870s-1880s
revolutionary, and the more specific transition from the 1870s revolutionary propagandist
(revoliutsionerka-propagandistka) to the 1880s revolutionary terrorist (revoliutsionerka-
terroristka).
63
When viewed as both an extreme realization of the earlier 1860s liberal call for a
“woman’s awakening” and a product of the 1870s tradition of female revolutionary activism, the
Perovskaia affair not only demonstrates a continuity of the 1860s modernizing narrative about
women, but also makes female sacrifice and transgression the two essential components of the
modern perception of the feminine.
As an outcome of the 1860s discourse about the emancipated “New Woman,” Perovskaia
became a pinnacle of a double rebellion against patriarchy—that of a citizen and of a female—by
challenging the conventional view of the feminine as subordinated to state and family
hierarchy.
64
Whereas the previous generation of emancipated women of the 1860s, known as
“kursistki” and “nigilistki,” also rejected the traditional roles of mother and wife and actively
“sought access to education, paid employment, and a role outside the household,” they did not
fully discard their role as a subject of the state.
65
Since their revolt was mainly oriented against
the family structure, its extent amounted to eluding arranged marriages, opposing or disobeying
the orders from the head of the family hierarchy – the father, running away from the family,
63
For a more general discussion of nihilists and terrorists in nineteenth-century Russian society, see Daniel Brower,
“Nihilists and Terrorists,” in Times of Trouble: Violence in Russian Literature and Culture, ed. Marcus C. Levitt and
Tatyana Novikov (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 91-102.
64
For more on promoting traditional female values, such as piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity, in mid-
nineteenth-century Russia, see Diana Greene, “Mid-Nineteenth-Century Domestic Ideology in Russia,” in Women
and Russian Culture: Projections and Self-Perceptions, ed. Rosalind Marsh (New York: Berghahn Books, 1998),
78-106.
65
Engel, “Transformation,” 138.
31
going to school, and working as a seamstress, a nurse, or a teacher. The most famous portrayal of
this phase of female rebellion in literature is the character of Vera Pavlovna from the
Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat’?, 1863).
66
Trying to improve her own
life and the lot of women close to her, Vera Pavlovna organized a “sewing commune” as a way
to liberate women from their oppressive fate. Even though the police came to view this enterprise
as politically dangerous, Vera Pavlovna neither aimed at subverting the established order nor
focused on promoting revolutionary ideas.
While in her ability to foster female independence Perovskaia was undeniably a
descendant of the likes of Vera Pavlovna and a product of the 1860s discourse about women’s
rights and equality, she was also a highpoint of the 1870s female revolutionary movement and,
as such, drastically differed from her 1860’s emancipated predecessors in a number of ways. Not
only did this new Revolutionary Woman rebel against the patriarchal family, refuse to get
married, and defend her right to education, but she also physically threatened the patriarchal state
with annihilation and, consequently, faced the most severe punishment previously reserved for
male revolutionaries — the public execution.
As a successor to the 1870s models of female revolutionary martyrdom, Perovskaia
thereby largely owes her legend to the defendants of the most famous trials of political crimes
committed by women before 1881, namely Olga Bardina and Vera Zasulich. Not only were these
two cases instrumental in changing the public perception of the feminine, but they also created a
cultural narrative of revolutionary martyrdom with a woman as its main heroine. Having
prepared the ground for Perovskaia’s case as an example of the ultimate female revolutionary
66
Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Chto Delat’?, vol. 11 of Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v piatnadtsati
tomakh, ed. K. I. Bonetskii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1950; repr.,
Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1971).
32
sacrifice, these trials helped to elevate the prosaic revolutionary to an inspiring martyr-heroine
and promoted this concept as a cultural icon for generations to come.
The Genealogy of the Martyr-Heroine
The term ‘martyr-heroine,’ introduced by Barbara Engel to describe the “limitlessly
devoted and endlessly self-sacrificing” revolutionary women of the late nineteenth-century, is
particularly apt for addressing the complexity of the modern concept of the Russian feminine.
67
The appearance of the martyr-heroine in Russian nineteenth-century culture created a hybrid of
two important ideas — the strong heroine of Russian literature and the martyrdom platform of
Russian Orthodoxy. Neither the thought of a heroine as a self-sacrificial woman nor the notion of
martyrdom was new to nineteenth-century Russian society. Both were deeply rooted in Russian
cultural and religious history and venerated as exemplary models of behavior by Russian writers
and religious thinkers.
68
To illustrate, as early as in 1861, the radical critic Dmitrii Pisarev evoked these notions as
indicative of the public perception about the position of Russian women in his seminal article
“Female Types in the Novels and Novellas of Pisemskii, Turgenev, and Goncharov” (“Zhenskie
tipy v romanakh i povestiakh Pisemskogo, Turgeneva i Goncharova”):
67
Engel, Mothers, 155. In her article about the early twentieth-century female revolutionary Mariia Spiridonova,
Sally Boniece emphasizes the importance of Engel’s term for creating the “mythology” of the female revolutionary
“among 19
th
century Russian radicals” that “had resonance beyond the revolutionary subculture in the chaotic period
of 1905-1907.” See Boniece, “The Spiridonova,” 574.
68
For more on Russian women and religious martyrdom, see Zhitiia sviatykh zhen (Astoria, NY: Russian Orthodox
Youth Committee, 1997). For more on the perception of women in medieval Russia, see Rosalind McKenzie,
“Women’s Image in Russian Medieval Literature,” in A History of Women’s Writing in Russia, ed. Adele Marie
Barker and Jehanne M. Gheith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 16-36.
33
It seems to me that you will then agree with me in that we have the woman in
such a state, in which she does not answer for anything; when she weakens and
falls, we must sympathize with her as a martyr; when she overcomes obstacles,
we must glorify her as a heroine.
69
While Pisarev presents the concepts of “the martyr” (muchenitsa) and “the heroine”
(geroinia) as two alternative ways of relating to women, it is not long before their parallel co-
existence results in their fusion—the revolutionary martyr-heroine. An important condition for
enabling this fusion is already present in Pisarev’s evaluation of “the present position of a
woman” as “extremely difficult and disappointing” (1: 187).
70
According to Pisarev, the reason
for the woman’s pitiful existence in Russian society is her lack of agency, “she is not responsible
for anything,” and the blame for that falls on men, “if there is anything bad in a woman, it is the
form, in which her ideas, feelings, and actions are shaped; and this form has been made by us”
(1: 186).
71
Since, in Pisarev’s opinion, men are responsible for molding inherently good female
material in a poor structure, it is therefore a man’s job to awaken a woman’s consciousness
because she cannot change this form “on her own” (sobstvennymi silami) (1: 186).
After getting the initial awakening impulse from men, the woman, in turn, must
overcome her own passivity by preparing for a social protest, which Pisarev describes as a three-
69
“Мне кажется, вы тогда согласитесь со мною в том, что женщина находится у нас в таком положении,
при котором она не отвечает ни за что; когда она изнемогает и падает, мы должны ей сочувствовать как
мученице; когда она одолевает препятствия, мы должны прославлять ее как героиню.” See Dmitrii Pisarev,
“Zhenskie tipy v romanakh i povestiakh Pisemskogo, Turgeneva i Goncharova,” vol. 1 of Literaturnaia kritika v
trekh tomakh (Leningrad: “Khudozhestvennaia literatura” Leningradskoe otdelenie, 1981), 1: 186; my translation.
Later references are cited as (volume: page) in the text.
70
“я считаю теперешнее положение женщины крайне тяжелым и неутешительным.”
71
“она не отвечает ни за что,” “Если что-нибудь дурно в женщине, так дурна форма, в которую отлиты ее
понятия, чувства и действия; а форму эту изготовили мы.”
34
stage process: the inner struggle against a woman’s own convictions, the struggle with the
family, and, finally, the outer struggle with the public opinion:
Therefore, having received a stirring push, the woman must also receive from the
outside or develop in herself the strength for a protest and a battle. The battle will
be the most diverse; first, the internal battle, the breaking of the previous beliefs
and the creation of the new ones; then, the battle with the familial powers, with
moms and aunties, with their matrimonial plans, with their fashionable prejudices,
with their philistine mediocrity and stiffened routine; finally— the battle with the
public opinion, with the mockery, hints, and gossip (1: 185).
72
While the difficulty of this triple battle is duly noted by Pisarev, he deems all three
aspects equally important for the development of female agency and for a woman’s liberation
from patriarchal prejudice. Given that the actual emancipation of Russian women also follows a
tripartite structure—from female students and nihilists of the 1860s through the female populists
of the 1870s to the female terrorists of the late 1870s and early 1880s—one may say that Pisarev
has, in fact, unwittingly outlined the program for the subsequent emergence of the concept of the
martyr-heroine. Whereas the elements of this concept are indeed man-made cultural constructs of
acceptable women’s behavior, the ways in which revolutionary women appropriate these
constructs for their own narrative are largely of their making. In what appears to be a response to
72
“Итак, получивши расшевеливающий толчок, женщина должна еще получить извне или развить в самой
себе силы для протеста и борьбы. Борьба будет самая разнообразная; сначала внутренняя борьба, ломка
прежних убеждений и созидание новых; потом борьба с семейными властями, с маменьками, с тетушками, с
их матримониальными планами, с их великосветскими предрассудками, с их мещанскою
посредственностью и окоченевшею рутинностью; наконец -- борьба с общественным мнением, с
насмешками, намеками и сплетнями.”
35
Pisarev’s rhetorical question from the 1860s, “What will a woman accomplish, if she develops
on par with a man?,” the politically active women of the 1870s provide a creative solution to
Pisarev’s dilemma by combining the familiar notions of “muchenitsa” and “geroinia” in the form
of female revolutionary martyrdom (1: 186).
73
The Gender of the Revolutionary
While scholars agree on the overall importance of martyrdom for the Russian
revolutionary movement, the role of gender in the narrative of revolutionary martyrdom has
received less focus.
74
How did Russian female revolutionaries of the 1870s become publicly
recognized as the key players in the late nineteenth-century revolutionary crusade against the
government? Was it by virtue of gender that Bardina, Zasulich, and Perovskaia created a lasting
cultural legacy that generated admirers and inspired followers with “an example to emulate”?
75
Did a martyr-heroine have male predecessors and if so, what was the significance of this change
for the public perception of the feminine and for the fate of Russia’s radical politics?
Revolutionary in their political activism as well as in their contributions to the new concept of
the feminine, the martyr-heroines of the 1870s-1880s actively interrogated the relationship
between gender and martyrdom by feminizing the notion of revolutionary sacrifice.
An important factor that contributed to the legend of female revolutionary martyrdom
was the approval of female political activism by some sections of the Russian public. According
to the historian Amy Knight, “At the very time they were engaged in terrorism, Russian women
attracted sympathy and support, not only from liberal elements of their own society, but also
73
“Что сделает женщина, если она будет развиваться наравне с мужчиною?”
75
Boniece, “The Spiridonova,” 584.
36
from the West-European and American public.”
76
Similarly, referring to the trial of the Fifty in
February 1877 as “a landmark in the revolutionary movement,” Barbara Engel argues that
“educated society responded very sympathetically to the sixteen women defendants” who
“provided an attractive model for subsequent generations.”
77
Whereas Knight and Engel highlight the feminine gender of the revolutionaries as a
definite factor in soliciting public support, the other two historians, Boniece and Patyk, do not
necessarily differentiate between male and female revolutionaries, making it more difficult to
assess the role of gender in the movement’s “power to attract popular sympathy.”
78
To illustrate,
in her analysis of terrorism in early twentieth-century Russia, Boniece does not provide gender-
specific evidence but generally states that “the Russian Socialist Revolutionary [SR] party’s
assassinations of tyrannical government officials met with acclaim rather than fear from the
majority of the Russian population.”
79
In the same vein, in her discussion of Russian
revolutionary culture, Lynn Patyk does not focus on gender but argues that “broad swaths of the
Russian public, including workers, intellectuals, and even civil servants, celebrated the
assassinations of unpopular government ministers and lionized their assassins.”
80
These last two
statements suggest that the question of public approval for female revolutionaries deals not only
with the gender of the revolutionary personality, but also with the larger narrative of the
revolutionary sacrifice—the narrative whose origins are found in male revolutionary activism.
76
Amy Knight, “Female Terrorists in the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party,” Russian Review 38, no. 2 (1979):
139-140.
77
Engel, Mothers, 152, 154.
78
Boniece, “The Spiridonova,” 573.
79
Ibid.
80
Lynn Patyk, “‘The Double-Edged’,” 1-2.
37
Indeed, the concept of the male revolutionary was long familiar to the public from the
revolt of the Decembrists in 1825, Karakozov’s attempt on the life of the tsar in 1866, and the
Nechaev affair in 1869, to mention the most known acts of political radicalism.
81
Because of the
previous male tradition, revolutionary women did not have to create their narrative from scratch,
which made it easier for them to transition into ready-made models of revolutionary sacrifice.
Further evidence for this assertion is found in an anonymous leaflet from 1878, which praises the
heroism of Vera Zasulich by equating her with her male predecessor Karakozov, “Your path will
not be strewn with roses, fearless Russian heroine […]: The path in front of you is already
sprinkled with the martyred blood of Dmitrii Karakozov [...].”
82
While this comparison was supposed to be flattering, its association with violence could
have also marked the women’s entrance into the revolutionary arena as problematic because of
the existing prejudice against radical revolutionary methods in the eyes of the public.
83
81
For more on the legacy of Decembrists, see Ludmilla Trigos, The Decembrist Myth in Russian Culture (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Ludmilla Trigos, “The Spectacle of the Scaffold: Performance and Subversion in
the Execution of the Decembrists,” in Times of Trouble: Violence in Russian Literature and Culture, edited by
Marcus C. Levitt and Tatyana Novikov (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 42-56; Daniel Beer,
“Decembrists, Rebels, and Martyrs in Siberian Exile: The “Zerentui Conspiracy” of 1828 and the Fashioning of a
Revolutionary Genealogy,” Slavic Review 72, no. 3 (2013): 528-51; and Lotman, “The Poetics.” For more on
Karakozov, see Adam Bruno Ulam, Prophets and Conspirators in Pre-Revolutionary Russia (New Brunswick:
Transaction Publishers, 1998) and Verhoeven, The Odd Man. For more on the Nechaev affair, see Paul Avrich,
Bakunin and Nechaev (London: Freedom Press, 1974); Philip Pomper, Sergei Nechaev (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1979); and Woodford McClellan, Revolutionary Exiles: The Russians in the First International
and the Paris Commune (London: Frank Cass, 1979). For more on the history of terrorism in imperial Russia, see O.
V. Budnitskii, ed., “Krov’ po sovesti”: Terrorizm v Rossii. Dokumenty i biografiii (Rostov: Izdatel’stvo
Rostovskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo universiteta, 1994) and O. V. Budnitskii, Terrorizm v rossiiskom
osvoboditel’nom dvizhenii: Ideologiia, etika, psikhologiia (vtoraia polovina XIX–nachalo XX v.) (Moscow: Rosspen,
2000).
82
“Не розами усыпанный путь предстоит тебе, бесстрашная русская героиня,[…]: Пред тобою путь,
обрызганный уже мученическою кровью Дмитрия Каракозова […].” See V. I. Nevskii, ed., vol. 2 of Istoriko-
revoliutsionnyi sbornik (Leningrad, Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1924), 333.
83
An example of the negative portrayal of revolutionary cells in Russian fiction is found in Dostoevsky’s novel
Demons (Besy, 1871-72), which is largely inspired by the Nechaev affair. For more on the Nechaev subtext of
Demons, see James Goodwin, Confronting Dostoevsky’s Demons: Anarchism and the Specter of Bakunin in
Twentieth-Century Russia (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 17-22 and Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky. The Miraculous
Years, 1865-1871 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 435-71.
38
Notwithstanding the negative perception of Karakozov’s assassination attempt or Nechaev’s
ruthless methods in certain circles, the generally positive view of the Decembrists and their
wives as noble martyrs, on the other hand, contributed to the veneration of revolutionary women
by most of the liberal intelligentsia.
84
The fact that Russian women, previously known for their
heroism in the role of wives, were now successfully appropriating the narrative of the male
revolutionaries in the role of heroes, was a likely indication of the public readiness for this
change and attested to the favorable conditions for developing a gender-specific concept of a
revolutionary martyr-heroine.
The Gender of the Martyr
The women’s transition from “good mother and helpmate” to models of revolutionary
activism was also facilitated by Russian religious messianism, which, according to Vatro
Murvar, informed the larger concept of Russian revolutionary martyrdom.
85
Given the dearth of
materials on the topic of female religious martyrdom, it is not surprising that until the appearance
of the nineteenth-century revolutionary heroines, the Russian martyrdom paradigm, whether
religious or revolutionary, has mainly been perceived as male. Further support for this assertion
is found in the scholarly works by Marcia Morris, Rufus Mathewson, and Irina Paperno, which
focus on the religious genealogy of male literary ascetics and martyrs, such as Chernyshevsky’s
84
For more on the Decembrists’ wives, see Anatole Mazour, Women in Exile: The Wives of the
Decembrists (Tallahassee: Diplomatic Press, 1975); Vera Figner, “Zheny dekabristov,” Katorga i ssylka 21 (1925):
227-37; E. Pavliuchenko, V dobrovol'nom izgnanii: O zhenakh i sestrakh dekabristov (Moscow: Nauka, 1980); and
Gitta Hammarberg, “The Canonization of Dolgorukaia,” in The Russian Memoir: History and Literature, ed. Beth
Holmgren (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 93-127. An example of the positive portrayal of the
Decembrists’ wives in Russian literature is found in Nekrasov’s narrative poem Russian women (Russkie
zhenshchiny, 1872-73).
85
See Vatro Murvar, “Messianism in Russia: Religious and Revolutionary,” Journal for the Scientific Study of
Religion 10, no. 4 (1971): 277-338.
39
Rakhmetov, Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, Dostoevsky’s monk Zosima, and Tolstoy’s Father
Sergius.
86
For example, in her study about Chernyshevsky’s novel What is to Be Done?, Paperno
approaches the character of Rakhmetov as a model revolutionary by emphasizing similarities
between religious and revolutionary martyrdom, “the figure of Rakhmetov is especially charged
with Christian symbolism.”
87
Drawing parallels between the Russian and Soviet novel, Morris
further underlines the pathos of self-denial shared by Russian and Soviet positive heroes
“through a typology of an ascetic hero.”
88
In a similar vein, Katerina Clark also argues that
“some kind of martyrdom” was “an almost ubiquitous element in radical fiction” of the late
nineteenth century.
89
Having established the medieval martyrdom paradigm in the ascetic and revolutionary
male characters of Russian and Soviet literature, scholars then trace the origins of this narrative
back to the Russian Orthodox tradition of ‘podvizhnichestvo.’
90
Not confined exclusively to the
religious paradigm, podvizhnichestvo, or “the performance of heroic feats involving self-
86
Marcia Morris, Saints and Revolutionaries: The Ascetic Hero in Russian Literature (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1993); Rufus Mathewson, The Positive Hero in Russian Literature (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1958); Paperno, Chernyshevsky. For more on the hagiographic tradition in nineteenth-century
Russian literature, see Margaret Ziolkowski, Hagiography and Modern Russian Literature (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1998).
87
Paperno, Chernyshevsky, 207.
88
Morris, Saints, 3.
89
Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 49.
90
For more on ‘podvizhnichestvo’ in literature, see Peter Henry, “Imagery of podvig and podvizhnichestvo in the
Works of Garshin and the Early Gor’ky,” The Slavonic and East European Journal 61, no. 1 (1983): 139-59 and
Patyk, “‘The Double-Edged.” For more on podvizhnichestvo in Russian culture, see Sergei Bulgakov, “Geroizm i
podvizhnichestvo (Iz razmyshlenii o religioznoi prirode russkoi intelligentsii),” in Vekhi: sbornik statei o russkoi
intelligentsii (Frankfurt am Main: Izdatel’stvo Posev, 1967), 23-69; Peter Duncan, Russian Messianism: Third
Rome, Revolution, Communism and After (London: Routledge, 2000); and Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology:
Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov. Orthodox Theology in a New Key (Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 2000).
40
abnegation and asceticism in the service of a spiritual cause,” was adapted for a secular
enterprise of politics and became a foundation for the heroic pathos of Russian revolutionary
terrorism.
91
Fused with “the pan-European heroic culture of political and national revolution,”
podvizhnichestvo produced a modern revolutionary narrative, in which “the terrorist was a
Messianic figure whose ‘heroic deed’ (podvig) of murder/self-sacrifice was imagined as sacred
violence capable of redeeming the national community.”
92
Given the male gender of most known Russian ascetics and martyrs, it was only natural
that the entrance of a woman onto the stage of revolutionary martyrdom altered the accepted
perception of gender roles in Russian culture, providing women with access to the public sphere
on equal footing with men. In turn, the martyr-heroine rejuvenated the existing paradigm of male
revolutionary martyrdom because she “expressed the ideas of moral purity, compassion, self-
sacrifice, and Russianness in a way that her male counterpart could not.”
93
It was this heroic
aspect of the Russian concept of the feminine that, when merged with a religious subtext of male
revolutionary podvizhnichestvo, highlighted the important role of women for the Russian
revolutionary narrative and contributed to the subsequent mythologization of the figure of the
martyr-heroine in literature and life.
The Literary Heroine
While male revolutionaries might have outpaced their female associates by claiming
revolutionary and religious messianism as their domain, the area where Russian women
91
Patyk, “‘The Double-Edged,” 3.
92
Ibid.
93
Ibid.
41
outperformed men was their heroic fictional portrayal. Indeed, the tendency to venerate the
Russian woman over her male counterpart has long been an important part of Russian literature
and literary criticism. According to Mathewson, the literary heroine was “the one person who
had moved beyond the stage of indoctrinated paralysis that afflicts the Russian man in the
novel.”
94
In her pioneering book about the exalted status of women in Russian literature, Barbara
Heldt also argues that the true positive hero of the Russian novel is a Russian woman whose
morals, strong values, and commitment to others serve as a counter-example to the apathy and
the indecision of the superfluous man, “in Russian fiction the elevation of the Russian woman is
matched only by the self-abasement of the Russian man.”
95
Indeed, in the relationship between the two iconic gender-specific Russian topoi, the
superfluous man and the strong woman, the strong woman possesses all the qualities that the
superfluous man lacks: stamina, determination, high ethical standards, courage, and a willingness
to act. Such an abundance of positive traits puts a new perspective on Mathewson’s claim about
the “hero-centered” nature of Russian literature, which may, in fact, be reassessed as “heroine-
centered” – particularly, in regards to the impressive number of female characters that are
considered worthy of emulation.
96
Even though this idealization of women has led some scholars
of Russian fiction to focus on the shortcomings of the strong woman motif and the dangers of
creating a perfect heroine, the ethic and aesthetic appeal of Russian female characters is still hard
94
Mathewson, The Positive Hero, 72. One of the most telling examples of literary criticism that praises the
determination of the Russian woman and laments the weakness of the Russian man is found in Chernyshevsky’s
renowned article, “A Russian at a Rendezvous” (“Russkii chelovek na rendez-vous,” 1858). See N. G.
Chernyshevsky, “Russkii chelovek na rendez-vous,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v piatnadtsati tomakh, vol. 5, ed.
K. I. Bonetskii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1950), 156-74.
95
Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 2.
96
Mathewson, The Positive, 14.
42
to deny.
97
Given the powerful influence that Russian literature exercised on the everyday
behavior of educated Russians, it was only natural that the Tatianas, Elenas, Lizas, Natashas,
Veras, and Sonias of realist fiction quickly became the symbols of true feminine qualities not
only in literature, but also in real life.
98
An important aspect of this idealized conception of the Russian woman was her strong
religious underpinning. Steeped in the traditional religious values of altruism, self-sacrifice, and
self-abnegation from the early age, Russian women were the most likely candidates for
“transforming society according to standards of morality that were religiously based and
culturally feminine.”
99
Due to the fact that Russian culture viewed humility and suffering as
positive attributes that often gave women ethical vision and moral authority over men, it was not
surprising that women were, in some cases, more resolute in their desire to sacrifice their life,
freedom, and comforts for the revolutionary cause. Serving as paragons of moral integrity and
utter dedication, the revolutionary heroines of 1870s and 1880s readily translated religious
values into public service and, similar to male revolutionaries, adapted the concept of religious
97
See Heldt, Terrible; Vera Dunham, “The Strong-Woman Motif,” in The Transformation of Russian Society:
Aspects of Social Change Since 1861, ed. Cyril E. Black (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 459-83; Joe
Andrew, “Mothers and Daughters in Russian Literature of the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” The Slavonic
and East European Review 73, no. 1 (1995): 37-60; Joe Andrew, Narrative Space and Gender in Russian Fiction:
1846-1903 (New York: Rodopi, 2007); Joe Andrew, Women in Russian Literature, 1780-1863 (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1988); Catriona Kelly, A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 1820-1992 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1994); Rina Lapidus, Passion, Humiliation, Revenge: Hatred in Man-Woman Relationships in the 19th and 20th
Century Russian Novel (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008); Rosalind Marsh, introduction to Gender and Russian
Literature: New Perspectives, trans. and ed. Rosalind Marsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1-38;
Frank Seeley, “The Heyday of the ‘Superfluous Man’ in Russia,” The Slavonic and East European Review 31, no.
76 (1952): 92-112; Jehanne Gheith, “The Superfluous Man and the Necessary Woman – ‘A Re-vision’,” Russian
Review 55, no. 2 (1996): 226-44; Ellen Chances, “The Superfluous Man in Russian Literature,” in The Routledge
Companion to Russian Literature, ed. Neil Cornwell (New York: Routledge, 2001), 111-22; David Patterson, Exile:
The Sense of Alienation in Modern Russian Letters (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995); and Matich,
“A Typology.”
98
For more on applying literary models to life in nineteenth-century Russian society, see Paperno, Chernyshevsky,
4-20.
99
Engel, Mothers, 200.
43
martyrdom for revolutionary goals. In their readiness for self-sacrifice, these women not only
challenged the traditional perception of revolutionary martyrdom as male, but also added “a
moral dimension to revolutionary politics seldom seen before or since.”
100
While both concepts, female heroism and female religiosity, enjoyed their separate
existence with several occasional overlaps in the tradition of “female orthodox asceticism”
(zhenskoe pravoslavnoe podvizhnichestvo), their final synthesis in the figures of female
revolutionaries, marked a new era in the mythology of the Russian feminine and gave a different
meaning to the strong heroine motif of the Russian realist fiction.
101
Because of the tradition of
idealized female portrayals in literature and the expectations of a woman’s sacrifice in life, it
seemed that it was only a matter of time before altruistic heroines turned into revolutionary
martyrs. In spite of this seemingly logical conclusion, there is an obvious gap between a strong
woman with her firm moral convictions and a revolutionary martyr-heroine with her bomb or her
gun — a gap that not only illuminates the changing perception of the feminine in late nineteenth-
century Russian society, but also highlights some of the forces behind this transformation, in
particular, the literary critics of the 1860s.
Russian Literary Criticism and the Birth of the Revolutionary Martyr in a Heroine
Before female revolutionaries successfully personified and promoted the concept of the
martyr-heroine to the Russian public in the 1870s, the male literary critics of the 1860s had
already paved the way for the martyr-heroine to appear in Russian life and fiction. Given the
100
Ibid., 203.
101
See O. V. Kirichenko, “Zhenskoe pravoslavnoe podvizhnichestvo v Rossii (XIX—seredina XX v.)” (PhD diss.,
IAE RAN, Moscow, 2010) and O. V. Kirichenko, Zhenskoe pravoslavnoe podvizhnichestvo v Rossii (XIX—seredina
XX v.) (Moscow: Aleksievskaia pustyn’, 2010).
44
importance of the 1860s Russian literary criticism as an instrument of developing the public
opinion, the critics’ study of Russian women as historical and fictional characters is particularly
helpful in monitoring changes in the public perception of the feminine. While my earlier analysis
of Pisarev’s essay has focused on his critique of the 1860s social plight of real Russian women,
my present goal is to examine Dobroliubov’s assessment of the 1860s female literary types in the
works of Goncharov, Turgenev, and Ostrovsky in order to reveal their possible contributions to
the notion of the revolutionary feminine.
My analysis of Dobroliubov is informed by Rufus Mathewson’s monograph about the
positive hero in Russian literature, in which he briefly outlines Dobroliubov’s search for a new
type of a heroine by examining the critic’s three seminal articles: “What is Oblomovshchina?”
(“Chto takoe Oblomovshchina?,” 1859), “When Will the Real Day Come?” (“Kogda zhe pridet
nastoiashchii den’?,” 1860), and “A Ray of Light in the Kingdom of Darkness” (“Luch sveta v
temnom tsarstve,” 1860).
102
According to Mathewson, Dobroliubov “arranged three literary
heroines, typical of the impulsive, straightforward feminine figures in Russian culture since
Pushkin’s Tatiana, in an ascending order of virtue and effectiveness.”
103
By comparing
Dobroliubov’s analyses of Olga from Goncharov’s Oblomov (Oblomov, 1859), Elena from
Turgenev’s On the Eve (Nakanune, 1860), and Katerina from Ostrovsky’s The Storm (Groza,
1859), Mathewson shows the critic’s progression “towards more resilient characters,” who are
“not yet fully developed,” but represent “the first authentic images of the new type.”
104
102
N. A. Dobroliubov, Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. J. Fineberg (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing
House, 1948).
103
Mathewson, The Positive, 72.
104
Ibid.
45
While Mathewson attests to the importance of Dobroliubov’s search for a positive
heroine, he does not examine the implications of this search for the changing concept of the
Russian feminine. Nor does Mathewson discuss the main features of this new female type in the
context of the 1870s-1880s revolutionary women, for whom this type is a definite precursor. By
approaching Dobroliubov’s articles as an expression of a larger cultural concern—that of the
emergence of the modern concept of the Russian feminine—I argue that Dobroliubov’s new type
is, in fact, the proto-martyr-heroine, whose transformation from the strong woman of the realist
narrative requires her to break away from Russia’s patriarchal structures.
Similar to Pisarev, who predicts the Russian woman’s liberation to occur in three steps
via her emancipation from self, family, and public opinion, Dobroliubov also maps the journey
towards the new female type in three stages—each of them described as a paragon of moral,
physical, and violent resistance. In so doing, Dobroliubov not only confirms the radical critics’
prophetic vision of a transgressive solution to the woman question, but also reveals the
mechanism behind creating this solution in the revolutionary martyr-heroine a decade later.
The origins of this solution can be found in Dobroliubov’s choice of criteria for assessing
female characters, which is based on their increased agency, stronger confrontation with
patriarchal tyranny, and self-inflicted death. As the strength of the heroines’ protest augments, so
does Dobroliubov’s praise of their portrayals. A telling example of the critic’s penchant for more
transgressive heroines is his changed opinion of the previously admired Olga, who loses her
initial appeal after the appearance of more daring and dynamic female characters, such as Elena
and Katerina.
To illustrate, in his article about Oblomov, Dobroliubov first introduces Olga as a very
likeable personage with a strong will and a proven ability to respond to “the spirit of the new
46
life.”
105
Defined as the morally sound woman, Olga becomes the first step towards
Dobroliubov’s new female type, to which she contributes the traditional feminine virtues of love,
loyalty, and devotion. While showing Olga as a victim of her surroundings, Dobroliubov also
invests his portrayal of her with a sense of urgency for a change and a desire “for [a] fight.”
106
Even though Olga is unable to rescue the main character, Oblomov, from apathy, Dobroliubov
still views her as “the highest ideal that a Russian artist can find in our present life” because of
her inner depth and astute acumen:
She is thoroughly familiar with Oblomovshchina, she will be able to discern it in
all its different shapes, and under all masks, and will always be able to find
strength enough to pronounce ruthless judgment on it […].
107
While the aforementioned portrayal of Olga shows definite “proof of her dignity and
promise” and “displays genuine moral strength,” her description in Dobroliubov’s later essay,
written about Turgenev’s Elena, is less flattering.
108
Although Dobroliubov still acknowledges
Olga’s good-hearted and well-developed character, when compared to Elena, Olga lacks the
practical implementation of her skills and therefore cannot yet be classified as an activist:
105
N. A. Dobroliubov, “What is Oblomovshchina?,” in Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. J. Fineberg (Moscow:
Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1948), 216.
106
Ibid.
107
Ibid., 217.
108
Mathewson, The Positive, 73.
47
Olga, in Oblomov, appeared to us to be an ideal woman whose development had
gone far beyond the rest of society; but where is her practical activity? She seems
to be capable of creating a new life and yet she lives amidst the same banality in
which all her women friends live because she cannot get away from this
banality.
109
The fact that Dobroliubov becomes more conservative in his accolades for Olga only
after he has familiarized himself with Elena suggests that his perception of the modern woman is
informed not only by the traditional feminine values of sensitivity and loyalty, but also by the
ideas of female activism and rebellion. Indeed, the main reason why Elena receives a higher
ranking in Dobroliubov’s hierarchy of strong heroines lies in her “habit of questioning dominant
values” and her socially active position.
110
By marrying the Bulgarian activist Insarov and
leaving her home country, Elena not only opposes her parents, but also prepares to give up her
life for a cause as a nurse during the Bulgarian rebellion. Elena’s commitment to performing a
useful social function is precisely what constitutes her most valuable trait for Dobroliubov and,
as such, makes her a more important contender that Olga for the title of a new female type:
Helena is an ideal personage, but her features are familial to us, we understand
and sympathize with her. What does this show? It shows that the basis of her
character – love for the suffering and the oppressed and a desire to do good [and
109
N. A. Dobroliubov, “When Will the Day Come?,” in Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. J. Fineberg (Moscow:
Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1948), 403.
110
Mathewson, The Positive, 73.
48
weary search for the one who could show how good can be done] – all this is at
last being felt in the best section of our society.
111
Although an impressive specimen of womanhood, Elena cannot claim the highest place
in Dobroliubov’s list of virtuous women because the nature of her sacrifice is unknown:
Nearly five years have passed since then, and no further news of Elena has come
[…] all trace of Elena had disappeared beyond recovery for ever; and no one
knows whether she is still living, whether she is hidden away somewhere, or
whether the petty drama of life is over — the little ferment of her existence is at
an end; and she has found death in her turn.
112
Without final confirmation of Elena’s death for a cause, Dobroliubov continues his search for the
cases of ultimate female sacrifice to find it in the most rebellious of the three heroines –
Ostrovsky’s Katerina. While retaining the positive feminine virtues of her literary precursors,
Katerina also possesses “the central virtue that is lacking in the noblest and most brilliant of her
predecessors,” namely “the instinctive [consciousness of her direct and inalienable right to life,
happiness, and love].”
113
111
Dobroliubov, “When Will,” 436.
112
Ivan Turgenev, On the Eve, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Macmillan, 1906), 287-88.
113
Mathewson, The Positive, 74; N. A. Dobroliubov, “A Ray of Light in the Realm of Darkness,” in Selected
Philosophical Essays, trans. J. Fineberg (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1948), 614.
49
Indeed, what makes the pathos of Karerina’s struggle particularly attractive to
Dobroliubov is her readiness to sacrifice her life rather than continue a repressed existence in an
abusive patriarchal family:
Ah, Varia, you don’t know me! I pray, of course, it may never come to that! But if
I am too miserable here, they would not keep me by any force on earth. I should
throw myself out of the window, I should drown myself in the Volga. If I will not
to live here, then I would not, they might cut me to pieces.
114
As a result of Katerina’s refusal to be subjugated by her husband and mother-in-law, she
performs an extreme act of rebellion by committing suicide. In so doing, Katerina becomes an
upgraded version of Elena, in that Elena prefers the potential dangers of the Bulgarian battlefield
to the stifling atmosphere of her home, while Katerina chooses actual death as a means of
resistance against her tyrannical family.
Katerina as the Proto-Martyr-Heroine
The fact that Dobroliubov picks Katerina as his new female type because of her
willingness to die for her beliefs is particularly important for our discussion about the emergence
of the revolutionary martyr-heroine. Not only does Dobroliubov evoke the traditional Russian
paradigm of female suffering in his discussion of Katerina’s plight, but he also approaches her
suicide as “the moral equivalent of an act of political rebellion”, which especially resonates in
114
A. Ostrovsky, The Storm, trans. Constance Garnett (Chicago: Charles H. Sergel Company, 1899), 43.
50
the later revolutionary context.
115
As if foreseeing the 1870s pathos of female revolutionary
sacrifice, Dobroliubov praises Katerina’s death as a way for a woman to oppose the patriarchy
and, in so doing, creates an important precedent for the positive perception of female rebellion in
literature and life.
In fact, by justifying Katerina’s suicide as a compelling way out of captivity and an
indication of her spiritual superiority, Dobroliubov proposes a gender-specific program of
resistance for women. Notably, this program requires the very qualities that will later form the
basis of the martyr-heroine, such as courage, resilience, and heroism:
A woman who wants to go to the end in her protest against the oppression and the
tyranny of elders in the Russian family must be imbued with the heroic spirit of
self-sacrifice, she must dare to do everything, and be prepared for everything (my
emphasis).
116
An important part of Dobroliubov’s call to action is his subsequent explanation of how
the woman’s weak, victimized position is, in fact, a source of strength and effectiveness of her
rebellion, “it is well known that extremes beget extremes, and that the strongest protest is the one
that rises, at last, from the breast of the weakest and most patient.”
117
By emphasizing female
agency, motivation, and ability to affect change, Dobroliubov not only redefines the public
perception of women as suffering victims, but also shows how one’s martyrdom can be
115
Mathewson, The Positive, 73.
116
Dobroliubov, “A Ray of Light,” 601.
117
Ibid., 599.
51
purposefully directed against one’s oppressors. For this point, Dobroliubov uses a telling
metaphor of enslavement, in which he compares Katerina’s protest to the Jewish slaves’ refusal
to entertain their masters with songs:
Her death is the realized song of the Babylonian captive. “Play and sing the songs
of Zion to us,” the conquerors said to the Judeans. But the mournful prophet
answered that the sacred songs of homeland cannot be sung in slavery, that it
were better that their tongues should stick to the roofs of their mouths and their
hands wither rather than that they should strike the harp and sing the songs of
Zion for the entertainment of their captors.
118
The analogy between the oppressed Katerina and the enslaved Jews introduces a new
political dimension to a local woman’s revolt against familial structures. No longer just a rebel
against her family, Katerina, in Dobroliubov’s interpretation, acquires the larger symbolic
significance of a protester against the whole patriarchal regime. By translating Katerina’s
victimization by the family into that by the state, Dobroliubov becomes one of the first critics to
exploit the parallels between these two types of tyranny through the cases of female oppression
and rebellion in Russian fiction. In so doing, Dobroliubov aptly prefigures the central argument
of Engel’s monograph, in which she similarly argues that “authoritarian, hierarchal family
relations that subordinated women to men reproduced and reinforced the authoritarian social and
political order.”
119
118
Ibid., 626
119
Engel, “Transformation,” 136.
52
If one is to accept Engel’s claim that “by fostering discipline and respect for authority on
the personal level, the patriarchal family prepared people for social discipline and respect for
state authority,” then it will be fair to assume that the destruction of one authority would
inevitably lead to the crisis of the other.
120
In this case, Dobroliubov’s choice to focus on a
woman as a potential destabilizing force for both authorities—family and state— is more than
justified. By insinuating that the despotic family hierarchy is an extension of a larger despotic
structure perpetuated by the state, Dobroliubov not only shows women as victimized by the
family and the state, but also provides them with motivation and vindication to rebel against
both. In this case, Katerina’s escape from her family’s authority automatically signifies an
instinctive rebellion against the social and political order, which has put Katerina in a
subordinate position in her family and caused her demise.
It is worth mentioning that while Dobroliubov does not explicitly blame the state for
Katerina’s suicide, his accusations against her tormentors, the families of “Dikois and
Kabanovys,” portray them not as individuals but as social types and representatives of the larger
tyrannical power that permeates Russian society. The fact that the omnipresent “Dikois i
Kabanovys” are pluralized in Dobroliubov’s discourse marks them as another manifestation of
an oppressive Russian authority, against which Katerina has to rebel in order to maintain her
dignity. In a similar fashion, Dobroliubov’s veiled last comment about a “determined action,” for
which Ostrovsky’s play is supposed to summon the Russians, also betrays the critic’s intentions
to transpose Katerina’s domestic plight onto a larger narrative of rebellion against the existing
social order.
121
120
Ibid.
121
Dobroliubov, “A Ray of Light,” 623.
53
Conclusion
By no means the only 1860s thinker to expose patriarchal tyranny against women,
Dobroliubov deserves a separate mention because of his focus on the rebellious potential of the
victimized female. Dobroliubov’s articles about Goncharov’s Olga, Turgenev’s Elena, and
Ostrovsky’s Katerina provide an important step-by-step framework towards creating a more
sacrificial, determined, and action-driven literary heroine. From a kind-hearted but passive Olga,
through an active but mysterious Elena, to the resolute and death-bound Katerina, Dobroliubov
legitimizes female rebellion as a natural reaction to social evils and validates a woman’s death as
her ultimate protest against the oppressive social structure. In so doing, Dobroliubov not simply
shows the progression of Russian literary heroines towards martyrdom, but, in fact, himself
contributes to the formation of the trope of the martyr-heroine and its larger embodiment – the
modern concept of the Russian feminine.
Dobroliubov’s veneration of Katerina’s determination and willingness to die for the cause
could not have passed in vain for the 1870s revolutionaries, who were in many ways influenced
by the 1860s radical literary criticism. While Katerina’s fictional suicide in 1859 was still
motivated by an individual quest for independence and love, twenty years later the concept of
female martyrdom acquired social as opposed to personal dimensions and moved from the
private domain of personal satisfaction to the public one of communal happiness. By
successfully redirecting women’s rebellion against the patriarchal structure from the domestic to
the public sphere, the male revolutionaries of the 1870s appeared to have answered the call for
action posed by the radical critics of the 1860s. It was now up to women to become heroines in
the revolutionary narrative outlined for them by scholars, writers, and political activists — the
54
narrative that successfully translated the earlier tradition of female suffering and sacrifice into
commitment to public service.
55
Chapter 2
The ‘Martyr-Heroine’ on Trial: The Historical Perspective
We have begun a great thing. Two generations, perhaps, will succumb in the task,
and yet it must be done.
122
—Sofia Perovskaia
Women, it must be confessed, are much more richly endowed with this divine
flame than men. This is why the almost religious fervor of the Russian
revolutionary movement must in great part be attributed to them; and while they
take part in it, it will be invincible.
123
—Stepniak-Kravchinsky, Underground Russia
The history of Russian revolutionary women has long been a topic of interest in Slavic
scholarship.
124
While researchers mainly focus on the biographies of Russian female
revolutionaries, this chapter examines the cultural contributions of real-life revolutionary women
to the Russian concept of the modern feminine and its foundational component – the martyr-
heroine. How did historical female revolutionaries promote the idea of the martyr-heroine in
Russian culture? What were the consequences of their revolutionary activism for the patriarchal
perception of the feminine? And, most importantly, who and how accommodated the concept of
the martyr-heroine in Russian cultural and literary space?
This chapter approaches the notion of the martyr-heroine as a cultural construct of
Russian modernity by investigating its three main stages of development. The first stage begins
122
Cited in Petr Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company,
1899), 318.
123
S. Stepniak-Kravchinsky, Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883), 127.
124
See Stites, The Women’s; Boniece, “The Spiridonova;” Engel, Mothers; Siljak, Angel; Patyk, “‘Double-
Edged’;”Anthony Anemone, ed., Just Assassins: The Culture of Terrorism in Russia (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2010); O. V. Budnitskii, ed., Zhenshchiny-terroristki v Rossii (Rostov-na-Donu: Feniks, 1996);
Lynne Hartnett, “The Making of a Revolutionary Icon: Vera Nikolaevna Figner and the People’s Will in the Wake
of the Assassination of Tsar Aleksandr II,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 43, no. 2/3 (2001): 249-70; Lynne Hartnett,
The Defiant Life of Vera Figner: Surviving the Russian Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014);
Anna Hillyar and Jane McDermid, Revolutionary Women in Russia, 1870-1917 (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2000).
56
with the “populist women” (narodnitsy) from the trial of the Fifty, whose public appearance in
court inscribes them in the male revolutionary narrative as historical subjects. The second stage
continues with Vera Zasulich, whose avenging shot against general-governor Trepov marks her
as “a signal to a new revolutionary movement, one that would terrorize the state and energize
rebellion.”
125
The narrative of the martyr-heroine reaches its peak with Sofia Perovskaia, whose
assassination of Tsar Alexander II not only changes the course of Russian and her own history,
but also confirms the status of the martyr-heroine as a modern subject and an agent of political
change.
These three stages are analyzed as a series of moments that consecutively familiarize the
public with the essential components of the concept of the martyr-heroine – its public activism,
leadership, agency, violence for a cause, and martyrdom. The process of familiarization occurs
though oral and written narratives presented by the revolutionary women, their defense lawyers,
supporters, and observers. By examining these narratives, this chapter aims to unpack the
mechanisms that facilitate the inclusion of the figure of the martyr-heroine in the Russian
perception of the feminine. More than that, it also intends to show the martyr-heroine as a
historical and cultural phenomenon that not only contributes to the revolutionary movement, but
also challenges the patriarchal perception of gender.
125
Siljak, Angel, 235.
57
Section I
Finally, there are women who truly belong among us, in other words the really
initiated who fully accept our program. They are our comrades. We should view
them as our most precious treasure, whose assistance is indispensable to us.
126
—Nechaev, Catechism of a Revolutionary
The propagandists wished nothing for themselves. They were the purest
personification of self-denial.
127
—Stepniak-Kravchinsky, Underground Russia
The Trial of the Fifty: Introducing Women to Revolutionary Martyrdom
The process of female integration into the revolutionary narrative received its first public
hearing at the trial of the Fifty in 1877. Along with its overall significance for the growth of the
revolutionary movement in Russia, this trial was especially important for the development of the
concept of the martyr-heroine because it finally brought women into the public focus as active
participants of and contributors to the movement. While women’s previous involvement in
revolutionary activities was already effective and widespread, it did not receive a strong public
resonance or public approval prior to their appearance in court alongside male revolutionaries.
By making revolutionary women visible, the trial of the Fifty provided a public space where
“revolutionary populists [men and women] openly proclaimed their ideological political views,”
defining women’s voice as representative of the movement.
128
As a result, the female defendants
not only had a chance to express their solidarity with the movement publicly, but also legitimized
the movement’s actions through their unwavering support.
126
Cited in Hillyar, Revolutionary, 23. For the original quote in Russian, see O. V. Budnitskii, ed., Istoriia
terrorizma v Rossii v dokumentakh, biografiiakh, issledovaniakh, 2nd ed. (Rostov-na-Donu: Feniks, 1996), 53.
127
Stepniak-Kravchinsky, Underground, 28.
128
“[…] революционные народники [мужчины и женщины] открыто провозгласили свои идейно-
политические взгляды.” See N. B. Panukhina, “Protsess 50-ti kak akt revoliutsionnoi bor’by,” Istoriia SSSR 5
(1971): 43; my translation.
58
Both the publicity of the hearing and the women’s participation in it marked the trial of
the Fifty as an important stepping stone in advancing the popular cult of a heroic revolutionary.
To illustrate, a well-known revolutionary and writer Stepniak-Kravchinsky discussed how the
defendants so impressed the public with their heroic behavior that the members of the audience
compared them to religious martyrs, “‘They are saints!’ Such was the exclamation, repeated in a
broken voice, by those who were present at this memorable trial.”
129
According to Stepniak-
Kravchinsky, the feelings of awe and admiration were expressed not only by the supporters of
the accused, but also by the most unlikely advocates of the revolutionary activity, “even those
who could not but consider such men as enemies were bewildered at the sight of so much self-
sacrifice.”
130
While accounting for a possible bias in Stepniak-Kravchinsky’s depiction of the overall
public sympathy for his revolutionary acquaintances and friends, there is still enough evidence in
support of his statement from the press coverage of the trial.
131
To the dismay of the government,
who “had planned the trial of the Fifty to discredit the revolutionaries,” the defense attorneys
focused “on the ethical bases for the defendants’ actions” and succeeded in elevating the
129
Stepniak-Kravchinsky, Underground, 27.
130
Ibid.
131
See N. B. Panukhina, “Protsess,” 49, 54. Other sources that inform my discussion of the trial of the Fifty include:
V. M. Sablin, Protsess 50-ti: [Sudebnoe delo revoliutsionerov-narodnikov, razbiravsheesia v Peterburge v osobom
prisutstvii Senata s 21 fev. po 14 marta 1877 g.] (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo V. M. Sablina, 1906); B. Bazilevskii (V.
Bogucharskii), ed., Gosudarstvennyia prestupleniia v Rossii v XIX veke: Sbornik politicheskikh protsessov i drugikh
materialov, otnosiashchikhsia k istorii revoliutsionnykh i oppozitsionnykh dvizhenii v Rossii (Rostov na-Donu:
Tipografiia “Donskaia Rech’,” 1877), 128-334; Vera Figner, vol. 1 of Zapechetlennyi trud. Vospominaniia v dvukh
tomakh (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Mysl,” 1964); I. S. Dzhabadari, “Protsess 50-ti (Vserossiiskaia Sotsial’no-
Revoliutsionnaia organizatsiia 1874-1877gg),” Byloe 8, 9, 10 (1907): 1-26, 169-92, 169-97; A. Ul’ianovskii,
Zhenshchiny v protsesse 50-ti (Saint-Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo O. N. Popovoi, 1906); V. V. Kallash, ed., Rechi i
biografii S. I. Bardinoi, P. A. Alekseeva, G. F. Zdanovicha, S. I. Agapova, I. N. Myshkina (Moscow: Izdanie V. M.
Sablina, 1907).
59
defendants’ “moral fervor and readiness for self-sacrifice” in the eyes of the public.
132
Dealing
with the propagandistic and not yet terrorist charges against the accused, the defense was able to
downplay the state indictments by exalting the defendants’ virtuous and highly principled
lives.
133
Portrayed as an idealist, the revolutionary of the seventies became all the more attractive
to the public because of his readiness to suffer for the people, “he went forth to martyrdom with
the serenity of a Christian of the early ages, and he suffered it with a calmness of mind – nay,
with a certain rapture, for he knew he was suffering for his faith.”
134
Given a strong religious
tone of this idealistic narrative, it was not surprising that even the judges, “with the exception of
the presiding judge, ultimately found little harm in the naïve young idealists who seemed so
charmingly ready to suffer for the sake of their beliefs.”
135
While the tradition of depicting revolutionaries as moral and sacrificial people was by no
means new, the presence of sixteen female defendants certainly made the trial of the Fifty stand
out from the other political trials of the time. Defined by the Soviet encyclopedia as “the first
political process in Russia, in which workers (14 people) and women (16 people) actively came
out,” the trial of the Fifty became a turning point in the Russian history of politics and gender.
136
132
Engel, Mothers, 152-53. Among the defense attorneys were some famous Russian lawyers, such as Spasovich,
Bardovskii, Ol’khin, Borovikovskii, Korsh, Liustig, and Gerard. See Panukhina, “Protsess,” 47.
133
The government brought the following indictments against the accused, “rejecting religion, the family, and
private property and attempting to destroy ‘all classes of society by assaulting all of those who live above the level
of the simple and poor peasant’.” See Siljak, Angel, 198.
134
Stepniak-Kravchinsky, Underground, 28.
135
Siljak, Angel, 201.
136
Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 2nd ed., s.v. “protsess piatidesiati.” The next important political trial, which
had 37 women out of 193 defendants, was the Great Trial, or the Trial of the 193. It took place between October
1877 and January 1878. Similar to the trial of the Fifty, the trial of the 193 also aimed to punish the revolutionary
propagandists and played a significant role in fostering the revolutionary movement of the late 1870s. However, the
female defendants from the trial of the 193 neither received such publicity as their counterparts from the trial of the
Fifty, nor produced a spokesperson such as Bardina to make a powerful statement on their behalf. For that reason,
this study does not focus on the trial of the 193 in detail. For more on the trial of the 193, see Stites, The Women’s,
60
In fact, several scholars have argued that the hearing largely owns its significance to its female
defendants who have contributed to the trial’s reputation of a milestone in the revolutionary
movement. For example, Barbara Engel claims that the appearance of women defendants was
instrumental in turning the trial into “a judicial platform used intentionally to propagate
revolutionary views.”
137
Similarly, Panukhina maintains that “bringing to trial a significant group
of women from privileged families arose everyone’s attention.”
138
Anna Hillyar and Jane
McDermid also suggest that “a great deal of publicity this trial received in Russia was due to the
high number of women involved (over 30 per cent).”
139
Likewise, Siljak examines how the
women on trial produced a furor among the “high-ranking Russian officials observing the
proceedings,” who “found themselves spellbound” and especially sympathetic to the female
defendants.
140
Given the fervor, publicity, and long-term impact of the trial, it is probably accurate to
assume that the appearance of women at the defendants’ table was one of the main factors that
elicited such strong public support for all the revolutionaries at the trial of the Fifty. What was it
about the women on trial that won them the compassion and sympathy of the public? According
to Engel, it was the virtue and selflessness of female defendants, praised by their lawyers for
giving up their “lives of wealth and comfort to live like workers,” that especially “impressed the
143; Hillyar, Revolutionary, 25-39; and Tim Chapman, Imperial Russia, 1801-1905 (London and New York:
Routledge, 2001), 115-18.
137
Engel, Mothers, 152.
138
“Привлечение к суду значительной группы женщин из привилегированных семей возбуждало всеобщее
внимание.” See Panukhina, “Protsess,” 47.
139
Hillyar, Revolutionary, 28.
140
Siljak, Angel, 201.
61
observers.”
141
Highlighting the impact of the defense’s speech, Engel suggests that the
aforementioned public exclamations – “they are saints!” – came after the attorneys’ mention
about the sacrifice of these women and, therefore, most likely referred to the female defendants.
In the end, Engel maintains that it was “the quality of their [women’s] participation, which
increased the movement’s legitimacy in the eyes of society, and so helped it gain support,
financing, and recruits.”
142
While seconding Engel’s assertion that “the women’s moral fervor, their ‘spiritual
beauty,’ earned populists the sympathy of a sector of the educated public,” the moral
magnanimity of the female defendants was probably not the only reason for the public’s
fascination with their actions.
143
In view of the attention traditionally paid to the women’s
physical appearance, the youth and physical attractiveness of the female defendants, mentioned
by many contemporaries, definitely played a role in soliciting a positive public opinion.
144
To
illustrate, the historian Ana Siljak describes the mesmerizing effect that “the attractive young
women” on trial had on many observers. According to Siljak,
141
Engel, Mothers, 153.
142
Ibid., 154-55. One of these recruits, Neonila Salova, wrote that female revolutionaries of the 1870s made “a
strong, deep impression, which had serious consequences for several of us. […] I have decided to follow the same
path as the women from the trial of the Fifty” [впечатление сильное, глубокое, имевшее для некоторых из нас
серьезные последствия. [...] Я решаю идти вслед за девушками из процесса 50, той же дорогой]. See N. M.
Salova, “Avtobiografiia,” vol. 40 of Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ Russkogo Bibliograficheskogo Instituta “Granat,”
ed. Iu. S. Gambarov et al., 7th ed. (Moscow: Redaktsiia i ekspeditsiia “Russkogo Bibliograficheskogo Instituta
Granat,” 1927), 398.
143
Engel, Mothers, 154.
144
Further support for this assertion is found in Rosenholm’s discussion of the importance of youth for the changing
perception of the feminine. According to Rosenholm, the male narrative of the 1860s aimed to portray the new
woman as “a daughter, young and full of faith in the egalitarian promises with the gaze directed into the future, still
equipped with fresh energy to redeem the pains required by self-control, by self-effacement.” See Rosenholm,
Gendering, 609.
62
One of the tsar’s adjutants went as far as to offer ten thousand rubles to assist in
the rescue of any of the female defendants in the trial. Another officer promised
Lidia Figner, a particularly beautiful defendant, anything she desired. Vera
Figner, Lidia’s sister, received nine hundred rubles through her lawyer from an
anonymous donor.
145
Based on the documented evidence of the public’s captivation by the physical appearance of the
female defendants, it is safe to assume that the cult of the female revolutionary grew out of the
public fascination with her corporeal as well as spiritual qualities – both corresponding to the
idealized perception of the Russian woman as young, beautiful, and self-sacrificial.
The Trial of the Fifty: Narrating Female Revolutionary Martyrdom
Whereas the mere appearance of the female defendants at the trial of the Fifty was
already likely to attract public attention, it was the elaborately constructed female revolutionary
narrative of innocence and martyrdom, presented by women and their attorneys, which created a
sensation and validated the new public role of women in the revolutionary movement. Fittingly,
the existing view of women as giving, sacrificial, and dedicated corresponded perfectly to the
popular concept of a committed and self-abnegating revolutionary. As such, the trial of the Fifty
not only transposed the accepted paradigm of male revolutionary martyrdom onto women, but
also infused traditional female religiosity with revolutionary undertones. With these two
narratives coming together in a public setting of a courtroom – that of a young idealistic woman
145
Siljak, Angel, 201.
63
and of an idealistic revolutionary hero – it was only logical that the trial of the Fifty became the
first public venue in constructing the concept of the martyr-heroine.
Another important narrative for this concept, which was brought into focus by the trial of
the Fifty, was its connection with the 1860s discourse of “the emancipated woman” (peredovaia
zhenshchina), of which the female defendants were the obvious products.
146
Refusing to define
themselves by family relationships, these women ventured into the public space by acting as
equal participants of the revolutionary movement, previously associated with men. This
experience of “autonomy” and “equality,” in turn, became a defining feature of the new woman
– the revolutionary martyr-heroines – who, to quote Zasulich, “achieved a good fortune seldom
attained in history: the possibility to act not in the capacity of inspirers, wives, and mothers of
men, but in complete independence as equals to men in all their social activities.”
147
146
Some of the main contributors to the discussion of the woman question were Pirogov, Mikhailov, Mikhailovskii,
Shelgunov, Pisarev, and Dobroliubov, to name just a few. See N. I. Pirogov, “Voprosy zhizni,” vol. 1 of
Sochineniia, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg, 1900), 1-44; M. L. Mikhailov, “Zhenschiny: ikh vospitanie i znachenie v sem’e
i obshchestve,” Sovremennik 4, 5, 8 (1860): 473-500, 89-106, 335-50; M. L. Mikhailov, “Zhenshchiny v
universitete,” Sovremennik 4 (1861): 499-507; N. Mikhailovskii, “Sofia Nikolaevna Belovodova: Piat’ glav iz
romana ‘Epizody iz zhizni Raiskogo,’ I. A. Goncharova (‘Sovremennik’ N. 2, fevral’ 1860 g.),” in Goncharov I. A. v
russkoi kritike: Sbornik statei (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1958), 184-95;
N. K. Mikhailovskii, “Muzhskoi vopros ili zhenskii?,” vol. 10 of Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. E. E. Kolosova,
2nd ed. (Saint-Petersburg: Tipografiia M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1913), 382-90; N. K. Mikhailovskii, “K zhenskomu
voprosu,” vol. 10 of Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. E. E. Kolosova, 2nd ed. (Saint-Petersburg: Tipografiia M. M.
Stasiulevicha, 1913), 390-99; N. V. Shelgunov, vol. 2 of Sochineniia (Saint-Petersburg: Izdanie russkoi knizhnoi
torgovli, 1871). Having introduced the woman question to the public in his pioneering article “Women, Their
Upbringing and Significance in Family and Society,” (“Zhenshchiny, ikh vospitanie i znachenie v sem’e i
obshchestve,” 1860), Mikhailov not only condemned the male victimization of women, but also laid the
philosophical foundation for women’s active contributions to society as civic subjects. For more on Mikhailov as the
founding father of the woman question, see Jennifer Lonergan, “M. L. Mikhailov and Russian Radical Ideas about
Women, 1847-1865” (PhD Diss., University of Bristol, 1995) and Richard Stites, “M. L. Mikhailov and the
Emergence of the Woman Question in Russia,” Canadian Slavic Studies 3, no. 2 (1969): 178-99. For more on the
woman question, see Arja Rosenholm, “The ‘Woman Question’ of the 1860s, and the Ambiguity of the ‘Learned
Woman’,” in Gender and Russian Literature: New Perspectives, ed. Rosalind Marsh (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 112-28 and I. I. Iukina, Istoriia zhenshchin Rossii. Zhenskoe dvizhenie i feminizm v 1850-
1920-e gody: Materialy k bibliografii (Saint-Petersburg: “Aleteiia,” 2003), 70-130.
147
Cited in R. A. Kovnator, ed., Stat’i o russkoi literature: V. I. Zasulich (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1960).
64
What Zasulich called “a good fortune” was, in fact, the realization of the emancipation
narrative of the 1860s, which not only informed the social activism of the female defendants, but
also provided a strong theoretical basis for their defense lawyers. Indeed, the accursed questions
of female rights, education, and equality became an important part of the defense strategy, which
present the female defendants not as an abomination, but as a natural outcome of the 1860s
discussions about women’s discrimination. By appropriating the main tenets of the woman
question for their defense line, the attorneys also established a legal precedent for defending
future female revolutionaries – a precedent that exposed the women’s inability to apply their
skills in Russian society through an appropriate legal channel and revealed the larger
ineffectiveness of traditional family roles for modern women.
148
The defense’s presentation of female defendants as male equals and public servants was
inadvertently reinforced by the prosecution, which indicted women as a part of a larger
revolutionary movement without any leniency for their gender or special consideration of their
traditional roles.
149
In its attempt to portray all the defendants, male or female, as endangering
the foundations of Russian society, the government compromised its own position on defending
the Russian patriarchal traditions because it refused to treat female and male defendants
differently during the trial. In other words, by using the same charges and legal procedures for all
the accused, the prosecution, in fact, supported the main principles of the emancipation narrative,
according to which women were to be handled on equal footing with men.
150
148
This defense line was successfully used by Zasulich’s attorney one year later. For more on specific examples of
the defense lawyers’ speeches, see Panukhina, “Protsess,” 49.
149
All the defendants were charged with an intention “to overthrow the existing order of rule and to place the
anarchic principles in Russian society” [задавшегося целью ниспровержения существующего порядка
управления и водворения анархических начал в русском обществе]. Ibid., 46.
150
The culmination of this legal trend happened during the fateful trial of 1881, in which Sofia Perovskaia received
not only the same charges but also the same punishment as the male defendants – a public execution by hanging.
65
The easiness, with which both the prosecutors and the defense were able to place women
into the roles, previously reserved for men, also revealed an important feature of the Russian
perception of the feminine – its latent subversive potential. Whereas the prosecutors viewed this
potential as a threat to the patriarchal order, the defense attorneys found its origins in this order’s
traditional perception of women as victims of circumstance. By contextualizing female political
activism as a contemporary expression of a woman’s domestic plight, the attorneys achieved a
nearly seamless transition from the patriarchal concept of the feminine into that of a modern
martyr-heroine. In so doing, they also implicated the patriarchal narrative as the true culprit
behind this transition and the harbinger of women’s transgressive impulses.
The fact that the defense’s attempt to translate the traditionally feminine qualities of
patience and suffering in a revolutionary context resonated well with the audience also indicated
the public awareness of the subversive nature of the Russian feminine. Further evidence of this
awareness is given by Rosenholm, who notes the presence of rebellious undertones in the
Russian cultural paradigm of female self-sacrifice, according to which women’s “active victim-
role, provided with pain and suffering, offers a synthesis to be redeemed in martyrdom.”
151
By
engaging this paradigm to justify women’s involvement in the revolutionary movement, the
defense once again demonstrated that female revolutionary activism was not an anomaly but a
modern expression of a Russian woman’s predilection for martyrdom, which, when used along
with the discourse of female victimization, successfully subverted the patriarchal narrative from
within.
151
Rosenholm, Gendering, 48-49.
66
What made this line of defense especially important for rationalizing female
revolutionary activism was its validation of a woman’s right to sacrifice her life for a cause other
than family. Indeed, the trial of the Fifty made an important public statement about the civic role
of women outside of family life by displaying living examples of women who redirected their
commitment from family to the commune.
152
The trial also provided female defendants with an
opportunity to be publicly recognized as a part of their new revolutionary “family” by presenting
a united front with their male counterparts to the prosecution:
Vladimir Alexandrov, Petr Alekseev and Sofia Bardina refused answering any
questions about their revolutionary activity. The judges’ attempt to isolate the
defendants from each other by dividing them into groups for the judicial
investigation was met with an energetic protest from the revolutionaries and their
defenders.
153
The projected image of unity and companionship from all the defendants reinforced the
already existing opposition between the revolutionaries and the state. Whereas the struggle
between these two antagonistic powers had always been perceived in binary terms, the female
defendants further exacerbated this gap by fully aligning themselves with the revolutionary
cause. Just like their male counterparts, these women refused all the prosecution charges as
152
According to Engel, the transition from family responsibilities to revolutionary duties was made easier by the fact
that the revolutionary group allowed female revolutionaries to “replace their emotional ties with the new ones based
on shared interests and ideals” and, as such, provided them with a new “surrogate family.” See Engel, Mothers, 120.
153
“Владимир Александров, Петр Алексеев и Софья Бардина отказались от каких бы то ни было ответов на
вопросы относительно их революционной деятельности. Попытка судей изолировать подсудимых друг от
друга, разделив их на группы для производства судебного следствия, натолкнулась на энергичный протест
революционеров и их защитников.” Cited in Panukhina, “Protsess,” 48.
67
“alien” to their intentions, “neither one of the accused pleaded guilty ‘in creating and
participating in an unlawful society’.”
154
In their unanimous rejection of the state accusations, the
female defendants not only showed their acceptance of the revolutionary movement, but also
increased the legitimacy of the movement in the public’s eyes.
Both aspects of this assertion – the dynamic opposition between the revolutionaries and
the government as well as the role of women in mediating this opposition – evoke important
Russian cultural phenomena discussed in the works of Lotman and Rosenholm. In his famous
study of the “one’s own”/“alien” (svoi/chuzhoi) binary, Lotman shows the significance of this
mechanism for “generating a sense of boundary in the individual’s social and cultural
construction of the world” and for negotiating “intersections with other cultural structures” in
Russian society.
155
In view of the strong ideological and cultural boundaries between the
prosecution and the defense at the Trial of the Fifty, Lotman’s theory is particularly relevant for
approaching female defendants as the intermediaries, who “internalize” the revolutionary culture
for the public by “externalizing” the traditional values protected by the state.
While Lotman’s work does not explicitly discuss the role of gender in this process,
Rosenholm’s study, on the other hand, fills this gap by examining the Russian perception of the
feminine as a symbol of cultural change. Based on Rosenholm’s discussion of women as “a site
of cultural meanings” and “an object of masculine economy of exchange,” the revolutionary
martyr-heroine appears to be a likely catalyst for redrawing the boundaries between the familial
154
“ни один из обвиняемых не признал себя виновным ‘в составлении и участии в противозаконном
сообществе’.” Ibid.
155
Wilma Clark, preface to Culture and Explosion, by Juri Lotman, ed. Marina Grishakova, trans. Wilma Clark
(Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009), xi and Juri Lotman, Culture and Explosion, ed. Marina Grishakova, trans.
Wilma Clark (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009), 133.
68
and revolutionary cultures.
156
Whereas the mediating ability of revolutionary women is not the
subject of Rosenholm’s study, the martyr-heroine does, in fact, emerge as an ultimate
manifestation of what Rosenholm more generally refers to as “a cultural sign invoked to encode
cultural, political, and economic meanings given by the new hero” – in this case, the male
revolutionary.
157
The perception of the martyr-heroine as the negotiator of cultural values may help to
explain the public furor created by the female defendants at the trial of the Fifty. Successfully
“encoded” by the revolutionary ideals, these women were not only the spokespeople of the
movement, but also the proof of its validity. By endorsing the values of the revolutionary culture
as “their own” and rejecting the state’s principles as “alien,” revolutionary women further
confirmed their ability to mediate between external and internal systems of values. The fact that
this ability, in turn, received support and sympathy from the public served as yet another proof of
the crucial role that the martyr-heroine were to play in rewriting Russia’s cultural narrative.
Whereas a woman’s function as a cultural mediator and an ethical arbiter did contribute
to the myth of female revolutionaries as superior moral beings, the price for this position of
symbolic importance was also high. In order to provide full support to the revolutionary
movement, the female defendants had to “subordinate personal life almost entirely to political
ends” by “subsuming their own cause into the broader revolutionary movement.”
158
While this
sacrificial behavior promoted women’s prestige in the movement and legitimized their active
156
Rosenholm, Gendering, 18, 103.
157
Ibid., 132.
158
See Engel, Mothers, 87, 101. Engel demonstrates that in their fight against social injustice, “some [women]
renounced not only their families of origin and the educational goals that had prompted their rebellion in the first
place, but also sexuality and personal life.” Ibid., 5.
69
role outside of family relationships, it also trapped them into an iconic image of perfection, often
at the expense of their individuality and independence.
159
Therefore, while at first glance the
martyr-heroines of the trial of the Fifty appeared to have departed from their traditional roles of
wives and mothers, their original orientation towards sacrifice did not change, corroborating a
famous Russian proverb that “everything new is well-forgotten old” (vse novoe – khorosho
zabytoe staroe).
The Case of Sofia Bardina
Whereas the full realization of the concept of the martyr-heroine occurred after the trial
of the Fifty with the appearance of such famous revolutionary icons as Zasulich and Perovskaia,
it was their less known predecessor from the trial of the Fifty, Sofia Bardina, who for the first
time publicly articulated her commitment to the movement and expressed her view of the
modern concept of the feminine as grounded in social activism. In her courtroom speech,
frequently quoted after the trial in the Russian media and also published abroad, Bardina made
several important pronouncements about the woman’s role in history, in the public sphere, in the
revolutionary movement, and in Russia’s cultural space.
160
These pronouncements deserve a
separate mention because they show the mechanism behind the construction of the narrative of
159
For more on the mythologization of revolutionary women, see Lynne Hartnett, “The Making;” Marie Claude
Burnet-Vigniel, Femmes russes dans le combat revolutionnaire: L’image et son modèle à la fin de XIXe siecle
(Paris: Institut d’etudes slaves, 1990); A. I. Ivanchin-Pisarev, Khozhdenie v narod (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardia,
1929).
160
Bardina’s speech was published in the European-based Russian revolutionary journal Vpered!. See Van
Schooneveld, ed., vol. 5 of Vpered! Neperiodicheskoe obozrenie (London: Nabornia “Vpered,” 1877; repr., The
Hague-Paris: Mouton, 1970): 36-41; 167-69. The importance of Bardina’s speech is further illustrated by the fact
that the Serbian translator of Turgenev’s political novel Virgin Soil (Nov’, 1877) used it as a preface to the novel.
See A. Amfiteatrov, Zhenshchina v obshchestvennykh dvizheniiakh Rossii (Saint-Petersburg: Knigoizdatel’stvo
zhivoe slovo, 1907), 52.
70
the martyr-heroine as well as illustrate the importance of this narrative for the changing
perception of women.
The first and most striking feature of Bardina’s speech was the way she identified with
her fellow revolutionaries by asking the judges not to view her as a separate individual but as an
element of a larger movement and an instrument of history:
I am not asking you for mercy, I do not wish for it, I am convinced that the day
will come when even our sleepy and lazy society wakes up and is ashamed that it
has so long allowed to trample itself underfoot with impunity, to tear out from
itself its brothers, sisters, and daughters, and to destroy them only for a free
confession of their beliefs […]. Persecute us, behind you is still the material force,
gentlemen, but behind us is the moral force, the force of the historical progress,
the force of an idea, and the ideas – alas! – are not caught on bayonets.
161
In his assessment of Bardina’s speech, Stepniak-Kravchinsky calls it “a property of history,” “the
uppermost point of the trial of the Fifty,” and even “an epoch in the history of our revolutionary
movement.”
162
The fact that both Bardina’s speech and Stepniak-Kravchinsky’s assessment of it
161
“Я не прошу у вас милосердия, я не желаю его, я убеждена, что наступит день, когда даже и наше сонное
и ленивое общество проснется и стыдно ему станет, что оно так долго позволяло безнаказанно топтать себя
ногами, вырывать у себя своих братьев, сестер и дочерей и губить их за одну только свободную исповедь их
убеждений […]. Преследуйте нас, за вами пока материальная сила, господа, но за нами сила нравственная,
сила исторического прогресса, сила идеи, а идеи — увы! — на штыки не улавливаются.” See S. I. Bardina,
“Rech’ Sofi’i Illarionovny Bardinoi,” in Zhenshchiny v protsesse 50-ti, ed. A. Ul’ianovskii (Saint-Petersburg:
Izdatel’stvo O. N. Popovoi, 1906), 50; my translation.
162
“достояние истории,” “кульминационный пункт,” “эпоха в истории нашего революционного движения.”
See S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinsky, “S. I. Bardina,” in Zhenshchiny v protsesse 50-ti, ed. A. Ul’ianovskii (Saint-
Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo O. N. Popovoi, 1906), 37-38; my translation.
71
repeatedly evoke the notion of “history” (istoriia) is important because it characterizes the
concept of the revolutionary martyr-heroine as not only socially valuable, but also historically
visible. Indeed, after Bardina’s speech, the educated public had no choice but to recognize
Bardina – and by proxy other revolutionary women – as active contributors to the forces of
history and agents of historical change.
163
In order to position herself as such, Bardina used a clever comparison by describing her
actions as exemplary of “moral and historical force.” The combination of these two adjectives
enabled the listeners to perceive the revolutionary movement as a carrier of “moral force,” while
also equating “morality” with historical progress. Since the women’s self-fashioning as moral
guides was already familiar to the audience, by further engaging this model, Bardina was able to
present a new, historically active role for women as a natural outcome. As a result of redirecting
“morality” from the habitually feminine family space to the public sphere of political activism,
Bardina also demonstrated a larger, historical dimension of traditional feminine virtues.
Moreover, by addressing her individual cause as “ours,” she further aligned herself – and by
proxy other female revolutionaries – with revolutionary ideas as symbolic of the progressive
forces of history. In the end, Bardina’s crafty inscription of self into the historical progress both
challenged the traditional perception of women as family-oriented and extended the female
influence beyond the domestic sphere.
163
Notably, in her examination of the woman question of the 1860s, Rosenholm argues that the male authors of the
female emancipation narrative purposefully present women as lacking history: “In the common dramaturgy created
for the woman question of the 1860s, the woman question serves as the Great Urscene throwing women out from
beneath their dark setting onto the enlightened stage of history […]. The tabula rasa, the very ‘start’ of women’s
history, makes an end of women’s cultural inheritance, their historical traces are covered behind the new ‘dawn’ of
enlightened male saviours.” See Rosenholm, Gendering, 37, 39. Building upon Rosenholm’s argument, I suggest
that a woman’s “entrance” into history, theoretically explored by the male authors of the woman question in the
1860s, receives its practical realization through the female revolutionaries of the 1870s. In this case, Bardina’s
speech at the trial of the Fifty is both – the woman’s entrance ticket into the public sphere of Russian political life
and the way of “inscribing women into the male history,” namely the history of the revolution. See Rosenholm,
Gendering, 38-39.
72
On the other hand, by virtue of being a female, Bardina inadvertently gendered her own
revolutionary narrative as exemplary feminine. For example, by rejecting a special treatment
because of her gender, Bardina, in fact, reinforced the traditional perception of women as
righteous and sacrificial. Likewise, the religious undertones of Bardina’s speech, reflected in
such phrases as “the free confession of our beliefs” (svobodnuiu ispoved’ nashikh ubezhdenii)
and “moral strength” (nravstvennaia sila) further sustained the established view of women as
highly spiritual. Further evidence for this view is found in a passage where Bardina makes an
explicit parallel between her socialist ideals and Christianity:
As it relates to religion, I can only say that I was always faithful to its spirit and
its vital principles in that pure way of theirs, in which they were preached by the
very founder of Christianity.
164
Having refused to accept the state’s accusations of subverting religious values, Bardina did not
come off to the public as someone radical, dangerous, or completely unfamiliar. On the contrary,
she managed to preserve all the traditional features of the ideal Russian woman, namely her
religious, giving, sacrificial, committed, and principled nature, by dressing them in a new
revolutionary disguise – that of a woman “devot[ed] to the ‘cause,’ high and moral, in the service
of others.”
165
164
“Относительно религии я могу сказать только, что я всегда оставалась верна ея духу и существенным ея
принципам в том их чистом виде, в каком они проповедовались самим основателем христианства.” See
Bardina, “Rech’,” 47.
165
Rosenholm, Gendering, 608.
73
The ability to synthesize the modern revolutionary cause with a more familiar narrative
of female religiosity not only facilitated Bardina’s entrance into the public sphere, but also made
her speech a model for her female followers.
166
A spokesperson for both the movement and her
gender in the movement, Bardina provided a conclusive example of how to act and what to say
for any other female defendant charged with a political crime. Likewise, by introducing high
standards of behavior, Bardina also set the expectations of the principled conduct for future
female revolutionaries. As would be seen from the subsequent trials, Bardina’s first public
performance as a self-abnegating supporter of the cause was indeed instrumental not only in
influencing the public perception of the revolutionary martyr-heroine as sacrificial, but also in
shaping the heroic pathos of the later testimonials by Zasulich and Perovskaia.
Notably, the exemplary purpose of Bardina’s speech was neither arbitrary not
unintentional. Given that most of the defendants had agreed on their behavior and speeches
before the trial, it was likely that Bardina’s objective to present herself as a part of a larger
collective was, in fact, approved by the other revolutionaries as an appropriate female model.
167
Indeed, according to Panukhina, both the choice of Bardina as a speaker and the structure of her
speech were elaborately planned:
166
Stepniak-Kravchinsky states that Bardina “represents the first brave challenge, publicly thrown in the face of the
government” [Она представляет первый смелый вызов, публично брошенный в лицо правительству]. See
Stepniak-Kravchinsky, “S. I. Bardina,” 37-38.
167
Panukhina notes that “after familiarizing themselves with the indictment, the majority of the defendants agreed
on their behavior in court. […] The defendants and the defense attorneys agreed on their line of action long before
the court date” [После ознакомления с обвинительным актом большинство подсудимых договорились о
своем поведении на суде. […] Подсудимые и защитники согласовали свою линию поведения задолго до
суда]. See Panukhina, “Protsess,” 47.
74
The orators were not chosen by accident. They represented different social groups
that were acting in close contact inside the “All-Russian Social-Revolutionary
Organization.” On behalf of the workers, Petr Alekseev had to speak. On behalf
of the populist intelligentsia – S. Bardina.
168
While Panukhina did not mention gender as a possible factor that made Bardina one of the
speakers, it was not by chance that the accused had decided to choose a woman as a
spokesperson for the populist intelligentsia. In view of the defendants’ goal to use the trial “for
the propaganda of the ideological-political views of the revolutionary ‘people of mixed ranks’
(raznochintsy),” Bardina was seen as an exceptionally effective mechanism of this propaganda
because she represented not one but two groups, i.e. the populist intelligentsia and women.
169
This assertion is further supported by Stepniak-Kravchinsky who noted that “such words
[Bardina’s speech], for the first time pronounced within the walls of the Russian court, and what
is more – by a woman, must have had an astounding affect.”
170
While praising Bardina’s speech
for its revolutionary content, Stepniak-Kravchinsky especially highlighted the powerful impact
of its ethical aspect, “but what, perhaps, is even more important is the other side of Bardina’s
speech, namely the moral side.”
171
Once again emphasizing the connection between women and
168
“Ораторы были выбраны не случайно. Они представляли различные социальные группы, действующие в
тесном контакте во ‘Всероссийской социально-революционной организации’. От имени рабочих должен
был выступить Петр Алексеев. От лица народнической интеллигенции - С. Бардина.” Ibid.
169
“[…] для пропаганды идейно-политических взглядов революционных разночинцев.” Ibid.
170
“Подобные слова, впервые произнесенные в стенах русского суда, да еще женщиною, должны были
произвести потрясающее действие.” See Stepniak-Kravchinsky, “S. I. Bardina,” 38.
171
“Но едва ли не большее значение имеет речь Бардиной с другой стороны, а именно со стороны
нравственной.” Ibid., 37.
75
morality, Stepniak-Kravchinsky went as far as to claim that the role of Bardina and other female
defendants was not only to impress, but, in fact, to infect the public with their personal
commitment to socialist ideology:
The mass, the crowd is able to be animated by them [ideas] only when a specific
fact or a personality that embodies this idea excites their moral sense and
imagination. This role specifically fell to Moscow women, among whom the
brightest performance was by Bardina.
172
By highlighting Bardina’s and the overall women’s ability to provoke the audience’s “moral
feeling” (nravstvennoe chuvstvo) and “imagination” (fantaziia), Stepniak-Kravchinsky provided
yet another proof of the revolutionaries’ awareness of the traditional narrative of female
righteousness and their conscious decision to exploit it as a powerful propaganda tool. Not only
did Bardina’s “passionate speech at the end of the trial” win her and the other women “the
attention and sympathy of the Russian public,” but it also meant to contribute to a stronger
feeling of public support towards the larger organization that she was a part of.
173
Further proof for the long-term influence of Bardina’s pioneering speech is found in the
many accolades that it received after the trial. For example, the European-based Russian political
journal “Forward” (“Vpered,” 1877) praised Bardina’s speech for its successful summary of the
Socialist program and, in so doing, endorsed her ideological contribution to the movement:
172
“Масса, толпа способна одушевиться ими [идеями] только тогда, когда конкретный факт или личность,
воплотившие эту идею, взволнуют их нравственное чувство и фантазию. Такая роль выпала на долю именно
московским женщинам, среди которых ярче всех выступила Бардина.” See Stepniak-Kravchinsky, “S. I.
Bardina,” 38.
173
Hillyar and McDermid, Revolutionary, 29.
76
Bardina’s speech represents in a concise form the complete program of the Socialist
Party. In short but sharp and clear terms, she expressed what the Russian socialists should
reach for and which way they should follow.
174
Eight years later, Stepniak-Kravchinsky used very similar language to commend Bardina’s
speech for its political message and rhetorical eloquence:
The ideas and the aspirations of the Russian socialist party – regardless of what it
had been at the time – were never, neither before nor after, formulated with such
accuracy, clarity, and strict logic as it was done by Bardina.
175
The fact that both passages focused on the conceptual merits of Bardina’s speech rather than her
gender, suggested that after the trial of the Fifty the fates of the revolutionary movement and
women became officially intertwined and their narratives - forever linked in the perception of the
public. No longer defined by familial relationships, the female defendants and, especially
Bardina, laid the foundation for the new cultural female type – the revolutionary martyr-heroine
– whose commitment to civic service, public activism, and moral leadership, in turn, became an
integral part of the modern concept of the Russian feminine.
174
“Речь Бардиной представляет в сжатой форме полную программу социалистической партии. В коротких,
но резких и ясных выражениях она высказала, чего должны добиваться русские социалисты и каким путем
должны они следовать.” See Schooneveld, ed., Vpered! Neperiodicheskoe obozrenie, 150.
175
“Идеи и стремления русской социалистической партии — какою она была в тот период — никогда, ни
прежде, ни после, не были формулированы с такой верностью, ясностью и строгой логикой, как это сделала
Бардина.” See Stepniak-Kravchinsky, “S. I. Bardina,” 37.
77
Section II
Zasulich was not a Terrorist. She was the angel of vengeance, and not of terror.
176
—Stepniak-Kravchinsky, Underground Russia
Accept from us a tribute of revered awe, the Russian girl with a soul of a hero,
and the descendants will rank your name among the few bright names of the
martyrs for freedom and human rights. The name of this girl is Vera Ivanovna
Zasulich.
177
—Anonymous
It is impossible to convict her, and punishment is uncalled-for, superfluous; but
say to her something like this: “Go, but do not do that again.” But such a judicial
formula, it would seem, we do not possess, and worst of all, she will now be
elevated into a heroine.
178
—Dostoevsky
The Case of Vera Zasulich
The notion of the martyr-heroine underwent a new stage in 1878 when the revolutionary
Vera Zasulich “had attempted to kill the governor-general of St. Petersburg [Trepov] for flogging
a populist prisoner [Bogoliubov].”
179
Notwithstanding the importance of the trial of the Fifty, the
case of Zasulich became an even larger event in the history of the public support for Russian
female revolutionaries. A major step in the development of Russian radicalism, this trial “excited
public sympathy for terrorists because it legitimized terrorism as a means of opposing autocracy”
and “ended with an acquittal which almost all Russia applauded.”
180
To illustrate, in an oft-told
176
Stepniak-Kravchinsky, Underground, 36.
177
“Прими же от нас дань нашего благоговейного удивления, русская девушка с душою героя, а потомство
причислит твое имя к числу немногих светлых имен мучеников за свободу и права человека. Имя этой
девушки - Вера Ивановна Засулич.” Cited in Nevskii, ed., Istoriko-revoliutsionnyi, 336.
178
Cited in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 (Princeton: Princeton University Press
2002), 375. For the original quote in Russian, see F. M. Dostoevsky, “Dnevnik pisatelia 1881. Avtobiograficheskoe.
Dubia,” vol. 27 of Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Nauka, 1984), 341.
179
Boniece, “The Spiridonova,” 579.
180
Boniece, “The Spiridonova,” 579 and Samuel Kucherov, “The Case of Vera Zasulich,” Russian Review 11, no. 2
(1952): 96.
78
story, an old general, otherwise an unlikely candidate for praising an attack on another governor-
general, complemented Zasulich’s heroism at the dinner party, “Vera Zasulich was nothing less
than a model of feminine bravery and self-sacrifice.”
181
In a similar instance, a contemporary
reactionary, prince Meshchersky, despite being shocked by Zasulich’s release, also had to admit
that “up to the highest circles of hierarchy, including the Senate and the State Council, the
verdict of acquittal, which honored Vera Zasulich, was accepted by some with loud transports,
by others with quiet approval, and by almost everyone with sympathy.”
182
One of the main reasons behind the overwhelming support for Zasulich was the public’s
intense dislike of her victim Trepov and its indignation about Trepov’s order of corporal
punishment against Bogoliubov for not taking off his cap in the governor’s presence. Further
evidence of this dislike is given by Siljak who argues that “among ordinary Russians, sympathy
for Vera was still greater” because the public saw “her victim [Trepov] as nothing more than a
government official, most likely, a ‘thief’ and a ‘bloodsucker’.”
183
This perception was also
reinforced by the fact that “almost all forms of corporal punishment were abolished by the
reform of 1863,” making Bogoliubov’s punishment all the more “shocking because it had
become so rare.”
184
Given that Bogoliubov was also an educated man, his flogging appeared to
be even more unacceptable and arbitrary, which, in turn, solidified the public view of Trepov as
181
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii, fond 109, Serkretnyi arkhiv III-ego otdeleniia, opis 1, delo 717, list
3. Cited in Siljak, Angel, 10.
182
Cited in Kucherov, “The Case,” 94. For the original quote in Russian, see V. P. Meshchersky, vol. 2 of Moi
vospominaniia (Saint-Petersburg: Tipografiia kniazia V. P. Meshcherskogo, 1898), 410.
183
Siljak, Angel, 10.
184
Ibid., 183-82.
79
a despot and a true representative of “a retrograde, hardened, and ultimately blood-thirsty
regime.”
185
Since Trepov’s decision to flog Bogoliubov produced such outrage, it was only natural
that Zasulich’s subsequent resolve to punish Trepov was welcomed not only by her revolutionary
friends, but also by the majority of the Russian public, including the jury, who voted for her
acquittal. Even the judge presiding over Zasulich’s trial, Anatolii Koni, later contended that the
true blame for the subsequent flourishing of terrorism did not lie with Zasulich’s shot but with
Trepov’s flogging of Bogoliubov:
Not from the trial of Zasulich, as thought by the short-sighted and stupid
politicians, but from the flogging of Bogoliubov should one consider the
beginning of the emergence of the terrorist doctrine among our ‘illegal’ youth.
186
In line with Koni, most historians have since agreed that Trepov’s abusive conduct had long-
term consequences and “set off a chain of reactions that were now impossible to contain” – the
first and the main reaction, naturally, being Zasulich’s infamous act of vengeance.
187
185
Ibid., 183. For more on the prison riots in the aftermath of Bogoliubov’s flogging, see Siljak, Angel, 183-86.
186
“Не с процесса Засулич, как думают близорукие и тупоумные политики, а с сечения Боголюбова надо
считать начало возникновения террористической доктрины среди нашей ‘нелегальной’ молодежи.” See A. F.
Koni, Vospominaniia o dele Very Zasulich, ed. M. F. Teodorovich (Moscow-Leningrad: Academia, 1933), 45.
187
Siljak, Angel, 186. For more on the Zasulich affair, see Rita Mae Cawley Kelly, “The Role of Vera Ivanovna
Zasulich in the Development of the Russian Revolutionary Movement” (PhD Diss., Indiana University, 1967);
Margaret Maxwell, Narodniki Women: Russian Women Who Sacrificed Themselves for the Dream of Freedom (New
York: Pergamon Press, 1990), 3-49; Richard Piper, “The Trial of Vera Zasulich,” Russian History 37, no. 1 (2010):
1-82; Stephan Rindlisbacher, Leben für die Sache: Vera Figner, Vera Zasulič und das radikale Milieu im späten
Zarenreich (Wiesdaben: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014); and Iu. S. Karpilenko, “Delo” Very Zasulich: Rossiiskoe
obshchestvo, samoderzhavie i sud prisiazhnykh v 1878 godu, 2nd ed. (Briansk: Izdatel’stvo Brianskogo
gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta, 1995).
80
Whereas the importance of this act for the Russian revolutionary movement has become a
commonplace fact in contemporary Slavic scholarship, its contributions to the emerging concept
of the modern Russian feminine are somewhat less obvious. How did Zasulich challenge or
confirm traditional stereotypes about women, in general, and revolutionary women, in particular?
What role did she play in the development of the notion of the martyr-heroine? In which ways
did Zasulich’s trial, in turn, make her into a “progenitor (rodonachal’nitsa) of the terrorist
struggle in Russia” and a model for both genders to emulate?
188
These questions propose to
examine the case of Zasulich as a bridge between the preceding and subsequent revolutionary
women and a mediator between various perceptions of the feminine. Most importantly, they also
allow one to approach Zasulich’s story not as a factual biography, but as a constructed narrative
of the martyr-heroine created by her lawyer Peter Alexandrov.
189
In the Footsteps of Bardina
Before discussing the mechanisms behind the creation of this narrative, one should
investigate Zasulich’s place in a larger context of revolutionary women, in particular next to the
female defendants from the trial of the Fifty. Similar to her revolutionary predecessors, Zasulich
attracted a lot of attention by virtue of her gender and age. The press in Russia and abroad
“fueled an intense interest in the young woman who had gone to such great lengths to conceal
her identity and had managed to hide a pistol under her shawl.”
190
According to Siljak, the story
188
Lev Deich, “Valerian Osinskii (K 50-letiui ego kazni),” Katorga i ssylka 54 (1929): 27.
189
I refer to Petr Aleksandrov as Peter Alexandrov to maintain consistency with most English-speaking scholars that
I cite in this section.
190
Siljak, Angel, 10. For more on how female revolutionaries, such as Zasulich, Figner, and Spiridonova, used
female clothes and accessories as a means of disguise and self-fashioning, see Lynn Patyk, “Dressed to Kill and Die:
Russian Revolutionary Terrorism, Gender, and Dress,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 58, no. 2 (2010):
192-209.
81
of a young female assassin became the “topic of the winter season within the highest social
circles” and “seemed to have all of the elements of the first installment of a serialized
Dostoevsky’s novel.”
191
Similarly, the historian Richard Piper noted that “the Zasulich trial for a
while became a worldwide sensation, overshadowing all other news.”
192
Because of public
fascination with her youth and gender, Zasulich was frequently compared to such legendary
historical heroines as Charlotte Corday and Joan of Arc and became recognized as yet another
symbol of revolutionary justice – in this case, a Russian one.
While the exalted view of Zasulich in Russia was strongly informed by the positive
impression made by the women from the trial of the Fifty, Zasulich added a fundamentally
different dimension to the earlier notion of a sacrificial revolutionary propagandist – that of a
“martyr-avenger.”
193
In contrast to her predecessors’ peaceful collaborative activities, Zasulich’s
solo performance and her unique status of an assassin contributed to her stronger popularity and
made her rather than Bardina the face of the Russian revolutionary movement and its terrorist
path. Indeed, whereas in 1877 Bardina had still defined her revolutionary mission as peaceful, “I,
gentlemen, belong to the type of people who are known among the youth under the name of
peaceful propagandists,” only several months later in 1878 Zasulich put the terrorist option on
the table, “It is frightening to raise one’s hand against another human being, but I felt that I had
191
Siljak, Angel, 10.
192
Piper, “The Trial,” 1.
193
Donna Oliver explains that “a martyr-avenger” is “a woman, whose consciousness was so alert to the acts of
injustice that she was simply unable to sit back idly and let them go unpunished.” See Donna Oliver, “Fool or Saint?
Writers Reading the Zasulich Case,” in Just Assassins: The Culture of Terrorism in Russia, ed. Anthony Anemone
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 74.
82
to do it.”
194
The fact that Zasulich claimed to have raised her hand not against a particular
person, Trepov, but against a larger idea of a “human being” (chelovek), suggested an important
change in the traditional perception of the feminine as nurturing and life-giving. Likewise,
Zasulich’s description of her deed as a personal duty – as opposed to Bardina’s depiction of her
actions as a group project – also indicated the ongoing transformation towards a more assertive
and independent version of the martyr-heroine.
Given that the transformation from talk to violence occurred in less than year, it was not
surprising that many might have seen it not as a radical anomaly but as a natural outcome:
After years of enduring the mute indifference of ordinary Russians, radicals at last
saw sign of awakening. Society had condemned the arbitrary rule of the Russian
regime and had embraced Vera and her vigilante act. It was a glorious moment, a
turning point that would lead to the inevitable collapse of the existing Russian
system.
195
The overwhelming public support for Zasulich’s act further attested to the eagerness and,
perhaps, willingness of Russian society to embrace a new form of female activism – that of
violence for a moral cause. What further contributed to this approval was a carefully constructed
194
“Я, господа, принадлежу к разряду тех людей, которые между молодежью известны под именем мирных
пропагандистов.” See Bardina, “Rech’,” 48-49. “Страшно поднять руку на человека, но я находила, что
должна это сделать.” See G. A. Gallanin, ed., Protsess Very Zasulich: sud i posle suda (Saint-Petersburg: Tipo-
Litografiia M. S. Muller, 1905), 48; my translation. Dostoevsky finds Zasulich’s hesitation especially important, “‘It
is difficult to raise one’s hand to spill blood,’ – this vacillation was more moral that the actual spilling of blood”
[Тяжело поднять руку пролить кровь, - это колебание было нравственнее, чем само пролитие крови]. See
Dostoevsky, “Dnevnik,” 57; my translation.
195
Siljak, Angel, 262.
83
narrative, in which Zasulich was portrayed as a victimized martyr-heroine rather than a
victimizer and, without which, her vigilante act would not have likely produced such resonance.
If one were to accept the importance of this narrative for winning Zasulich the sympathy of the
public, then the next objective would be to examine how its main components, such as female
agency, violence, and sacrifice for the public cause, have informed the legend of the martyr-
heroine and, by proxy, the modern concept of the Russian feminine.
Zasulich and the Rise of Female Agency
Known as “the first in history: a noble terrorist, a female assassin, a radical heroine,”
Zasulich was also one of the first revolutionary women to make female agency a significant part
of the changing perception of the feminine in the late 1870s.
196
Zasulich’s contribution to this
perception is best illustrated by Siljak’s mention of Russia’s ‘awakening’ in reaction to her shot.
Whereas the metaphor of ‘awakening’ had previously been used by the proponents of the woman
question in the 1860s, by 1878 it was no longer male critics and writers who were supposed to
rouse a dormant Russian woman into action. Instead, it was a woman, the revolutionary assassin
Zasulich, who was heralded as the one in charge of awakening Russian society from its civic
slumber.
197
Given the importance and the continuous use of the ‘awakening’ metaphor in late
nineteenth-century Russian discourse about gender dynamics, two questions arise – first, how
does one map the journey from men awakening women to the whole society being awoken by
women? And, second, what does this journey tell us about the women’s transformation from the
196
Ibid., 263.
197
A telling example of how the “awakening” metaphor is used in the 1860s is found on the front page of the
women’s journal Rassvet (The Dawn, 1859), in which a woman is shown as being awoken by a God resembling
Apollo. See Barbara Heldt, “Rassvet (1859-1862) and the Woman Question,” Slavic Review 36, no. 1 (1977): 76-85
and Rosenholm, Gendering, 1-8.
84
presumed object of the male emancipation project of the 1860s into the subject of the
revolutionary narrative of the 1870s?
Most contemporary scholarship examines the ‘awakening’ metaphor as evidence that
Russian male thinkers believed in their intellectual superiority over women. To illustrate, the
historian Stites emphasizes the role of male agency in the “female awakening” of the 1860s by
arguing that “one feature of the period – one that no woman reader will have missed – was that
the propagation of women’s emancipation was done exclusively by men.”
198
In concord with
Stites, Rosenholm also mentions the “Pygmalion focus” of the 1860s male discourse about
women. In her interpretation, the male critics of the 1860s viewed “femininity as an elastic form
to be filled with the enlightened, but male spirit” and perceived “the female allegory as Russia –
to be transformed, rescued, utilized.”
199
In conclusion, Rosenholm maintains that the woman
question first and foremost served male interests because it “presented men in a privileged
position as awakeners elevating women from their cultural inferiority onto the stage of historical
consciousness.”
200
While Rosenholm’s discussion about the lack of a feminine voice in a male-framed
emancipation discourse of the 1860s offers a compelling argument, her emphasis on the men’s
appropriation of the woman question for their own “psychological self-testing” obscures the
positive impact of the woman question on the development of female agency.
201
Furthermore,
Rosenholm’s framing of the 1860s discussion as a master plot, devised by male intellectuals to
198
Stites, The Women’s, 48.
199
Rosenholm, Gendering, 101.
200
Ibid., 593.
201
Ibid., 117-18.
85
control the direction of women’s education, also downplays a woman’s ability to use her own
agency independently of the male narrative. In fact, Rosenholm often appears to be doing exactly
what she criticizes the authors of the woman question for, as she is using the woman question to
illustrate the male rather than the female concerns of the time.
Without denying the larger male ownership of the female emancipation narrative of the
1860s, I suggest that the main focus of this narrative is not simply to create female agency from
scratch, but to unleash it from within by awakening women from their traditional patriarchal
roles into a civic subject. As stated in the liberal journal Rassvet in 1859:
Finally, at the dawn of the new day for Russia, a genius is flying up to a sleeping
Russian woman, showing her the path that she should take in order to become a
citizen and prepare herself for a high duty, – to be an educator of a new, resurgent
generation.
202
On the one hand, this paragraph portrays a Russian woman as an object, which is to take orders
from a presumably male author. On the other hand, it also evokes an important parallel between
the future of Russia and the future of women – a parallel, according to which both are awoken at
the dawn of a new day and which invests a sleeping woman, rather than a man, with power and
agency to change the destiny of Russia.
Indeed, the fact that the Russian woman is described not simply as a vessel to absorb
male intellectual endeavors, but as an educator in her own right, indicates that she harbors more
202
“Наконец, на рассвете нового дня для России, подлетает гений к спящей русской женщине, указывая на
тот путь, по которому она должна идти, чтобы сделаться гражданкою и приготовить себя к высокому долгу,
- быть воспитательницею нового, возрождающегося поколения.” Cited in Rosenholm, Gendering, 88; my
translation.
86
agency than meets the eye. The mention of a woman’s educational function further suggests that
it is not only a Russian woman who is supposed to be saved by a male intellectual, but also a
male intellectual who expects to be saved by the Russian woman in the long run. Given that The
Dawn does not call for the ‘birth’ but for the ‘awakening’ of the Russian woman, this woman
appears to be neither a tabula rasa, nor raw material for Russian Pygmalions. Therefore, while it
is true that the ‘awakening’ metaphor is a male-authored project, its acknowledgment of women
as subjects with their own, albeit dormant, agency challenges the accepted perception of the
1860s emancipation narrative as condescending and controlling.
Serving as a link between the two perceptions of female agency as still ‘asleep’ and fully
‘awoken,’ Zasulich brought the 1860s ‘awakening’ metaphor to its logical conclusion. As a
woman ‘awoken’ to action, Zasulich appeared to be an actual realization of the 1860s discourse
about the New Woman, who was supposed to be educated in the direction of “new moral
maximalism, grounded on female self-sacrifice.”
203
As a woman awakening the public to action,
Zasulich, on the other hand, became yet another famous female figure in the history of Russia to
serve as a catalyst of change, demonstrating that the manifestations of female agency in Russia
went before and beyond the 1860s discussion.
204
Therefore, while the force directing Zasulich’s
actions might have belonged to the authors and supporters of the emancipation narrative of the
1860s, the hand that fired the shot was distinctly her own.
203
Rosenhilm, Gendering, 609.
204
For more on the famous female figures who changed the history of Russia and influenced Russian culture, see
Barbara Clements, A History of Women in Russia: From Earliest Times to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2012); Natalia Pushkareva, Women in Russian History: From the Tenth to the Twentieth Century,
trans. Eve Levin (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1997); Toby Clyman and Diana Greene, eds., Women Writers in Russian
Literature (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994); Catriona Kelly, A History of Women’s Writing, 1820-1992 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1994); and Adele Marie Barker and Jehanne Gheith, eds., A History of Women’s Writing in Russia
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
87
Zasulich and Female Violence
Zasulich’s exercise of her agency was all the more remarkable because it was
transgressive. Given the violent nature of Zasulich’s act, two questions arise – was spilling blood
a necessary prerequisite for Russian society to awaken and if so, was the gender of the
perpetrator a significant factor in this awakening? The short answer is yes. Standing half way
between her propagandist predecessor Bardina and her terrorist successor Perovskaia, Zasulich
represented a particularly interesting transition from a peaceful word to a violent deed. On the
one hand, Zasulich was responsible for introducing a violent way of resistance into the concept
of the revolutionary martyr-heroine, which began the Russian “era of martyrs.”
205
At the same
time, her largest contribution was validating female revolutionary violence on moral grounds –
an achievement largely made possible by the fact that Trepov did not die. That is, while by
shooting Trepov Zasulich did cross a moral threshold, Trepov’s survival, on the other hand,
made her act of violence appear less threatening and, as such, more palatable and justifiable to
the public.
Not surprisingly, the failure of Zasulich’s assassination attempt became an effective
argument for her defensive lawyer Alexandrov, who used it to insist on her not murderous, but
punitive intentions. In fact, Alexandrov frequently emphasized that Zasulich never meant to take
her violent deed to its logical end because after wounding Trepov with one shot, she dropped the
revolver on the floor, “quite satisfied with what had been achieved.”
206
Given that Zasulich did
not continue firing at Trepov, Alexandrov was able to frame her act of violence as neither cold-
blooded nor heartless, but worthy of condescension:
205
Siljak, Angel, 273.
206
“…довольствуясь вполне тем, что достигнуто.” See Gallanin, ed., Protsess, 90.
88
[…] due to the fact that for her [Zasulich’s] intentions the consequence of a
greater or lesser importance did not matter, that nothing was done by her
specifically for achieving a greater result, that death was only an accepted but not
an exclusive aspiration of V. Zasulich, - there is no reason to consider her shot an
attempted murder.
207
In line with her lawyer, Zasulich also showed that she was a potential rather than a
committed assassin, “I admit that I shot General Trepov, but whether this would have resulted in
a wound or in death was all the same for me.”
208
Zasulich’s indifference towards the outcome of
her shot became yet another important argument in Alexandrov’s defense arsenal because it
marked her assassination attempt with a symbolic rather than literal significance – an assertion
seconded by Siljak who argued that “her [Zasulich’s] gunshot was a highly symbolic act of
protest against all of Russian society.”
209
As the focus was redirected from violence per se
towards its larger conceptual significance, so was the public perception of Zasulich, which
transformed a would-be murderess into an emblematic “heroine of the Revolution,” “one of the
Russian Destroying Angels,” and “a sort of ideal Jeanne d’Arc of the party.”
210
207
“[…] в виду того, что для ее намерений было безразлично последствие большей или меньшей важности,
что ею ничего не было предпринято для достижения именно большего результата, что смерть только
допускалась, а не была исключительным стремлением В. Засулич, - нет оснований произведенный ею
выстрел определять покушением на убийство.” See Koni, Vospominaniia, 190.
208
“Я признаю, что стреляла в генерала Трепова, причем, могла ли последовать от этого рана или смерть,
для меня было безразлично.” See A. F. Koni, Vospominaniia o dele Very Zasulich, ed. L. M. Suris (Moscow-
Berlin: Direct Media), 2015, 99.
209
Siljak, Angel, 242.
210
Ibid., 299.
89
A telling example of this transformation is found in a popular verse of the time, which
compares Zasulich’s “avenging shot” to “God’s whip”:
Fired was the avenging shot
Down came the God’s whip,
And fell the governor-general
Like a wounded game!
211
The fact that the verse elevated Zasulich’s crime to an act of Divine Providence served as yet
another indication that the violence committed by the martyr-heroine was no longer interpreted
in legal terms, but perceived as a symbolic expression of “a ‘pure soul,’ an ‘incarnation of the
Russian consciousness’.”
212
The lofty meaning of Zasulich’s violent outburst was further reinforced by Alexandrov’s
portrayal of it as a heroic response against injustice as opposed to a criminal perpetration. In so
doing, Alexandrov presented Zasulich’s violence as a means to an end rather than an end unto
itself – namely, as a way for Zasulich to raise public consciousness about Trepov’s crime against
Bogoliubov. The basis for this interpretation is found in Zasulich’s own testimony, in which she
argued that it was the lack of reprimand from Trepov’s superiors, as well as the absence of any
reaction from Russian society, that spurned her into action:
211
“Грянул выстрел-отомститель / Опустился божий бич, / И упал градоправитель / Как подстреленная
дичь!” See Koni, Vospominaniia, 66.
212
Cited in Siljak, Angel, 262.
90
It seemed to me that such a thing cannot, should not pass unnoticed. I waited
whether it were to resonate in some way, but everything was silent, and nothing
could have prevented Trepov or someone else, similarly strong, from inflicting
the same punishment time and time again – after all it is so easy to forget to
remove the cap at the second meeting, so easy to find another, similarly dismal
excuse.
213
Echoing Zasulich’s speech, Alexandrov also framed her hopeless wait for justice as a reproach of
Russian society for its lack of response:
Zasulich was waiting for this intercession by the press; she was waiting for the
question that worried her so much to be raised. Bearing in mind the limitations,
the press was silent. Zasulich was waiting for help from the force of the public
opinion. From the quiet of the study, from the intimate circle of familiar
conversations, the public opinion did not creep out. She was waiting, finally, for
the word from justice. Justice … But nothing was heard about it.
214
213
“Мне казалось, что такое дело не может, не должно пройти бесследно. Я ждала, не отзовется ли оно хоть
чем-нибудь, но все молчало, и ничто не мешало Трепову или кому другому, столь же сильному, опять и
опять производить такие же расправы - ведь так легко забыть при встрече шапку снять, так легко найти
другой, подобный же ничтожный предлог.” See Gallanin, ed., Protsess, 48.
214
“Засулич ждала этого заступничества от печати, она ждала оттуда поднятия, возбуждения так
волновавшего ее вопроса. Памятуя о пределах, молчала печать. Ждала Засулич помощи от силы
общественного мнения. Из тиши кабинета, из интимного круга приятельских бесед не выползало
общественное мнение. Она ждала, наконец, слова от правосудия. Правосудие ... Но о нем ничего не было
слышно.” Ibid., 84-85.
91
By portraying Zasulich’s act as a corrective to injustice, Alexandrov not only justified her
actions, but also redirected the blame for her act to the state. This change of focus was
particularly evident from Alexandrov’s concluding sentence, in which he insinuated for some
other forces to be the true instigator of Zasulich’s crime, “it is only left to wish that the reasons
that produce such crimes and produce such criminals do not repeat.”
215
With this powerful final
pronouncement, Alexandrov left the public with an impression that Zasulich’s crime was,
indeed, a sign of the government’s failure to administer justice properly and, in so doing,
succeeded in transforming “the trial of a political criminal […] into a trial of the regime.”
216
Alexandrov’s narrative of Zasulich as an arbiter of justice fell on particularly fertile
ground because of the public belief in the “accentuated moral superiority” of Russian women.
217
One of the ways, in which Alexandrov exploited this stereotype, was by gendering Zasulich’s
compassion and sensitivity to injustice as specifically feminine qualities, “and again arose in her
feminine, exalted mind an image of Bogoliubov, submitted to the degrading punishment, and
[her] inflamed imagination tried to guess, re-experience everything that the ill-fated could
experience” (emphasis mine).
218
Another way, in which Alexandrov engaged the traditional view
of Russian women as moral, was by investing the feminine Zasulich rather than the masculine
state with authority to pass fair judgement: “To stand up for the idea of moral honor and dignity
215
“…остается только пожелать, чтобы не повторялись причины, производящие подобные преступления,
порождающие подобных преступников.” Ibid., 93.
216
Kucherov, “The Case,” 96.
217
Rosenholm, Gendering, 47.
218
“И снова возникал в женской экзальтированной голове образ Боголюбова, подвергнутого позорному
наказанию, и распаленное воображение старалось угадать, перечувствовать все то, что мог перечувствовать
несчастный.” See Gallanin, ed., Protsess, 81.
92
of a political convict, to proclaim this idea loud enough, and to call for its recognition and
acceptance, - these are the motives that drove Zasulich.”
219
By focusing on the non-fatal outcome of Zasulich’s shot, her ethical motivation, her
‘womanly’ commitment to justice, and the judicial failures of the state, Alexandrov was able to
downplay the violent side of Zasulich’s crime and to turn an actual gunshot into a symbolic
“shout against the silence, an exclamation of outrage.”
220
In so doing, Alexandrov not only
created a legal precedent for defending a revolutionary woman’s transgression, but also made
violence an integral component of the public perception of the martyr-heroine. Whereas the
heroic side of Zasulich’s act of violence, presented as her willingness to stand up for
Bogoliubov’s rights, allowed Alexandrov to justify her shot, it was its sacrificial aspect, found in
Zasulich’s readiness to give up her life for a cause, that enabled Alexandrov to elevate her
assassination attempt from an act of heroism to that of martyrdom.
Zasulich – Female Sacrifice
Given the familiarity of the Russian public with the narrative of a sacrificial Russian
woman, it was not surprising that Alexandrov made this idea central to his presentation of
Zasulich as a martyr for an idea. The first reference to martyrdom belonged to Zasulich, who
articulated her sacrificial intentions while explaining her motivation for shooting Trepov:
219
“Вступиться за идею нравственной чести и достоинства политического осужденного, провозгласить эту
идею достаточно громко и призвать к ее признанию и уверению, - вот те побуждения, которые руководили
Засулич.” Ibid., 88.
220
Siljak, Angel, 241.
93
Then, seeing no other means for this matter, I decided, even at the price of my
own life, to prove that one cannot be sure in one’s impunity, when mocking a
human personality in such a way (my emphasis).
221
In his follow-up statement, Alexandrov also evoked the topos of feminine sacrifice – this time
expanding the extent of Zasulich’s martyrdom:
When she crossed the threshold of the governor-general’s house with a
determined intention to resolve the thought that was tormenting her, she knew and
understood that she was sacrificing everything – her freedom, the rest of her
broken life, all that little that was given to her by the stepmother-fate (my
emphasis).
222
By linking “crossing the threshold” (perestupit’ porog) with “sacrifice” (zhertva),
Alexandrov found an effective way to contextualize female transgression as an act of ultimate
martyrdom – a powerful association later used by Turgenev in his narrative poem, “Threshold”
(“Porog,” 1878), incidentally inspired by the Zasulich affair. Another important phrase in this
passage was the mention of a “thought tormenting Zasulich” (muchavshaia ee mysl’) – a
valuable concept that Alexandrov referred to once again, when explaining how Zasulich’s
221
“Тогда, не видя никаких других средств к этому делу, я решилась, хотя ценою собственной гибели,
доказать, что нельзя быть уверенным в безнаказанности, так ругаясь над человеческой личностью.” See
Gallanin, ed., Protsess, 48.
222
“Когда она переступила порог дома градоначальника с решительным намерением разрешить мучившую
ее мысль, она знала и понимала, что она несет в жертву все - свою свободу, остатки своей разбитой жизни,
все то немногое, что дала ей на долю мачеха-судьба.” Ibid., 92.
94
dedication to the idea forced her hand and pushed her to martyrdom, “she was and remained a
selfless slave of that idea, in the name of which she raised a bloody weapon.”
223
By fusing the
familiar narrative of female sacrifice with bloody violence in the name of an idea, Alexandrov
conditioned Zasulich’s violence as inherently Russian and, as such, made it more acceptable to
the Russian mind. At the same time, Alexandrov also introduced a new variation on the
traditional motivation for female violence and martyrdom – that of sacrificing oneself to avenge
a larger, impersonal cause.
Indeed, while the charges of vengeance, perpetuated by a woman, were not new to the
Russian courtroom, Zasulich’s case was different because she was not avenging herself but acted
on the behalf of another person – a man whom she was neither related to nor knew personally. In
his defense speech, Alexandrov specifically pointed out the differences between these two types
of vengeance by contrasting the traditional crimes of female revenge to that of Zasulich:
It is not for the first time that in front of the court of public consciousness, on this
bench of crimes and severe mental sufferings, there appears a woman accused of a
bloody crime. There were women here, who avenged their seducers by death;
there were women, who reddened their hands in the blood of their cheating lovers
or their happier rivals.
224
223
“Она была и осталась беззаветною рабой той идеи, во имя которой подняла она кровавое оружие.” Ibid.
224
“Не в первый раз на этой скамье преступлений и тяжелых душевных страданий является перед судом
общественной совести женщина по обвинению в кровавом преступлении. Были здесь женщины, смертью
мстившие своим соблазнителям; были женщины, обагрявшие руки в крови изменивших им любимых людей
или своих более счастливых соперниц.” Ibid.
95
As opposed to the women, who committed crimes of vengeance for personal causes,
Zasulich was shown to be a new heroine – an avenger for an idea:
Those women, when committing the massacre, fought for and avenged
themselves. For the first time here appears a woman, for whom there were no
personal interests, a personal revenge in the crime – a woman, who connected her
crime with the struggle for an idea in the name of the man who, to her, was only a
fellow sufferer.
225
Whereas these two passages aimed to explain how Zasulich’s idea of sacrifice departed
from the traditional models of female behavior, Alexandrov was careful not to present this idea
as motivated by radicalism or any affiliation with revolutionary groups. In contrast with the
defense attorneys from the trial of the Fifty, who emphasized their clients’ revolutionary
affiliations, Alexandrov specifically instructed Zasulich not “to mention her views on society, the
state, and the future world” and “leave her deepest beliefs and convictions out.”
226
The reason for
using a different approach in Zasulich’s case was likely due to the increased gravity of her crime
as opposed to the peaceful protests by the female defendants from the earlier trial. Since
Alexandrov’s objective was not to decriminalize socialist propaganda, but to make the notion of
female ideological violence more acceptable to the jury, it was only logical that he decided to
225
“Те женщины, совершая кровавую расправу, боролись и мстили за себя. В первый раз является здесь
женщина, для которой в преступлении не было личных интересов, личной мести, - женщина, которая со
своим преступлением связала борьбу за идею, во имя того, кто был ей только собратом по несчастью всей ее
молодой жизни.” Ibid., 93.
226
Siljak, Angel, 229-230.
96
“transform her [Zasulich’s] socialist vision into a set of simple, palatable ideas sweetened for
public consumption.”
227
As a result of “sanitizing her biography,” Zasulich appeared less radicalized, more
human, and, most importantly, more feminine to the audience – which saw her not as a hardened
revolutionary, but as “a confused girl, who in her hysteria, had identified with the suffering of
the man she never met and decided to shoot an official who had never harmed her in any
way.”
228
By counting on Zasulich’s feminine appeal to secure the public support for her case,
Alexandrov was right to assume that her “schoolgirl” hairstyle, plain black dress, shy voice, and
“a tear-stained face” were to become important components in winning Zasulich the sympathy of
the courtroom, which “instantly took to the unpretentious, modest young woman whose
mannerisms were those of a quiet nun.”
229
What the courtroom might not have taken so well to
was the fact that behind the facade of these feminine mannerisms there was an elaborately
constructed narrative of female victimization – a narrative that manipulated the public
expectations of a Russian woman’s penchant for heroism, martyrdom, and sacrifice to exonerate
female violence for a cause.
Indeed, while Zasulich’s shot was considered the inspiration for Russian terrorism, it was
most likely Alexandrov’s skillful defense that gave impetus to the subsequent veneration of
Zasulich’s act as symbolic of larger social issues. By portraying Zasulich’s violence as justified,
her sacrifice as revered, and her gender as morally superior, Alexandrov transformed an
attempted murderess Zasulich into “a determined martyr for human dignity” and, in so doing,
227
Ibid., 243.
228
Ibid., 229, 235.
229
Ibid., 235, 234.
97
legitimized a violent means of resistance for a noble cause by a righteous female executor.
230
Given the enthusiastic acceptance of Alexandrov’s narrative by the public, it was only a matter
of time before Zasulich’s symbolic vengeance turned into actual terrorism at the hands of Sofia
Perovskaia – the embodiment and the final stage of the concept of the martyr-heroine.
230
Ibid., 243.
98
Section III
I imagine her as some kind of ideological Joan of Arc.
231
—Tolstoy
Among the others – the woman is sitting:
A large childish forehead is not obscured
By a simple and modest haircut,
The wide white collar
And her black dress – all is simple,
Thin, of small height,
A blue-eyed, childish face,
But, as if having found something in the distance,
She looks closely, point blank,
And this sweet, gentle gaze
Is burning with courage and sadness [...]
232
—Blok, Vozmezdie, 1910-1921
The Case of Sofia Perovskaia
The importance of Perovskaia for changing the traditional perception of the feminine is
hard to underestimate. Known as the first female terrorist to have dealt a deadly blow to the
Russian autocratic regime, Perovskaia also became the first Russian woman to be publicly
executed for terrorism. Both events enabled Perovskaia to fulfil the heroic and the sacrificial
aspects of female revolutionary martyrdom and, as a result, marked her as an ultimate martyr-
heroine – that is, deadly and dead. Whereas Perovskaia’s supreme heroism and martyrdom are
usually viewed in terms of their political significance, there are also larger cultural implications
of Perovskaia’s act – namely, its essentially modern nature, mythological status, and
fundamental subversiveness. How did Perovskaia’s terrorist act inform our understanding of the
modern concept of the Russian feminine? In which ways was the myth of Perovskaia
231
“Она мне представляется какой-то идейной Жанной д’Арк.”
232
“Средь прочих – женщина сидит: / Большой ребячий лоб не скрыт / Простой и скромною прической /
Широкий белый воротник / И платье черное – все просто, / Худая, маленького роста, / Голубоокий детский
лик, / Но, как бы что найдя за далью, / Глядит внимательно, в упор, / И этот милый, нежный взор / Горит
отвагой и печалью [...]” See Alexander Blok, Vozmezdie, vol. 3 of Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh (Moscow-
Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1960), 311-12; my translation.
99
constructed? And, finally, what caused the public ambivalence towards Perovskaia and what
consequences did it have for the greater narrative of the martyr-heroine? These questions are
central to our vision of Perovskaia not only as a historical revolutionary, but also as a symbolic
breakthrough between the patriarchal and the modern perceptions of women.
Perovskaia and Modernity
What makes Perovskaia’s act of terrorism especially relevant for discussing the modern
concept of the feminine is its inherently modern nature. Indeed, not only did Perovskaia’s
behavior represent an example of a woman’s rebellion against the patriarchal state, but it also
symbolized the revolt of modernity against traditionalism. Further support for this assertion is
found in the study by Claudia Verhoeven, who reveals “an intimate bond between terrorism and
modernity.”
233
In her book about the first Russian male terrorist Karakozov, Verhoeven argues
that “Karakozov’s factual propaganda suggests a model of political action based on a subject that
directly experiences and seeks to intervene in the historical process.”
234
Verhoeven further
unpacks the connection between terrorism and modernity by suggesting that while “modernity
does not cause terrorism, it does create the conditions for the coming of a historically conscious
and politically sovereign subject, and when this subject’s desire to act in accordance with its
nature is blocked, terrorism can emerge.”
235
Whereas Verhoeven’s study mainly focuses on the modern male subject, the appearance
of the female terrorist Perovskaia suggests a possibility to extend the premises of her argument to
233
Verhoeven, The Odd Man, 6.
234
Ibid.
235
Ibid., 7.
100
both genders. In line with Verhoeven’s definition of all terrorism as a “violent model of political
action” in modernity, female terrorism also appears to be “rooted in the rhythms and routines of
life in the modern era.”
236
Indeed, just as Karakozov uses violence to inscribe himself in history,
so does Perovskaia who, according to another female revolutionary Vera Figner, “is one of those
few characters destined to become historical.”
237
Therefore, if one approaches Perovskaia as a
modern female subject and her act of terrorism as this subject’s imprint on history and
expression of agency, then Perovskaia’s designation as the martyr-heroine, in turn, marks this
trope as a fundamentally modern phenomenon.
By locating the origins of the terrorist martyr-heroine in modernity, one could further
understand why the case of Perovskaia was instrumental in making female transgression,
martyrdom, and public activism the integral components of the modern concept of the feminine.
Whereas these components were already present in the public perception of the female
revolutionary from the earlier trials of Bardina and Zasulich, it was not until Perovskaia that the
martyr-heroine’s commitment to fighting the oppressive regime actually became the reality of
regicide and resulted in a public execution. Just as Bardina’s and Zasulich’s symbolic quest for
martyrdom turned into the actual death of Perovskaia, so did the concept of the martyr-heroine,
which transformed from a propagandist or an avenger into what Verhoeven calls “a new, modern
political subject […] that seeks, via violence, to generate fear and advance change.”
238
The Myth of Perovskaia
236
Ibid., 6.
237
Vera Figner, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, ed. George R. Noyes and Alexander Kaun, trans. Camilla Chapin
Daniels and G. A. Davidson (London: Martin Lawrence Limited, 1929), 108.
238
Ibid.
101
Given the public resonance and gravity of the Perovskaia affair, it was not surprising that
Perovskaia quickly became a heroine of myth. The mythological dimensions of Perovskaia’s
character were intensified by the symbolism attributed to her assassination attempt and
subsequent execution. Indeed, by murdering Tsar Alexander II, Perovskaia not only factually
killed the head of the state, but also symbolically destroyed the father figure of Russian society.
In so doing, Perovskaia also subverted the subordinate role of women in the family and state
hierarchy and ascertained the prominence of her gender in history.
Similar to the symbolic significance of the murder of Alexander II, Perovskaia’s
execution by his son Alexander III not only meant to put a political assassin to death, but also
implied the state’s attempt to denounce a woman’s rebellious impulse and reinstate the
patriarchal order. This attempt was not altogether successful, partly because of the public being
unaccustomed to the sight of female executions and partly because of the liberal intelligentsia’s
opposition to state violence and even sympathy for the revolutionaries in more radical circles.
Further proof for the public indignation with the hanging of Perovskaia is offered by
Boniece, who argues that Perovskaia’s execution produced such “public outcry” that “it caused
the government to refrain from hanging another woman for a political crime for 25 years.”
239
More evidence for the intelligentsia’s protest against the execution is found in the two famous
cases of intercession on behalf of the accused by Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Solov’ev, who both
asked the new tsar for Christian mercy: Tolstoy – in a personal letter to Alexander III and
Solov’ev – in a public lecture.
240
Finally, an example of the outright support for the terrorists was
239
Boniece, “The Spiridonova,” 584. According to Sally Boniece, “the next woman so hanged was Zinaida
Vasil’evna Konopliannikova on 29 August 1906, following the introduction of Prime Minister Petr Arkad’evich
Stolypin’s law on field court-martial, which in its turn followed the bombing of Stolypin’s summer home by SR
Maximalists on 12 August. Konopliannikova was condemned to death for killing a general, also on 12 August.”
240
See Budnitskii, ed., Istoriia, 479-480 and 485-486. Also see V. E. Kel’ner, ed., 1 marta 1881 goda: kazn’
imperatora Aleksandra II (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1991), 322-40.
102
given by a member of the radical opposition Stepniak-Kravchinsky, who demonstrated that
Perovskaia’s execution neither demonized nor condemned her to oblivion, but instead
commemorated her sacrifice and turned her into a legend.
While Stepniak-Kravchinsky was right in saying that the legend of Perovskaia was
inspired by her sacrifice, it was also his carefully constructed narrative of Perovskaia that made
her an ultimate martyr-heroine and “a new symbol for the movement.”
241
Resorting to a familiar
perception of the self-sacrificial Russian woman, Stepniak-Kravchinsky placed Perovskaia in a
larger context of female revolutionary martyrdom represented by her predecessors Bardina and
Zasulich. In so doing, Stepniak-Kravchinsky first outlined the ways in which each woman –
Bardina, Zasulich, and Perovskaia – contributed to the concept of the martyr-heroine and then
designated Perovskaia as both the pinnacle and the essence of female revolutionary martyrdom.
The order of Stepniak-Kravchinsky’s female revolutionary types bears a striking
resemblance to Dobroliubov’s discussion of female literary types examined in the previous
chapter. Similar to Dobroliubov’s presentation of Russian fictional heroines as ascending
towards a stronger rebellion and a larger sacrifice, Stepniak-Kravchinsky also places real
revolutionary women in order of increasing violence and martyrdom, with both ideally resulting
in death. In line with Dobroliubov, who views a woman’s transformation from an observer into a
rebel as a positive development, Stepniak-Kravchinsky also approves of the change in women’s
tactics from propaganda to terrorism. The fact that Stepniak-Kravchinsky, just like Dobroliubov,
justifies a higher degree of destructive and self-destructive behavior in his assessment of female
241
Sijlak, Angel, 278.
103
revolutionaries serves as yet another example of a close relationship between the 1860s discourse
about the New Woman and the 1870s-1880s narrative of the revolutionary martyr-heroine.
Given that the development of this narrative receives the most comprehensive coverage
in Stepniak-Kravchinsky’s study of female revolutionary profiles, his ascent towards the ideal
martyr-heroine Perovskaia through the portrayals of Bardina and Zasulich deserves a more
detailed look. In Stepniak-Kravchinsky’s hierarchy of martyr-heroines, the peaceful propagandist
Bardina is predictably placed at the very bottom. While Stepniak-Kravchinsky does praise
Bardina’s commitment to the revolutionary cause, his re-reading of Bardina’s speech seven years
later does not provide him with the same feeling of enthusiasm and affection as it has during the
trial of the Fifty. One reason for Stepniak-Kravchinsky’s diminished excitement for Bardina is
his exposure to much stronger examples of sacrifice, such as Zasulich and Perovskaia. Another
reason may lie in Stepniak-Kravchinsky’s characterization of Bardina as “a monument, a literary
work.”
242
While acknowledging Bardina’s significance, this statement reduces all her features
into a fixed literary memorial of the past, indicating the limitations of the female propagandistic
activity and peaceful idealism.
Stepniak-Kravchinsky’s second point of focus, Vera Zasulich, receives a higher degree of
approval as a “woman for great decisions and for great occasions.”
243
Chronologically and
ideologically situated between the two Sofias – the propagandist Bardina and the terrorist
Perovskaia – Zasulich, in Stepniak-Kravchinsky’s narrative, serves as the connecting point
between a propagandist’s word and a terrorist’s deed. By stressing Zasulich’s intermediary
function in the role of a sacrificial victim, Stepniak-Kravchinsky describes her as a site for the
242
“…памятник, литературное произведение.” See Stepniak-Kravchinsky, “S. I. Bardina,” 38.
243
Stepniak-Kravchinsky, Underground, 114.
104
cultural negotiation of meanings – a woman that fulfills her inherently feminine “active victim-
role” by acting as “a creature of transcendence rather of physical life,” hence her literary
pseudonym – the angel of vengeance.
244
While inspirational, Zasulich’s otherworldly disposition
is also the reason for her limitations, which Stepniak-Kravchinsky sees in her inability to become
a real leader:
But, great as is her moral influence, Zassulic cannot be considered as a model of
political influence. She is too much concentrated in herself to influence others.
She does not give advice, unless she is expressly asked to give it. […] She does
her duty as her conscience prescribes, without endeavoring to lead others by
example.
245
The leadership qualities, which Zasulich lacks, are finally found by Stepniak-
Kravchinsky in Perovskaia, who is defined as the new ideal of the revolutionary woman
precisely because of her ability to combine both masculine and feminine traits:
Another woman presents to us an example of an indefatigable and powerful
combatant. […] a personality that united in herself so much purely feminine
tenderness, so much power of the combatant, and so much selfless devotion of the
martyr (my emphasis).
246
244
Rosenholm, Gendering, 49, 118.
245
Stepniak-Kravchinsky, Underground, 114.
246
“Тип борца неутомимого и могучего представляет нам другая женщина […] эту личность, совмещавшую
в себе столько чисто женской нежности, столько мощи бойца и столько самоотверженной преданности
105
In another instance, Stepniak-Kravchinsky again portrays Perovskaia as a hybrid of the
traditionally masculine features of stoicism and emotionlessness fused with the traditionally
feminine notions of heart and inspiration:
Notwithstanding her stoicism and apparent coldness, she remained essentially, an
inspired priestess; for under her cuirass of polished steel, a woman’s heart was
always beating.
247
This feminine-masculine duality is further illustrated by Stepniak-Kravchinsky’s
discussion of Perovskaia’s behavior during her execution. Citing the account of the execution
from the German newspaper Kolnische Zeitung, Stepniak-Kravchinsky emphasizes Perovskaia’s
self-possession at the scaffold as similar to or even surpassing that of the men:
All the condemned died like heroes. Kibalcic and Geliaboff were very calm,
Timothy Micailoff was pale, but firm, Rissakoff was liver-colored. Sophia
Perovskaia displayed extraordinary moral strength. Her cheeks even preserved
their rosy color, while her face, always serious, without the slightest trace of
мученика.” See Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinsky, “Podpol’naia Rossia,” in Grozovaia tucha Rossii (Moscow: Novyi
Kliuch, 2001), 102, 103; my translation.
247
Stepniak-Kravchinsky, Underground, 127.
106
parade, was full of full courage and endless abnegation. Her look was calm and
peaceful; not the slightest sign of ostentation could be discerned in it.
248
The fact that the correspondent describes Perovskaia’s remarkable display of composure with a
wide range of mixed-sex epithets further highlights Perovskaia’s capacity to transcend the
traditional perception of the feminine and, in so doing, become a heroine of a new generation of
politically active women.
When viewed through the prism of Stepniak-Kravchinsky’s account, the development of
the concept of the martyr-heroine reveals a series of negotiations between the narratives of
tradition and transformation. On the one hand, by revering his heroines’ quest for martyrdom,
Stepniak-Kravchinsky continued the previous Russian practice of venerating feminine sacrifice
and idealizing women as moral guardians. On the other hand, Stepniak-Kravchinsky also had to
accommodate concepts that did not use to be a part of the narrative about women in the earlier
Russian culture, such as calculated political violence, political activism, and martyrdom for a
political cause. By translating these alien notions into the familiar language of feminine sacrifice,
moral absolutism, feminine heart, and religious fervor, Stepniak-Kravchinsky not only found a
way to narrate the new trope of the martyr-heroine, but also made its ultimate manifestation – the
female terrorist – a key component of the Russian concept of the modern feminine.
The Ambiguity of Female Violence
The difficulty of Stepniak-Kravchinsky’s task is not to be underestimated. While the
ecstatic tone of his narrative might have indicated the public’s acceptance of revolutionary
248
Ibid., 130.
107
women, the Russians’ consensus on the positive value of the “regicide” Perovskaia was far from
unanimous. One of the reasons why the Perovskaia affair produced a much more divided public
response than either Bardina’s or Zasulich’s trials was its exposure of the violent, threatening,
and overall emasculating aspect of the martyr-heroine. Given that Perovskaia neither spread
political propaganda, nor avenged a specific individual, but, in fact, led a successful
assassination operation against the head of the Russian state, many members of Russian society
found it difficult to accept this type of calculated violence and strong leadership as the face of the
modern concept of the feminine.
249
A similar opinion is expressed by Grieman who argues that
“women who engage in premeditated political violence disrupt normative standards of feminine
behavior that idealize women’s roles as care-givers, mothers, wives, and victims (rather than
perpetrators) of violence [...].”
250
Unable to reconcile the revolutionary martyr-heroine with the
traditional perception of the Russian feminine, Russian society experienced the breakdown of
gender stereotypes, whose validity was undermined by the open manifestations of female
revolutionary violence.
A telling example of this breakdown is found in a letter by Peters, the prosecutor of the
Trial of the Fifty, written on March 13, 1887. In his letter, Peters reminisced about “the ‘moral
suffering’ brought on by the necessity to pronounce harsh sentences according to the letter of the
law.”
251
According to Engel, despite Peters’ accusatory stance against the sixteen female
revolutionaries in court, he “was nevertheless touched by them,” which, in turn, created anxiety
249
For more on the public’s ambiguous perception of Perovskaia, see A. Hilbrenner, “The Perovskaia Paradox or the
Scandal of Female Terrorism in Nineteenth Century Russia,” The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet
Societies 17 (2016): 1-15.
250
Grieman, “Representing,” 3.
251
Engel, Mothers, 153.
108
on his part.
252
Because of the contradiction between Peters’ position as a prosecutor of the state,
who is supposed to protect the government, and his status as a man, who is presumably meant to
protect “the weaker sex,” the ambiguity of his feelings towards an unfamiliar phenomenon –
women attacking the state – is both revealing and understandable.
The ambivalence about the destruction of gender stereotypes was a concern not only for
the conservative members of Russian society, but also for some male revolutionaries. For
example, in her memoirs, a famous female revolutionary Vera Figner mentioned that one of the
revolutionary men, Sukhanov, had a hard time getting used to Perovskaia’s simultaneous
manifestations of what she defined as “feminine” softness and “masculine” harshness:
Generally speaking, there was in her nature both feminine gentleness and
masculine severity. Tender, tender as a mother with the working people, she was
exacting and severe towards her comrades and fellow-workers, while towards her
political enemies, the government, she could be merciless, a trait that made
Sukhanov almost shudder; his ideal of woman could not be reconciled with this
trait.
253
The fact that Perovskaia’s presumed masculine ‘mercilessness’ was considered too much even
by her male counterpart served as further proof that the changing of the patriarchal perception of
the feminine in late nineteenth-century Russia was a slow and complicated process.
252
Ibid.
253
Figner, Memoirs, 112.
109
Perhaps, the most revealing example of the public’s divided opinion on Perovskaia was
its behavior during her execution. According to the different accounts of the event, the reactions
to the execution varied, ranging from the veneration of the revolutionary heroine to the outright
hostility towards the female regicide. For example, one of the witnesses, A. Breitfus, discussed
the crowd’s sympathy towards the accused:
Tears choked me […] The same was happening with some people from the
crowd, in which groans and shouts were heard: “How young they are!” “Such
good faces and what a crime!” and so on. It was evident that it was not only I who
was mistaken in my fantasies but the majority of people, [who] now, having seen
the nice faces of the convicted in the chariot, profoundly pitied them and were
perplexed with what drove them to ‘crime’.
254
In contrast, another witness, an officer L. Planson, portrayed a very different picture:
That the crowd was hostile to the regicides, I conclude from the other examples that
happened in front of my eyes, when it [the crowd] wanted to brutally lynch two unknown
women, whose only fault was that they expressed their sympathies for the regicides too
openly.
255
254
“Меня душили слезы [...] То же было и с некоторыми из толпы, среди которой слышались оханья и
восклицания ‘какие молодые!’, ‘какие хорошие лица и такое преступление!’ и т. д. Видно было, что не
только я ошибался в своих фантазиях, но и большинство, и теперь, видя на колеснице перед собою славные
лица осужденных - глубоко сожалели их и недоумевали, что побудило их на ‘преступление’.” See A. L.
Breitfus, “Iz vospominanii o kazni 3-go aprelia 1881 goda,” Byloe 25 (1924): 60; my translation.
255
“Что толпа была враждебно настроена к цареубийцам, я заключаю из бывших на моих глазах других
случаев, когда она зверски хотела расправиться самосудом с двумя какими-то женщинами, которые были
повинны лишь в том, что слишком явно выразили свои симпатии к цареубийцам.” See L. Planson,
110
The fact that the mob vehemently attacked two women, who showed sympathy for the
accused, could be interpreted as a sign of the crowd’s transference of its anger against Perovskaia
onto her female supporters. Indeed, the female gender of Perovskaia’s fans might have been an
important factor in provoking the crowd to assault them in a symbolic act of punishing
Perovskaia for her transgression. By attempting to silence Perovskaia’s female followers, the
mob also vicariously expressed anxiety about modern female subjects as threatening not only to
the familial perception of women, but also to the whole patriarchal order. In so doing, the
attackers seconded the opinion of the patriarchal regime, whose new leader Alexander III refused
to pardon his father’s murderess and, by that, symbolically condemned the concept of the martyr-
heroine to death.
“Vospominaniia. Kazn’ tsareubiits,” in 1 marta 1881 goda: kazn’ imperatora Aleksandra II, ed. V. E. Kel’ner
(Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1991), 360; my translation. Planson also writes, “Having approached the corner of
Nadezhdinskaya and Spasskaia, we noticed some woman, standing on a pedestal near the lantern, modestly dressed
but wearing a hat and with a look of an intelligentsia member. When a platform with the regicides drew close to the
place where she was standing, and even passed it a little so that the criminals could see this woman, she took out a
white handkerchief and had enough time to wave it two or three times in the air. One should have seen with what
wild frenzy the crowd instantly tore the poor woman from her pedestal, immediately crushed her, threw the hat from
her head, tore her coat and even, it seemed so, bloodied her face. Had it not been for the immediately appearing
policemen and some of us, the officers, there would have been nothing left from the reckless fan of regicides but a
torn corpse. And even for us it was not without difficulty and struggle that we were able to snatch her from the
hands of the brutal mod, which tried to bare its teeth onto us as well” [Подойдя к углу Надеждинской и Спасской,
мы заметили стоявшую на тумбе возле фонаря какую-то женщину, скромно одетую, но в шляпе и
интеллигентного вида. Когда платформы с цареубийцами поравнялись с тем местом, где она стояла, и даже
немного миновали его, так что преступники могли видеть эту женщину, она вынул белый платок и раза два-
три успела махнуть им в воздухе. Нужно быо видеть, с каким диким остервенением толпа сорвала
моментально несчастную женщину с ее возвышения, сразу смяла ее, сбила с головы ее шляпу, разорвала
пальто и даже, кажется, раскровенила ей лицо. Если бы не немедленно подскочившие полицейские и кто-то
из нас, офицеров, от неосторожной поклонницы цареубийц не осталось бы ничего, кроме истерзанного
трупа. И то нам не без труда и борьбы удалось вырвать ее из рук озверевшей толпы, которая пробовала
скалить свои зубы и на нас]. See Planson, “Vospominaniia,” 360-361.
111
Conclusion
Notwithstanding the moral concerns about the revolutionaries’ violent methods, the
attractiveness and longevity of the heroic image of the martyr-heroine in Russian culture is hard
to deny. Almost thirty years after the assassination of Alexander II, a famous Russian poet
Alexander Blok pointedly expressed admiration for the sacrificial aspect of revolutionary
terrorism in his letter to Vasilii Rozanov:
Now, how will I condemn terror when I see clearly, as if by the light of a huge
tropical sun, that: 1) the revolutionaries that are worth talking about (and there are
tens of them), kill like true heroes, with the radiance of the truth of martyrdom on
their face […], without the slightest self-interest, without the slightest hope of
escape from torture, penal servitude, and execution.
256
The aspects of the revolutionary behavior that Blok venerates, such as heroism, religious
fervor, a penchant for martyrdom, and complete self-denial, are also what characterizes the
martyr-heroine as an important component of the Russian mindset of the late nineteenth century.
A historical and cultural phenomenon not to be missed, the trials of Bardina, Zasulich, and
Perovskaia both revealed and encouraged changes in the patriarchal perception of the feminine.
Thanks to their narrative of female revolutionary martyrdom, Bardina, Zasulich, and Perovskaia
256
“Теперь: как осужу я террор, когда вижу ясно, как при свете огромного тропического солнца, что: 1)
революционеры, о которых стоит говорить (а таких — десятки), убивают, как истинные герои, с сияньем
мученической правды на лице […], без малейшей корысти, без малейшей надежды на спасение от пыток,
каторги и казни.” See Alexander Blok, “V. V. Rozanovu,” vol. 8 of Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh
(Moscow-Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1963), 276.
112
not only contributed to the myth of the martyr-heroine, but also made this myth an integral part
of the modern concept of the Russian feminine.
Notably, this achievement was not only theirs to claim. In fact, the actual formation,
fashioning, presentation, and dissemination of the image of the martyr-heroine to the public
largely belonged to their male defenders and supporters. In the end, it was the carefully outlined
defense strategy at the trial of the Fifty, the meticulously planned courtroom presentation by
Zasulich’s lawyer Alexandrov, and the hagiographical paean to the revolutionary heroes by
Stepniak-Kravchinsky, which all contributed to the creation of the idea of the martyr-heroine in
Russian cultural space. This idea, featuring the martyr-heroine as young, virtuous, ready to die,
and prone to lethal violence, was then to be realized in one of the most powerful venues for
forming public opinion – late nineteenth-century Russian fiction.
113
Chapter 3
Writing the ‘Martyr-Heroine’:
A Literary Response by Polonsky, Turgenev, and Korolenko
The need to develop affirmative ideological heroes was deeply felt by others, but
[…] the obstacles to its imaginative realization were enormous. The Decembrists,
the most authentic and dramatic symbols of political protest, apparently defied
artistic re-creation. There is no doubt that a good part of the difficulty lay in the
creative problems attendant on the reproduction of a plausible, active, and
successful image of ideological virtue.
257
—Mathewson, The Positive Hero
With the appearance of historical martyr-heroines, such as Bardina, Zasulich, and
Perovskaia, Russian literature faced the difficult task of accommodating a new concept of the
feminine – the revolutionary feminine – without undermining the conventional role of Russian
womanhood as “a vital source of national salvation.”
258
Not only did Russian writers
successfully accomplish this mission, they also used the revolutionary martyr-heroine to
revitalize the traditional perception of the feminine as a gauge of national consciousness. This
chapter will focus on the first formative moment of this process – the appearance of the
revolutionary martyr-heroine in the works of Polonsky, Turgenev, and Korolenko from 1877
through 1880.
Serving as a testimony to the writers’ awareness of the changing concept of the feminine,
the female protagonists of Polonsky and Turgenev represent the first response to the trials of
actual female revolutionaries. For each of these works, there existed a real-life female prototype,
whose narrative motivated these authors to introduce a new character of the female revolutionary
onto the Russian literary podium. As such, Polonsky’s poem The Prisoner (Uznitsa, 1877) was
257
Mathewson, The Positive, 17.
258
Vera Dunham, “The Strong Woman Motif,” in The Transformation of Russian Society: Aspects of Social Change
Since 1861, ed. Cyril Black (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 468.
114
likely inspired by Lidiia Figner - one of the defendants from the trial of the Fifty in 1877.
Similarly, Turgenev’s narrative poem The Threshold (Porog, 1878) followed the trial of Vera
Zasulich in 1878. In the same vein, Korolenko’s story The Strange One (Chudnaia, 1880) was
encouraged by the writer’s actual conversations with the exiled revolutionary Evelina
Ulanovskaia.
The fact that these three works came out before Perovskaia’s assassination of Tsar
Alexander II in March 1881 makes them particularly valuable for investigating the writers’
reaction to the appearance of revolutionary, yet non-murderous martyr-heroines. Similar to the
public perception of these women as idealistic and sacrificial, Polonsky, Turgenev, and
Korolenko also describe their revolutionary heroines as principled and prone to martyrdom rather
than to calculated violence. To illustrate, The Prisoner portrays an imprisoned young woman,
whose distressed appearance visibly upset the male narrator. The Threshold depicts the Russian
girl’s initiation into a revolutionary woman, during which an unknown voice asks her a series of
questions about her commitment to the revolutionary cause. The Strange One describes the story
of a guard, who reminisces about his female prisoner’s trip to Siberia, where she eventually dies
of tuberculosis.
By investigating different stages of female revolutionary martyrdom – the imprisonment,
the rite of passage, and the transportation to penal servitude, each writer contributes a new facet
to a more comprehensive narrative of the martyr-heroine. In order to show the continuity of this
narrative, the chapter will first focus on the structural and conceptual similarities between the
three heroines, with a particular emphasis on the writers’ use of the existing realist portrayal of
the strong Russian woman. It will then analyze all three heroines individually to account for the
specificity of each writer’s approach. In the end, the chapter will demonstrate that by challenging
115
the previous familial portrayals of women, these heroines reveal a larger crisis of the patriarchal
perception of the feminine and make a female revolutionary an important part of the late
nineteenth-century Russian literary narrative about women.
116
Section I
The women, those innumerable Tatianas, Lisas, Natalias, Belas, and Ninas shine
like an ideal, chaste and beyond the reach of Onegins and Pechorins, who love
them so clumsily and unsuccessfully. For Russian literature, they served as a
synonym of the ideal, as symbol of a higher Purpose.
259
—Abram Terts, On Socialist Realism
From the Strong Woman to the Martyr-Heroine
The transition from the ‘strong’ woman of the realist novel to the revolutionary martyr-
heroine in Polonsky, Turgenev, and Korolenko is best understood when examined through the
binary model of dynamics in Russian culture offered by Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii.
According to this model, the dual mechanism of Russian culture is based on “the transformation
of the old, a process of turning it inside out.”
260
Building upon this argument, I suggest that the
new literary concept of the martyr-heroine is also in many ways “a regeneration of archaic
forms.”
261
As such, the emergence of the martyr-heroine as a new cultural text did not imply the
complete annihilation of the earlier portrayal of the feminine, but, to put it in Lotman and
Uspenskii’s terms, “was in practice a powerful means of preserving the latter [and] included both
inherited texts and past forms of behavior, whose functions had become a mirror image of what
they were before.”
262
Given this premise, it would be misguided to analyze female protagonists from The
Prisoner, The Threshold, and The Strange One as something entirely different from existing
259
Abram Terts, On Socialist Realism, trans. George Dennis (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), 63.
260
Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii, “Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture (to the
End of the Eighteenth Century,” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, ed. Alexander D. Nakhimovsky and
Alice Stone Nakhimovsky (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 33.
261
Ibid.
262
Ibid., 39-40.
117
norms. Attempting to integrate the image of the female revolutionary into the previous tradition
of writing about women, Polonsky, Turgenev, and Korolenko all engage the traditional literary
paradigm of female suffering, innocence, dedication, and victimization by society. Their use of
these conventional motifs for the martyr-heroine highlights the crux of Lotman and Uspenskii’s
argument that the new culture in Russia “reveals its dependence upon the cultural model that
existed earlier,” which, in the case of the feminine, features the strong woman motif of Russian
realist literature.
263
Therefore, it is not solely by rejecting the previous tradition but by presenting
“the new” as an ethical evolution of “the old” that these writers are able to accommodate the
character of the martyr-heroine as strikingly familiar in her revolutionary aspirations.
All this continuity notwithstanding, neither author mindlessly transposes realist female
characters onto the new image of the martyr-heroine. Far from encapsulating the new
revolutionary content into the old means of representation, all three writers portray their
revolutionary heroines not only as an outcome of earlier predecessors, but as a revision of
traditional values under new historical circumstances. Therefore, although the portrayal of the
martyr-heroine does evolve from the literary prototype of the strong woman, the fact that the old
means of representation no longer suffice reveals a need for a new approach – an approach that
accounts for the less familiar aspects of female behavior, such as the martyr-heroine’s rejection
of a family plot or her political activism.
The tensions between tradition and transformation suggest that the mechanisms of
literary adaptation and sabotage are both used to create the martyr-heroine as a literary character
and a cultural concept.
264
As seen from the discussion of Lotman and Uspenskii’s cultural model,
263
Ibid., 36.
264
For more on the use of the contrasting strategies of adaptation and sabotage in Pasternak, see Alexander
Zholkovsky, “The Dynamics of Adaptation: Pasternak’s Second Birth,” in Text Counter Text: Rereadings in Russian
118
the adaptation is accomplished by presenting the more controversial features of revolutionary
women as deeply rooted in the Russian culture of female sacrifice. With regards to the sabotage,
the subversive role of the revolutionary feminine is evident from the writers’ unsureness about
the ways to inscribe the martyr-heroine into the realist narrative. It is to the origins and the
manifestations of this unsureness that this chapter now turns.
The Literary “Martyr-Heroine:” a Prisoner, a Sacrificial Saint, and an Exile
In their attempt to create a new female trope of the martyr-heroine, Polonsky, Turgenev,
and Korolenko demonstrate a surprising affinity. Not only does the structure of their works
undergo similar changes upon incorporating revolutionary women in their plots, but it also
reveals extensive contextual parallels, which set their martyr-heroines apart from the Olgas,
Elenas, and Katerinas of Russian realist fiction. In contrast to these fully developed characters,
who all have a family history, foster relationships, and demonstrate some form of personal
growth, literary martyr-heroines emerge as an abstraction, a concept, and a collective image of
the Russian feminine.
Missing a surname or a first name, they are either anonymous heroines, referred to as
“she” by Polonsky and “the Russian girl” by Turgenev, or a reincarnation of another historical
personage, such as “Morozova” by Korolenko.
265
Lacking their own narrative past and future,
Literary History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 213-40. For more on women as using the techniques of
accommodation and resistance, see Barbara Clements, introduction to Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance,
Transformation, ed. Barbara Clements, Barbara Engel, and Christina Worobec (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1991), 1-16 and Barbara Engel, “Transformation,” 135-47.
265
Feodosia Morozova was an educated noblewoman, who refused to accept the church reforms enforced by the
Patriarch Nikon in seventeenth-century Muscovite Russia and died a martyr for her religious beliefs. For more on
Morozova, see Margaret Ziolkowski, Tale of Boiarynia Morozova: A Seventeenth-Century Religious Life (Lanham:
Lexington Books, 2000); Julia Alissandratos, “Narrative Patterning in the Seventeenth-Century Old Believer Lives
of Bojarynja Morozova and Gregory Neronov,” in Gattung und Narration in den alteren slavischen Literaturen, ed.
119
these female characters are all portrayed in the present, highlighting the immediacy and the
fleeting nature of their existence. Frozen in the time and the space of the narrative, each
personage is placed into one specific chronotope – in prison, at the threshold, or on the way to
exile.
266
Given the numerous similarities between these three heroines, one cannot help but
wonder – why do such otherwise diverse writers as Polonsky, Turgenev, and Korolenko choose
this non-representational type of characterization to introduce the martyr-heroine onto the
Russian literary stage?
The answer is once again suggested by Lotman and Uspenskii’s model – as the familial
tropes no longer provide the connection to the portrayal of the strong woman, the only remaining
means of traditional female characterization are the more abstract feminine qualities of
perseverance, commitment, and sacrifice. A telling indication of how writers employ these
qualities to familiarize the revolutionary martyr-heroine to their readers is their continuous use of
religious connotations, such as an iconic suffering image of Polonsky’s prisoner, a saintly
reference to Turgenev’s heroine, and a martyred aura of Korolenko’s dying protagonist.
The problem with these qualities, on the other hand, is that once isolated from the
traditional familial tropes, which motivate their appearance in realist fiction, they actually
undermine the verisimilitude of female revolutionary characters and further decontextualize their
portrayal. A revealing example of this narrative displacement is the narrators’ direct or indirect
references to the martyr-heroine’s state of madness or strangeness. Whether portrayed as a
mentally and physically distraught prisoner in Polonsky, called a “fool” in Turgenev, or named
Klaus-Dieter Seeman (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1987), 29-46; and Irina Paert, Old Believers: Religious
Dissent and Gender in Russia, 1760-1850 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003).
266
A term used by Mikhail Bakhtin to describe the category of time and space in literature. See M. M. Bakhtin,
“Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane. Ocherki po istoricheskoi poetike,” in Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i
(Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986), 121-290.
120
“the strange one” in Korolenko, the martyr-heroine is perceived as an outcast whose madness
emphasizes her isolated social and cultural status and reinforces her marginalization from the
familial plot of the realist narrative.
Without the anchor of the familial plot, the turn to the schematic portrayal of the martyr-
heroine reveals the writers’ hesitancy and, perhaps, inability to provide this unidentified narrative
phenomenon with a holistic profile and a voice of its own. Given that none of the stories employs
a first-person female narrative, it may be possible that the male-framed perception of the martyr-
heroine as a symbolic representative of her gender becomes a way for the Russian writers to
resolve their narrative anxieties about this new phenomenon. In this case, a non-representational
type of characterization allows the writers to display the martyr-heroine as a literary type in-
progress by fragmenting her experience and affording the reader only a glimpse of her existence.
For example, instead of characterizing the female revolutionary as a multifaceted
character, Polonsky, Turgenev, and Korolenko focus on a particular moment of her life, which
makes their fragmented martyr-heroines not only easier for the public to digest, but also more
manageable for the writer to regulate. Whether portrayed as an imprisoned “damsel-in-distress”
in Polonsky, a heroic “threshold-crosser” in Turgenev, or a spirited dying exile in Korolenko,
each martyr-heroine represents only one facet of female narrative representation, rendering it
both a symbolic representation of a larger whole and a fragment under authorial control.
The one-sided portrayal of the martyr-heroine is further reinforced by a one-word title –
The Prisoner (Uznitsa), The Threshold (Porog), The Strange One (Chudnaia) – which encloses
the character’s whole experience under a simple heading and makes it unable to change its given
status. As such, Polonsky’s female prisoner does not break out of prison, we never find out what
happens to Turgenev’s girl after she crosses the threshold, and Korolenko’s “strange one” dies
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leaving the narrator of her story perplexed about her “peculiar” revolutionary behavior. This
unwillingness to provide female characters with a narrated future – by either leaving the story
open-ended in the case of Polonsky and Turgenev or letting the martyr-heroine die in the case of
Korolenko – betrays the writers’ uncertainty about the possibility of survival for the martyr-
heroine as a cultural construct and a literary type. Unsure about the ways, in which the martyr-
heroine can acquire a multidimensional personality and continue her existence beyond one
specific scene, these writers choose to depict their female protagonists as representatives rather
than individuals and endow them with personality labels instead of names.
The lack of last or first names is not the only missing element in the portrayal of the
Russian martyr-heroine. In contrast to the strong woman of Russian realist fiction, who engages
in life-changing interactions along her narrative journey, the martyr-heroine is a given entity with
a zero or little authorial attempt to provide her with any development. In fact, her “narrative
journey” is not a voyage in self-exploration but an exercise in statement making. Serving as a
model of suffering, determination, or resistance, the martyr-heroine is nothing but a static figure
with no potential for personal transformation. Not only does she not change throughout the
narrative, but she also exists in an interpersonal vacuum, with no meaningful communication
with anyone outside her cause. Whether placed into an empty prison cell by Polonsky, put on the
verge of the revolutionary abyss by Turgenev, or left on the brink of the spatial and temporal
void through exile and death by Korolenko, the martyr-heroine stands alone as a narrative
monument to the limitations of the realist discourse.
Reluctant to free their martyr-heroines from the constraints of time and space, Polonsky,
Turgenev, and Korolenko further limit their protagonists’ agency by portraying them as objects
of male voyeuristic attention. In fact, the only perception of the martyr-heroine available to the
122
reader is provided by her male narrator, who observes her as an unknown species of the female
revolutionary world. To him, she is the “Other” - a type, worthy of exploring and commenting
on, and an interesting case that provokes his empathy and questions his earlier perception of the
feminine.
267
For example, in his compassionate response to the suffering female prisoner,
Polonsky’s narrator finds her disheveled image so bothersome that the sight of her anguish
consistently prevents him from falling asleep, “So why does her suffering image // Keep me
awake all night?”
268
Likewise, neither of Korolenko’s male protagonists is able to make peace
with the death of the “strange one,” who, in turn, disturbs their sleep: “I was not asleep […]. The
gloom of the little hut tucked away in the woods tormented my soul […].”
269
In a similar
disquieting way, Turgenev’s narrator also leaves the reader in a state of flux by showing a lack of
public consensus on the foolish or saint-like behavior of the female protagonist who has just
stepped into the revolutionary abyss.
The intimation of the male loss of sleep or composure is an important thread, which
marks the portrayals of the martyr-heroine in Polonsky, Turgenev, and Korolenko as
troublesome for male narrators. In their unceasing attempt to define the revolutionary feminine,
all three narrators question their own narrative role towards the martyr-heroine by observing her
from a distance. In the case of Polonsky, the distance is imaginary because the narrator visualizes
the martyr-heroine in his mind, but never meets her in person. In the case of Turgenev, the
distance is no longer imaginary but physical because the narrator, despite seeing the martyr-
heroine, never approaches her. In the case of Korolenko, the distance is neither imaginary nor
267
For more on the male perception of women as the “other,” see Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translated
and edited by H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).
268
Ia. P. Polonsky, Uznitsa, vol. 1 of Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986), 222.
269
Vladimir Korolenko, “The Strange One,” in Selected Stories, trans. Suzanne Rosenberg (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1978), 240.
123
physical but intellectual because the narrator, while actively communicating with the martyr-
heroine, does not understand her motivation or cause. Whether portrayed as imaginary, physical,
or intellectual, the distance remains a distinct feature of all three narrators’ interactions with the
martyr-heroine and an indication of their unsureness about the relationship with revolutionary
women.
The roots of this unsureness go back to the Russian tradition of the superfluous man,
who, similar to the aforementioned narrators, often refuses to act along with his female
counterpart or join her in marriage, but instead creates discourse about her. Building upon this
tradition of social withdrawal, the male narrators and protagonists in The Prisoner, The
Threshold, and The Strange One are superfluous not only in the sense of their inability to match
the aspirations of female revolutionaries, but also to the actual structure of the martyr-heroine
narrative. Unable to join the revolutionary woman as equal fictional participants in the
conventional tropes of lovers, fathers, husbands, and sons, male protagonists resolve their
narrative redundancy by removing themselves from the martyr-heroine story. In so doing, the
men act as standby witnesses to the changing perception of the feminine, which both intrigues
and frightens them as a potentially inexpressible phenomenon. This detachment, in turn, allows
the male characters to preserve their own narrative as affected by, yet separated from that of the
martyr-heroine, whose exact role towards the male protagonist can no longer be defined in
familial or erotic terms.
Faced with the collapse of the relationship between traditional male and female tropes,
the narrator has no other recourse but to rely on his own observations of the martyr-heroine. This
gives rise to the proliferation of his rather than her discourse, which explains why the voice of
the martyr-heroine is either completely missing in The Prisoner; heard in response to another,
124
presumably male “voice” (golos) in The Threshold ; and is only perceived in reaction to several
male voices in The Strange One. A far departure from the strong women of the realist narrative,
the martyr-heroines of Polonsky, Turgenev, and Korolenko do not speak unless asked to speak
by their male interlocutors. Therefore, even when the female characters do express themselves, it
is mainly in response to a series of prompts initiated by men.
The use of this narrative device is especially pronounced in Turgenev, whose female
protagonist is subjected to a rigorous questioning about her readiness to cross over into
revolutionary martyrdom. While the questions are quite elaborate in nature, the protagonist’s
responses are kept to one-word or one-phrase answers, such as “I know,” “Yes,” “I am ready,” “I
want to enter,” never permitting her to change the direction of the dialogue or ask her own
questions. In what appears to be an interrogation rather than a discussion, the voice repeatedly
dissects the girl’s responses in a compulsive fashion by asking her new questions and rephrasing
the old ones with additional details, “Are you ready for a sacrifice? Yes. For an anonymous
sacrifice?” Despite the fact that the female protagonist exercises her agency in making the
decision to cross the threshold, she does not escape the scrutiny of the omnipotent voice, which
literally puts her on trial and carefully frames her discourse.
Confined to a narrative existence under the microscope, the martyr-heroines of Polonsky,
Turgenev, and Korolenko are not only carefully monitored in terms of their movement,
appearance, and speech, but are also presented as a study case in progress. The microscope
metaphor is particularly apposite for highlighting this apparent narrative paradox of
fictionalizing revolutionary women. On the one hand, the writers’ refusal to provide the martyr-
heroine with a larger context and their focus on the spatial and temporal fragmentation of her
narrative existence increase the degree of their authorial control. On the other hand, the lack of
125
facts about the martyr-heroine’s narrative past and future, combined with the abundance of
details about a particular moment of her life, contribute to the unfinished nature of her overall
portrayal.
This sense of unfinalizability, defined by Mikhail Bakhtin as a reaction against the
limitations of the narrative, not only makes the martyr-heroine spill over her seemingly
controlled description, but also prevents her from becoming a distinct literary trope.
270
Not
reducible to the portrayals of a prisoner, a threshold-crosser, or a dying propagandist, the martyr-
heroine is all and none of these tropes because the closer one looks at her narrative, the more
questions the character generates. A figure larger than her literary representations, the martyr-
heroine remains an ideological construct and a cultural text, whose fictionalization inevitably
results in its mythologization as a symbol of the modern concept of the feminine.
The narrative challenges faced by Polonsky, Turgenev, and Korolenko in their attempt to
define the martyr-heroine were similar to issues articulated by the renowned Russian poet
Alexander Pushkin, who likewise complained about the narrative demands placed on him to
either “marry off” or “kill” his male protagonist in his novel in verse Eugene Onegin (Evgenii
Onegin, 1825-1832).
271
Not unlike Pushkin, who decided to subvert the traditional ending by
doing neither and leaving Onegin in a state of permanent narrative flux, Polonsky, Turgenev, and
Korolenko also experimented with the realist structure by providing different types of solutions
to the problem of narrating the martyr-heroine. While none of these solutions completely
resolves the predicament, the fact that each writer departs from the traditional portrayal of the
270
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1963).
271
For more on Pushkin’s narrative contradictions in Evgenii Onegin, see Iurii Lotman, Roman A. S. Pushkina
“Evgenii Onegin”: Kommentarii: Posobie dlia uchitelia, 2nd ed. (Leningrad: “Prosveshchenie,” 1983).
126
familial woman indicates the subversive nature of the martyr-heroine who, akin to Onegin, is a
literary character with a larger metaliterary function.
272
272
For more on the metaliterary concerns in Eugene Onegin, see Douglas Clayton, Ice and Flame: Aleksandr
Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985) and Marcus Levitt, “Evgenii Onegin,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin, ed. Andrew Kahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 41-56.
127
Section II
As he recognized himself, Polonsky was a Romantic born out of due season.
273
—J. A. Harvie
Polonsky’s The Prisoner or The Captive of the Narrative
One of the first attempts to portray a martyr-heroine after her appearance in the public
light belongs to Iakov Polonsky. A literary response to the trial of the Fifty, Polonsky’s The
Prisoner exposes the difficulties of rendering the concept of the martyr-heroine in a verbal
narrative and moves away from using tropes to endowing his female protagonist with religious
symbolism.
274
Acting as a bridge between the earlier portrayals of the sacrificial feminine in
Nekrasov’s Russian Women (Russkie zhenshchiny, 1871-73) or Turgenev’s Virgin Soil (Nov’,
1877) and the later literary works, inspired by actual female revolutionaries, Polonsky’s The
Prisoner sets the foundation for subsequent depictions of the martyr-heroine in Russian fiction as
highly symbolic:
The Prisoner
What is she to me! – Not a wife, not a mistress,
And not my native daughter!
Then why her accursed fate
273
J. A. Harvie, “The Poetry of Yakov Polonsky,” New Zealand Slavonic Journal 2 (1981): 39.
274
For more on the controversy surrounding the name of the female revolutionary, who became the inspiration for
Polonsky’s poem, see N. A. Troitskii, “Zasulich ili Figner? O stikhotvorenii Ia. P. Polonskogo ‘Uznitsa’,” Russkaia
literatura 20, no. 2 (1977): 183-186 and Semen Vengerov, “Turgenevskii ‘Porog,’” Russkoe bogatsvo 10-11 (1905):
156. There were also several variations of the poem, one of which was supposedly written in 1877, but only
published in 1906, and another one published by B. M. Eikhenbaum in 1935. The poem under discussion was
written around February-March 1878 and published in November 1878. With minor alterations, the other two poems
incorporate the version of the poem that is examined in this chapter. For the texts of all three variations, see Iakov
Polonsky, Uznitsa, vol. 1 of Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986), 221-222, 452-
53. For more on the history of the poems, see I. B. Mushina, commentary to vol. 1 of Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, by
Iakov Polonsky (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986), 451-52.
128
Keeps me awake all night!
It keeps me awake because I dream of
Youth in the stifling prison,
I see - vaults ... a window behind bars,
A cot in the damp twilight ...
From the cot, stare feverishly sultry
Eyes without a thought or tears,
From the bunk, hang almost to the floor, the dark
Tresses of heavy hair.
Neither her lips stir, nor pale
Hands on her pale chest,
Slightly pressed to the heart without a tremor
And without hopes ahead ...
What is she to me! – Not a wife, not a mistress,
And not my native daughter!
Then why her suffering image
Keeps me awake all night!
275
275
“Что мне она! - не жена, не любовница, / И не родная мне дочь! / Так отчего ж ее доля проклятая /
Спать не дает мне всю ночь! / Спать не дает, оттого что мне грезится / Молодость в душной тюрьме, /
Вижу я – своды ... окно за решеткою, / Койку в сырой полутьме ... / С койки глядят лихорадочно-знойные /
Очи без мысли и слез, / С койки висят чуть не до полу темные / Космы тяжелых волос. / Не шевелятся ни
губы, ни бледные / Руки на бледной груди, / Слабо прижатые к сердцу без трепета / И без надежд впереди ...
/ Что мне она! - не жена, не любовница, / И не родная мне дочь! / Так отчего ж ее образ страдальческий /
Спать не дает мне всю ночь!” See Polonsky, “Uznitsa,” 222; my translation.
129
Evoking the picture of a suffering female prisoner, Polonsky frames his martyr-
heroine as a victim of injustice in need of help. Given the imprisoned status of Lidiia
Figner – a suggested prototype for the poem – it is not surprising that Polonsky chooses
prison to introduce the martyr-heroine onto the literary stage. What is surprising though is
how relevant the image of prison becomes in reference to the new type of heroine, who is
trying to break out from previous narrative demands. Because the role of the martyr-
heroine is to attack the patriarchal structure of society and, consequently, the narrative
supported by this very structure, depicting a female revolutionary in prison is not only
historically appropriate, but also suggestive of the character’s destructive potential.
The innovative features of Polonsky’s approach to narrating the martyr-heroine
have often been obscured by most scholars’ focus on the “ideological substance” of the
poem and its derivative nature.
276
What, at first glance, appears to be a traditional
narrative of female victimization essentially becomes Polonsky’s exercise in subverting
several narrative clichés in search of other than realist means to portray the martyr-
heroine. The first indication of this destabilization comes from the narrator’s inability to
define his relationship towards the female prisoner, “What is she to me, not a wife, not a
lover, and not my own daughter.” Incapable to identify the exact role for his heroine, the
narrator appears to be bewildered by his own lack of a point of reference, failing to
justify his concern for the female prisoner in familial terms.
276
For example, Mushina examines the poem as evidence of Polonsky’s civic awareness, whereas Patyk approaches
it as an example of Polonsky’s romantic sensibilities. See I. B. Mushina, introduction to vol. 1 of Stikhotvoreniia i
poemy, by Iakov Polonsky (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986), 20-21 and Patyk, “‘Double-Edged,” 93.
While Patyk convincingly argues that Polonsky “cast the lyric hero (the male intelligent) and the female
revolutionary into familiar, romanticized roles,” she does not discuss Polonsky’s deviations from the Romantic
canon, rendering The Prisoner a byproduct of the existing literary tradition.
130
The narrator’s use of the inanimate pronoun “what” instead of the animate “who”
further marks his perception of the martyr-heroine as an objective phenomenon rather
than a concrete personage. By rejecting the female tropes of a wife, a lover, and a
daughter twice – in the beginning and at the end of the poem – Polonsky’s narrator
questions not only the nature of his own relationship with the heroine, but also the ability
of the realist narrative to tell the story of the revolutionary feminine. In this respect, the
narrator’s repeated question, “What is she to me?,” reveals more than his capacity to
sympathize with any unknown woman-in-distress. What this question truly indicates is
the author’s awareness of a narrative challenge, presented by the martyr-heroine, who
exists beyond the patriarchal hierarchy and, thus, defies familial definition.
The narrator’s uncertainty about the nature of his relationship to the martyr-
heroine also affects his ability to help the heroine in any meaningful way. While the male
lyrical persona appears to be haunted by his vision of a helpless young woman in a prison
cell, he neither attempts to save her nor offers any suggestions for her escape. This
complete lack of action on behalf of the narrator serves as another reminder about the
shortcomings of literary clichés, in which the traditional function of the male protagonist,
who comes across an imprisoned virtuous female, is to offer his assistance.
277
Instead, in
The Prisoner the narrator appears to be more concerned about his disturbed sleep patterns
than the freedom of the heroine, which renders him superfluous to ameliorating her fate.
277
Even though the Russian male protagonist often falls short of this task because of his superfluous nature, he is
still expected to try acting as a female protector and liberator. See Chernyshevsky, “Russkii chelovek” and Nikolai
Dobroliubov, “Kogda zhe pridet nastoiashchii den’?” (“When Will the Real Day Come?”), in Izbrannoe, ed. A.
Ushakov, 2nd ed. (Moscow: “Iskusstvo,” 1986): 300-327.
131
Given Polonsky’s attempt to introduce the martyr-heroine as a new narrative
phenomenon, it is not accidental that the narrator acts in an atypical fashion and never
tries to become a hero. In fact, it is precisely because of the narrator’s failure to rescue
the heroine from her confinement that the author manages to save her from the narrative
imprisonment of a female victim waiting for a male liberator. With no male liberator in
sight, the martyr-heroine, while suffering and imprisoned, is no longer a frail victim but a
victimized heroine, all the more tragic and powerful because of her ability to endure her
hopeless “accursed fate” (prokliataia dolia) on her own.
By subverting the traditional male-savior/female-victim narrative paradigm as
inadequate for portraying the martyr-heroine, Polonsky not only strips the male lyrical
persona off his possible role of a savior, but also turns him into a victim – a sufferer of
severe insomnia, caused by the disturbing visual image of the martyr-heroine. Far from
displaying a holistic picture of a female captive, presented by Karamzin in “The Island of
Bornholm” (“Ostrov Bornhol’m,” 1793) or by Pushkin in The Fountain of Bakhchisarai
(Bakhchisaraiskii Fontan, 1823), Polonsky’s prisoner features a list of characteristics,
which reveal a fragmented portrayal of a beast-like, possibly deranged, woman. Joined
together in an impressionistic fashion, these characteristics include “feverishly sultry eyes
without thought and tears,” long “dark tresses of heavy hair,” “unmoving lips,” “pale
hands on her pale chest,” and the prisoner’s immobile position on the prison cot. A
resulting impression of this loose description is unsettling as it evokes a Frankenstein-like
being, composed of various disintegrated parts, whose present immobility intimates
132
reserves of untamed energy.
278
With no thought left in the prisoner’s feverish eyes and
her unkempt tresses hanging low to the floor, she becomes even more reminiscent of a
madwoman, whose unbalanced depiction may reveal authorial anxiety about the potential
danger of unleashing the martyr-heroine from her social and narrative constraints.
Portrayed as a trapped creature rather than an innocent beauty, the martyr-heroine
appears imprisoned thrice as she is first placed in a prison cell, second confined to a
prison cot, and, finally, locked into a quite unfavorable fragmented description. However,
because of this triple confinement, the heroine’s immobile physical state also becomes a
sign of the ultimate social and narrative captivity, allowing her to escape from the status
of a regular female prisoner and become a symbol of the “Imprisoned Feminine.” The
unknown nature of the heroine’s crime and the lack of context for her imprisonment
further emphasize her emblematic status of a “Female Prisoner” par excellence,
supported by the generic title of the poem, The Prisoner.
Defined by negation, “eyes without thoughts and tears,” “neither lips nor hands
are moving,” “no hopes ahead,” “not a wife, not a lover, not my own daughter,”
the
martyr-heroine is no longer reducible to the narrative constraints of a prison, a cot, or her
own visual portrayal.
279
In fact, the more physically restricted she appears, the more
narrative limitations she defies; prompting a valid narrative concern – if the martyr-
heroine is not all these things, then who is she and how to depict her? In the end, the
prisoner’s lack of a name, her incomplete and negated portrayal, and her withdrawal from
278
The Frankenstein metaphor appears particular apt because Polonsky’s attempt to portray the martyr-heroine as a
new type corresponds to Viktor Frankenstein’s desire to create a new species. For more on the creation of
Frankenstein, see Harold Bloom, “Frankenstein, or the New Prometheus,” Partisan Review 32 (1965): 611-18.
279
Italics are mine.
133
familial roles break the boundaries of the realist narrative and present the imprisoned
martyr-heroine as an abstract “image” of the feminine rather than a concrete literary
trope.
While the prisoner’s fragmented description is a clear departure from a more
comprehensive portrayal of her literary predecessors, the uncomplimentary nature of this
description further destabilizes the reader’s narrative expectations. In contrast to the
sexually charged portrayals of female prisoners in Karamzin and Pushkin, Polonsky
desexualizes his prisoner’s appearance by emphasizing her religious symbolism. In fact,
Polonsky’s purposeful avoidance of any sexual associations with the character of the
martyr-heroine throughout the poem makes The Prisoner an important stepping-stone for
a subsequent desexualized literary depiction of the revolutionary feminine in Turgenev
and Korolenko. In line with Polonsky’s rejection of the traditional tropes of wife, lover,
and daughter, which are associated with the act of sexual intercourse or its result, his
mention of the prisoner’s delirious eyes and pale bosom likewise subdues any erotic
impulses. Instead of evoking a sensual picture of a female captive, Polonsky stresses the
superior meaning of her suffering and emphasizes her spiritual rather than corporal
magnetism. By actually describing the prisoner’s image (obraz) as “suffering”
(stradal’cheskii) with her hands placed on her pale breasts as if in prayer, Polonsky not
only arouses compassion and sympathy for the victim’s hopeless situation, but also
conjures the religious significance of her portrayal.
The double meaning of the word “obraz” in Russian, i.e. an image and an icon,
further suggests the presence of religious connotations in Polonsky’s martyr-heroine.
280
280
For more on the importance of icons in Russian culture, see Alfredo Tradigo, Icons and Saints of the Eastern
Orthodox Church, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (Los Angeles: J. P. Getty Museum, 2006); Oleg Tarasov, Icon and
134
Importantly, it is this “obraz,” which keeps Polonsky’s narrator awake at night and makes
him care about the “prisoner” in a humanly universal, spiritual sense. Because of its
religious subtext, the use of “obraz” in describing a female prisoner also evokes the
Mother of God as a likely reference to an icon representing a woman. In this case, the
absence of the mother from the female tropes rejected earlier by Polonsky does not
appear accidental, but suggests the poet’s adaptation of maternal associations as a
possible way to contextualize the martyr-heroine in the narrative. Even though Polonsky
never specifically refers to the martyr-heroine as a mother figure, the fact that he
excludes the mother from his description of what the martyr-heroine is not and mentions
the icon in reference to a suffering female prisoner advocates the separate status of a
mother as a potential means of accommodating revolutionary women in fiction.
281
By removing the martyr-heroine from most traditional feminine roles onto the
mythological plane of religious maternal significance, Polonsky demonstrates his
understanding of the revolutionary feminine as an indeterminate concept rather than a
specific trope. Since Polonsky’s portrayal of the prisoner is largely based on the generic
description of female suffering and religious symbolism, his heroine is no longer
constricted by the narrative demands of contemporary fiction and, therefore, does not
need a name or a familial context. Meant as a literary response to the historical trial of the
Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia, trans. and ed. Robin Milner-Gulland (London: Reaktion, 2002); Leonid
Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, trans. G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky, 2nd. ed.
(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1982).
281
In his discussion of Gorky’s novel Mother (Mat’, 1906), Richard Freeborn suggests that the mother trope
becomes an essential symbol of the revolution in early twentieth-century Russian literature. See Richard Freeborn,
The Russian Revolutionary Novel: Turgenev to Pasternak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 46-52.
Grieman also argues that the mother trope enables writers to bypass the troubling cases of female terrorism as she
“uncover[s] the deep ambivalence about women as perpetrators of violence and the ways in which realist novels
seek to overcome this taboo by emphasizing the women’s maternal links and caring natures.” See Grieman,
“Representing,” 31.
135
Fifty, Polonsky’s poem is above all a narrative experiment that destabilizes the
perception of literary heroines as trope-bound women with a detailed narrative
background. Therefore, if viewed metaphorically, the narrator’s loss of sleep over an
image of a suffering female prisoner may actually reflect Polonsky’s own growing
concern about the suitability of this or any female portrayal for narrating the martyr-
heroine.
136
Section III
I must admit that I have never attempted to ‘create an image’ unless I have had as
a starting point not an idea but a living person, to which suitable elements have
gradually been added or implied.
282
—Turgenev, Literary Reminiscences
Among all the great writers, not only from Russia, but from all over the world,
Turgenev occupies his own special, his unique place as the best praiser of the
girlish and womanly figure. He is a woman’s most faithful friend.
283
—Konstantin Balmont
It is evident that till the last days of his life the novelist continued to regard
emancipated women as both a fascinating and an enigmatic phenomenon.
284
—Walter Smyrniw
Turgenev’s The Threshold or Escaping the Narrative
Polonsky’s attempt to break the martyr-heroine from the prison of the realist
narrative does not occur in a literary vacuum. Another author who quickly reacts to the
appearance of real-life female revolutionaries is Ivan Turgenev – an accurate observer of
changes in Russian society and a recognized writer of literary types.
285
Known for his
previous portrayals of strong, rebellious women such as Elena in On the Eve (Nakanune,
1860) and Marianna in Virgin Soil (Nov’, 1877), Turgenev now tries his hand at
282
Cited in Freeborn, The Russian, 12-13. For the original quote in Russian, see Ivan Turgenev, “Po povodu ‘Ottsov
i detei’,” vol. 14 of Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos’mi tomakh. Sochineniia (Moscow-Leningrad,
1967), 97.
283
“Среди всех великих писателей, не только русских, но всего мира, Тургенев занимает свое особое, свое
единственное место, как лучший восхвалитель девического и женского лика. Он самый верный друг
женщины.” See Konstantin Balmont, “Mysli o tvorchestve. Turgenev,” in Gde moi dom: Stikhotvoreniia,
khudozhestvennaia proza, stat’i, ocherki, pis’ma, ed. Vadim Kreid (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Respublika,” 1992), 324.
For more on Turgenev’s role in promoting the myth of the pure, sacrificial Russian woman, see A. Krukovskii,
“Russkaia zhenshchina v izobrazhenii Turgeneva,” Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 8 (1914): 177-
95.
284
Walter Smyrniw, “Turgenev’s Emancipated Women,” The Modern Language Review 80, no. 1 (1985): 105.
285
For more on Turgenev’s ability to capture the political atmosphere of his time, see Kathryn Ambrose,
“Turgenev’s Representation of the ‘New People’,” in Turgenev: Art, Ideology and Legacy, ed. Robert Reid and Joe
Andrew (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 139-55.
137
describing the martyr-heroine in a narrative poem The Threshold, written as a literary
response to the trial of Vera Zasulich in 1878.
286
Inspired by the resonance from Zasulich’s assassination attempt, Turgenev reacts
to the first widely publicized case of female revolutionary violence by placing his martyr-
heroine at a threshold of ethical choices. While the poem focuses on the heroine’s
determination to cross the moral line into the realm of revolutionary martyrdom, the
symbolic meaning of a “threshold” also becomes an important metaphor for Turgenev’s
own narrative concerns. In other words, it is not only the female protagonist, who has to
choose her narrative fate, but also the writer Turgenev, who finds himself at the threshold
of aesthetic choices, faced with limited narrative possibilities to portray the new concept
of the feminine as prone to violence.
The Threshold
I see a huge building.
A narrow door in its front wall is open wide. Inside the doorway looms a
dank fog. A young woman is standing before its high threshold – a Russian young
woman.
The impenetrable fog exudes icy streams of frost, and a slow, toneless
voice is carried out from the depths of the building along with those streams.
“Oh you who wishes to cross this threshold – do you know what awaits
you?”
286
Because of censorship, the poem was only published in 1905, though its copies widely circulated among the
Russian public. For more on the publication history of the poem, see Leonard Schapiro, Turgenev, His Life and
Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 287. For more on Turgenev’s ambivalence about the poem’s
concern with the revolutionary youth, see Oliver, “Fool or Saint?,” 81-86.
138
“I know,” the young woman answers.
“Cold, hunger, hatred, mockery, scorn, resentment, imprisonment, illness,
and even death?”
“I know.”
“Utter alienation, isolation?”
“I know. I’m ready. I’ll bear all the suffering, all the blows.”
“Not only from your enemies, but even from your relatives, your friends?”
“Yes … even from them.”
“Very well. You are prepared for any sacrifice?”
“Yes.”
“For anonymous sacrifice? You will perish, and no one … no one will
ever know whose memory to honor!”
“I don’t need either gratitude or pity. I don’t need a name.”
“Are you prepared to commit a crime?”
The young woman bowed her head. …
“I’m even prepared to commit a crime.”
The voice didn’t immediately continue its questions.
“Do you know,” it eventually spoke up again, “that you may cease to
believe what you believe now, that you may realize that you have deceived
yourself and have destroyed your young life in vain?”
“I know this as well. Nonetheless, I want to enter.”
“Then enter!”
139
The young woman crossed the threshold – and a heavy curtain fell behind
her.
“Fool!” someone shrieked from behind it.
“Saint!” came from somewhere in reply.
287
In his search for appropriate ways to depict the martyr-heroine as ready for crime,
Turgenev departs from Polonsky’s portrayal of a female revolutionary in an immobile and
weakened state. In contrast to Polonsky’s prisoner, whose physical confinement limits her
agency and deprives her of a narrative voice, Turgenev’s martyr-heroine appears rather active
and outspoken. This transformation towards a more vocal and dynamic feminine portrayal is not
surprising, given a change in revolutionary tactics from the peaceful propagandists at the trial of
the Fifty, who inspired Polonsky, to an attempted assassin, Vera Zasulich, who prompted
Turgenev. Because of Zasulich’s switch to violence instead of words, it seems only natural that
Turgenev’s female protagonist has more pronounced willpower and determination that
Polonsky’s prisoner, whose capacity for suffering and sacrifice appears more internalized.
Despite their apparent difference in agency and physical capacity – with Polonsky’s silent
prisoner lying on a prison cot and Turgenev’s heroine talking and stepping across a threshold –
both characters come from the same lineage of literary martyr-heroines, suggesting the
emergence of a larger cultural text of the revolutionary feminine. Positioned at the tipping point
of this text, Turgenev’s poem, akin to Zasulich’s trial, becomes the last attempt by a prominent
Russian writer to portray female revolutionary violence in symbolic terms before the appearance
of an actual tsar-murderess (tsareubiitsa), Perovskaia, in 1881. Prefiguring the post-Perovskaia
287
Ivan Turgenev, “The Threshold,” in The Essential Turgenev, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Allen (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1994), 877-78.
140
literary concerns about describing the violent nature of revolutionary women, Turgenev’s poem
prophetically brands violence an integral part of the concept of the martyr-heroine and, in so
doing, adds a new dimension to its previous depiction as a half-conscious, motionless prisoner by
Polonsky.
288
This timely addition not only illustrates Turgenev’s perceptiveness of changes in the
Russian concept of the feminine, but also demonstrates the writer’s hesitancy to cross the
narrative “threshold” of describing female violence. As both Turgenev’s heroine and Turgenev’s
narrator stand on the verge of transgression, her – choosing to commit – and him – to depict
violence, it is the heroine who crosses the threshold and leaves the narrator behind a heavy
curtain, unable or, perhaps, unwilling to follow her into the void of revolutionary martyrdom.
The narrator’s reluctance to portray the martyr-heroine after her crossover may partly stem from
his ethical prejudice against female violence. However, a more plausible explanation lies in the
narrator’s lack of means to describe this new phenomenon in fictional terms. This supposition is
further supported by the fact that Turgenev neither creates another female character after The
Threshold nor devises a new martyr-heroine in response to the trial of Perovskaia, as he does in
the case of Zasulich. Given Turgenev’s ensuing silence on the life of the martyr-heroine after
1878, it is likely that Turgenev’s Russian girl has exhausted his narrative options, making The
Threshold Turgenev’s farewell poem to his earlier representations of women.
288
Turgenev’s ability to foresee the transformation of female figures in literature and life was noticed by Tolstoy,
who stated, “Turgenev did a great thing by writing the remarkable portraits of women. Maybe, the women that he
wrote about did not exist, but when he created them, they appeared. It is true; I myself later observed Turgenevian
women in life” [Тургенев сделал великое дело тем, что написал удивительные портреты женщин. Может
быть, таких, как он писал, и не было, но когда он написал их, они появились. Это – верно; я сам наблюдал
потом тургеневских женщин в жизни]. Cited in N. I. Gitovich, ed., M. Gor’kii i A. Chekhov: Perepiska, stat’i,
vyskazyvaniia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1951), 161. Another example of
the public’s belief in Turgenev’s “prophetic vision” is provided by Oliver, who remarks: “German journals had
taken to calling him [Turgenev] der Prophet, noting a similarity between Zasulich and Marianna, Turgenev’s
heroine in his novel Virgin Soil.” See Oliver, “Fool or Saint?,” 82.
141
Having become Turgenev’s last portrayal of a female revolutionary, the Russian girl is,
therefore, important not only as an epitome of Turgenev’s earlier “Amazonian” maidens, but also
as a formal narrative experiment with the realist ways of depicting female figures.
289
Instead of
using the family plot, Turgenev’s poem consists of a series of questions, which test the heroine’s
commitment to the revolutionary cause. Notwithstanding its innovative structure, the poem
derives its testing impulse from the realist narrative, which frequently puts its female
protagonists through a variety of moral trials on their way to maturity. While traditional realist
works usually conceal the restrictive nature of the testing format in order to provide the
impression of the heroine’s narrative autonomy, The Threshold lays bare the device of testing as
symptomatic of the controlling patriarchal narrative.
Similar to the testing format, which serves as a recap and a critique of the former ways to
portray female characters, the content of the test also demonstrates how traditional ethical norms
fail to define Turgenev’s martyr-heroine. By framing the Russian girl’s commitment in the
conventional language of feminine sacrifice, the test presents the reader with the basics of “The
Realist Feminine 101” description as it tries to dissuade the heroine from breaking the expected
ethical norms of this description. Considerably surpassing these norms, the Russian girl expands
the scope of the test to include a woman’s readiness for violence and rejection of family tropes as
two important features of the new concept of the Russian feminine. The fact that the Russian girl
willingly accepts these unorthodox traits as part of her new identity makes it impossible for her
to remain on this side of the threshold and pushes her to the margins of the traditional narrative,
where she eventually disappears behind the proverbial curtain of revolutionary martyrdom.
289
Jane Costlow, “‘Oo-la-la’ and ‘No-no-no’: Odintsova as Woman Alone in Fathers and Children,” in A Plot of
Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature, ed. Sona S. Hoisington (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1995), 22.
142
The heroine’s journey towards her narrative exodus starts early in the poem as Turgenev
begins to deprive his protagonist of several narrative crutches, starting with her name. A symbol
of the new feminine rather than a concrete literary personage, Turgenev’s heroine is simply
called “a girl” (devushka) with a subsequent adjectival qualification, “the Russian girl” (Russkaia
devushka). Given Turgenev’s earlier praise of the female defendants from the trial of the Fifty as
fundamentally Russian in their sacrifice, his focus on the Russianness of the female protagonist
from The Threshold legitimizes the concept of the martyr-heroine as a uniquely Russian
phenomenon.
290
By framing the Russian girl as a successor to the traditional Russian values of
female suffering and resilience, Turgenev establishes the continuity of the Russian perception of
the feminine and presents his martyr-heroine as a highpoint of the realist portrayal of women
and, inevitably, the beginning of its decline.
Validated as a novel representative of her gender and her country, Turgenev’s Russian
girl emerges as a symbol of the new Russian woman, whose lack of a personal name not only
emphasizes her ubiquitous presence in Russian culture, but also further underscores her
alienation from the traditional female protagonists of the realist narrative. Continuing the
tradition of anonymous literary martyr-heroines, started by Polonsky’s prisoner, Turgenev’s
Russian girl takes Polonsky’s estranged, highly symbolic portrayal to a greater level of
abstraction. By expanding his character’s definition from a prisoner into a girl, Turgenev
subsumes Polonsky’s image as one of the many facets of the new martyr-heroine, whose
experience is not to be reduced to the prison narrative, or any other plot for that matter.
290
“The fact is remarkable – and in no other land – decisively in no land – possible: from 52 political prisoners –
there are 18 women!!” [Факт знаменательный – и ни в какой другой земле – решительно ни в какой –
невозможный: из 52-х политических преступников – 18 женщин!!]. See Turgenev, “A. V. Golovninu,” 103.
143
For example, when questioning the girl about her revolutionary stamina, Turgenev’s
narrator mentions prison as only one of many obstacles on her way to revolutionary martyrdom,
such as “cold, hunger, hatred, scorn, contempt, resentment, illness, and death.” By articulating
the adversities, which precede and follow the heroine’s possible imprisonment, Turgenev’s
narrator extends Polonsky’s narrow focus from a particular place – prison – to a set of more
abstract concepts and feelings, thus preventing the martyr-heroine from being narratively
“imprisoned” into a concrete location. In fact, it is the increased range of the Russian girl’s
emotional and physical discomforts, which not only advances her symbolic significance beyond
that of Polonsky’s prisoner, but also expands her experience as a martyr-heroine.
The abstracted depiction of the Russian girl extends beyond the absence of a name and a
defined future to her non-existent visual portrayal. The fact that the Russian girl is not only
nameless but also faceless further contributes to her symbolic status of a concept rather than a
concrete personage. In contrast to Polonsky’s strictly visual presentation of the martyr-heroine,
Turgenev’s girl is not visible but audible. Since the entire plot focuses on the girl’s interrogation
by the unseen voice, the reader has to define the martyr-heroine through her convictions rather
than her appearance. The choice of a voice (golos) for the girl’s interlocutor, as well as the
voice’s invisibility, further suggest Turgenev’s emphasis on the intellectual rather the visual
portrayal of his heroine. This change from sight to voice in the manner of presenting the new
female trope is significant because it moves the martyr-heroine towards an even larger degree of
generalization and introduces discourse rather than visual imagery as a more appropriate way to
portray the revolutionary feminine.
Turgenev’s choice of discourse as a means to frame the martyr-heroine also helps to
highlight her non-physical, asexual nature. By switching to the narrative of words instead of
144
pictures, the poem completely desexualizes the Russian girl as it emphasizes the spiritual
meaning of her quest and eschews any glimpse of her bodily features.
291
The heroine’s spiritual
power is further demonstrated by her own self-abnegating responses and the two
pronouncements on her future, a “fool” and a “saint,” which evoke the Russian religious tradition
of the holy fool and, in so doing, deny the Russian girl any physical or material gratifications.
292
Along with her refusal of basic comforts, Turgenev’s protagonist also rejects her own presence
in the poem, agreeing to a narrative non-existence as a fair price for becoming a martyr-heroine.
In the end, as the Russian girl flees from the narrator’s sight and grasp after crossing the
threshold, her disappearance becomes emblematic not only of her non-physical nature, but also
of the failure of the narrative to sustain her.
This crisis of female representation exposes Turgenev’s resolve to undermine the realist
female portrayal by subverting its very essence – the moral dilemma of a self-defining subject.
293
Coming across as a myth rather than a problematic novelistic personage, Turgenev’s martyr-
291
Turgenev’s tendency to accentuate the spiritual side of his female characters is noticed by Merezhkovsky, who
argues, “Turgenev is the poet of the Eternal Virginity. I cannot imagine that Turgenev’s women and girls have the
same bodies as Tolstoy’s Kitty, Natasha, and even Anna Karenina. It seems that their bodies are cloudy, ghostly, and
transparent, like the bodies of Gogolian mermaids, through which the moon is shining” [Тургенев – поэт вечной
девственности. Я не могу себе представить, что у женщин и девушек Тургенева такие же тела, как у
толстовской Китти, Наташи или даже Анны Карениной. Кажется, что тела их облачные, призрачные и
прозрачные, как тела гоголевских русалок, сквозь которые светит луна] See Dmitrii Merezhkovsky,
“Turgenev,” vol. 12 of Polnoe sobranie sochinenii D. S. Merezhkovskogo (Saint-Petersburg–Moscow: M. O. Vol’f,
1911), 135; my translation.
292
For more about the holy fool in Russian history and culture, see Dmitrii Likhachev and Alexander Panchenko,
“Smekhovoi mir” Drevnei Rusi (Leningrad: Nauka, 1976); Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, The Slave Soul of Russia:
Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering (New York: New York University Press, 1995); Ewa Majewska
Thompson, Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture (Lanham, MD: University Press of America,
1987); and Harriet Murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1992), 1-31.
293
For more on the problematic modern individual in Hegel, whose philosophy was instrumental for the
development of the Russian realist novel, see Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1975). For more on the psychological evolution of the Russian literary character as an introspective subject, see
Lidiia Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, trans. and ed. Judson Rosengrant (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1991).
145
heroine is prepared to endure any difficulty known to the narrator. Unaffected by physical
impediments, the Russian girl is similarly unfazed by a psychological set of adversities, such as
the lack of accolades, the disappearance of her name in posterity, a need to commit a crime, or
her possible disappointment in the cause. Unable to deter the Russian girl from becoming a
martyr-heroine, the narrator runs out of possible narrative scares to waver her determination and
fails to return the heroine to the previous way of a woman’s narrative existence as a positive, yet
complicated character, often shown in disagreement with herself.
This lack of internal disagreement about crossing the moral threshold is precisely what
separates the narrative of the Russian girl from that of her literary predecessors. While Annas,
Tatianas, and Katerinas are self-conscious individuals who struggle to define their relationship
with a contingent world, the Russian girl challenges the accepted portrayal of a literary heroine
as problematic.
294
In contrast to the visible distress of previous novelistic protagonists troubled
by the challenging questions of morality, the Russian girl appears composed in her resolution to
subvert the contextual and formal norms of the traditional narrative. Despite the narrator’s
attempt to find gaps in the heroine’s determination, the Russian girl never yields to provocations
or shows any doubt about her choice. In fact, she continuously demonstrates the futility of testing
her revolutionary resolve and appears unfazed by even the more troublesome questions about her
potential violence and the loss of family support.
295
294
Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1971).
295
In her penchant for sacrifice and ability to endure suffering, the Russian girl is not a newcomer, but an
ideological descendant of Turgenev’s earlier heroines, such as Natalia from Rudin (Rudin, 1856), Elena from On the
Eve, Sofi from “The Strange Story” (“Strannaia istoriia,” 1870), and Lukeria from “A Living Relic” (“Zhivye
moshchi,” 1874). For example, Natalia openly voices a woman’s readiness for martyrdom, “Believe me, a woman is
not only able to value self-sacrifice; she can sacrifice herself.” See Ivan Turgenev, Rudin, trans. Constance Garnett
(London: William Heinemann, 1900), 136.
146
In her refusal to be problematized, the Russian girl is quite similar to the ascetic and
revolutionary heroes examined by Morris, who argues that the complexity of the realist novel
cannot accommodate these heroes’ one-sided narrative. According to Morris, “the incorporation
of a unidimensional hero into a naturalistic work of literature is ultimately a difficult and only a
partially feasible undertaking. The ascetic is inherently a misfit in such works, and very little can
be done to make him fit.”
296
Just as Morris’s ascetics fail to be become a genuine part of the
realist novel, so does the Russian girl. As her monolithic character and revolutionary agenda
exhaust the productive capacity of the realist canon, there is nothing left for the Russian girl but
to escape the realist narrative into the abyss of revolutionary martyrdom.
297
A telling sign of this narrative dissolution is Turgenev’s reduction of the lengthy Russian
cultural text of feminine suffering and sacrifice to a brief summary of its main features. By
condensing the extensive novelistic tradition of the Russian feminine to a one-page interrogation,
Turgenev questions the suitability of the Russian novels for portraying the new figure of a
female revolutionary. Opposing the “large loose baggy monsters” of the realist tradition,
Turgenev chooses a more compact genre of a narrative poem and an even denser form of a
verbal questionnaire as a shortcut to his depiction of the martyr-heroine.
298
This shortcut proves
to be short-lived as it quickly releases the martyr-heroine from the story, revealing her ability to
make any attempt at definition redundant. With each question embodying a gloomy prediction
296
Morris, Saints, 126.
297
Another Turgenev’s work, in which the heroine chooses the proverbial abyss over her regular life is the novel On
the Eve, in which Elena refuses to return home after her husband’s death and goes to war instead, “I have been
brought to the edge of the precipice and I must fall over.” See Turgenev, On the Eve, 286. This precedent suggests
that the themes of crossing the threshold and escaping traditional narrative expectations continue to preoccupy
Turgenev, especially in his portrayals of women.
298
Henry James, preface to vol. 1 of The Tragic Muse, vol. 7 of The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), x.
147
about the Russian girl’s anticipated revolutionary experience and each answer justifying that
prediction, there appears no narrative future for Turgenev’s heroine, other than the one outlined
through negation.
An example of negation as the main descriptive feature of the martyr-heroine is the
Russian girl’s rejection of every positive means of representation, which gradually erases her
presence from the narrative.
299
In a self-cancelling fashion, the heroine claims that “she needs
neither gratitude, nor pity, nor acknowledgment of her feat” and agrees to a “nameless sacrifice.”
Not only does Turgenev’s female protagonist negate the preservation of her memory after her
death, but she also declines a narrative label for herself – an important statement, which suggests
her willingness to abandon all features of the traditional female portrayal. Having depleted the
narrative capabilities of “The Realist Feminine 101,” the Russian girl emerges as a new narrative
species, making it nearly impossible to discuss her future in any other but negative terms.
300
Turgenev’s decision to depict the Russian girl through an annulling, reductive set of
questions and answers also undermines the usual approach to portraying a female character as a
part of the family structure. Given the writer’s previously manifested tendency to remove his
more emancipated heroines from the family hierarchy, it is not surprising that Turgenev is
299
Another Turgenev’s story, in which the female character slowly withers away, is “A Living Relic.” After a
strange, inexplicable fall, the peasant heroine Lukeria begins to shrink in her body until she dies. Even though
Lukeria’s withdrawal from life and Turgenev’s narrative is a result of an accident rather than a matter of choice, her
saintly demeanor and acceptance of suffering make her a definite precursor to the Russian girl from The Threshold.
300
Another doomed character, who is also undone by the narrative, is the nihilist Bazarov from Turgenev’s novel
Fathers and Children (Ottsy i deti, 1862). The way Turgenev discusses Bazarov is similar to the way he presents the
Russian girl, suggesting a larger affinity between the two in terms of their zeal and martyrdom: “I dreamed of a
somber, wild, large figure, half-grown from the earth, strong, wicked, honest – and yet doomed to destruction –
because it still stands on the threshold of the future, – I dreamed of some strange pendant to the Pugachovs and so
on” [Мне мечталась фигура сумрачная, дикая, большая, до половины выросшая из почвы, сильная, злобная,
честная, — и все-таки обреченная на погибель, — потому что она все-таки стоит еще в преддверии
будущего, — мне мечтался какой-то странный pendant Пугачевым и т. д.]. See Ivan Turgenev, “Pis’ma I. S.
Turgeneva K. K. Sluchevskomu,” vol. 7 of Shchukinskii sbornik (Moscow: Tipografiia Tovarishchestva A. I.
Mamontova, 1907), 321; my translation.
148
especially wary of using traditional female tropes to describe his most liberated female
protagonist – the revolutionary martyr-heroine.
301
As a creator of some of Russia’s most
rebellious female characters, Turgenev routinely challenges accepted family relations and breaks
narrative cliché and ethical stereotypes. Further evidence for the subversive nature of Turgenev’s
heroines is found in Elena’s unchaperoned visit to her Bulgarian fiancé Insarov in On the Eve
and in the shared living arrangement between unmarried Marianna and her fiancé Nezhdanov in
Virgin Soil. Whereas these divergent heroines do not fully destroy the patriarchal plot because
they eventually do get married, the Russian girl collapses the familial narrative altogether and
renders it completely unproductive for her portrayal.
Having finished the estrangement process that Elena and Marianna have started, the
Russian girl not only sheds her familial roles, but also discards any personal relationships, which
may have presented her as a verisimilar character with an authentic story. Placed outside of the
family hierarchy with no characters to frame her as a tangible personage, Turgenev’s martyr-
heroine has no other point of reference to the narrative than through questions from an unfamiliar
voice. Used to contextualize the revolutionary feminine as a narratable phenomenon, these
questions become the last crutches that keep the Russian girl at the threshold of the realist
narrative and provide her with any concrete substance. As a plot substitute for a traditional
dialogue with a concrete personage, the heroine’s questioning by a mysterious voice further
suggests that in The Threshold Turgenev departs from his earlier detailed, contextualized,
301
Turgenev’s other heroines who attempt to subvert the traditional family plot are Natalia from Rudin, Asia from
“Asia” (“Asia,” 1857), Elena from On the Eve, Sofi from “The Strange Story,” and Marianna from Virgin Soil. For
more on Turgenev’s response to the woman question, see April Fitzlyon, “I. S. Turgenev and the ‘Woman’
Question,” New Zealand Slavonic Journal (1983): 161-73 and Kathryn Ambrose, The Woman Question in
Nineteenth-Century English, German and Russian Literature: (En)gendering Barriers (Boston: Brill, 2015), 152-82.
149
problematized portrayal of the strong woman to a more symbolic, mythological vision of the
martyr-heroine.
302
The emblematic nature of Turgenev’s heroine is noticed by the critic Vengerov, who
argues that the non-representational depiction of the Russian girl distinguishes her from
Turgenev’s other maidens:
The heroine of The Threshold stands at the center of that apotheosis of the
Russian woman, which is represented by the gallery of Turgenev’s female types.
The impulse of the Russian woman to the light, incarnated by Turgenev in the
charming images of Natalia, Asia, Elena, Marianna, is represented here in its most
radiant manifestation.
303
Vengerov’s use of abstractions in his definition of the Russian girl fittingly contrasts with
his mention of the more concrete “charming images” of Turgenev’s other female
characters. By highlighting the Russian girl’s transcendent nature as opposed to the more
earthly portrayals of her literary predecessors, Vengerov further emphasizes her symbolic
status. While Natalia, Asia, Elena, and Marianna can never fully escape the narrative
302
Turgenev’s move towards a more abstract depiction of a female character seems to be a natural continuation of
his overall penchant for allegory in depicting female figures. According to Merezhkovsky, “Turgenev’s women and
girls are icons among the human faces; among the living people they are – ‘the living relics’” [Тургеневские
женщины и девушки среди человеческих лиц – иконы; среди живых людей – ‘живые мощи’]. See
Merezhkovsky, “Turgenev,” 135.
303
“Героиня ‘Порога’ стоит в центре того апофеоза русской женщины, которым является галлерея женсних
типов Тургенева. Порыв русской женщины к свету, воплощенный Тургеневым в обаятельных образах
Натальи, Аси, Елены, Марианны, представлен здесь в наиболее лучезарном своем проявлении.” See
Vengerov, “Turgenevskii,” 156; my translation. Another critic Krukovskii suggests that Turgenev’s move towards
more abstracted depictions of women begins with Marianna, who represents a new type and is, therefore, portrayed
schematically. See Krukovskii, “Russkaia zhenshchina,” 190-91.
150
because of their “incarnation” in the plot through their relationships with family and
friends, the Russian girl abandons the traditional plot altogether, which not only
complicates her narrative representation as a realist character, but also enables her to
function as an emblematic representation of the modern concept of the Russian feminine.
This seemingly contradictory nature of the narrative in The Threshold, which tries
to define yet fails to contain the martyr-heroine within its borders, stems from Turgenev’s
own polemical attitude towards literary discourse. Recognizing its structural importance
as a way to organize one’s own universe, Turgenev nevertheless views the proliferation
of discourse with suspicion, doubting the effectiveness of the excessive ideological or
philosophical talk. This feature of Turgenev’s writing, known as his poetics of narrative
control, receives extensive, albeit contrasting, coverage by Turgenev’s scholars Jane
Costlow and Elizabeth Allen.
Whereas Costlow and Allen both examine Turgenev’s carefully constructed
narrative as a sign of his departure from extended realist discourse, they diverge on the
reasons behind Turgenev’s motivation for this departure. In her discussion of Turgenev’s
“poetics of silence,” Costlow argues that the writer’s desire to control the narrative stems
from his wariness of unqualified philosophical discourse, which inspires him to move
away from the extended narrative into the aesthetics of understatement and, occasionally,
silence:
Turgenev’s own literary language is grounded in the paradox of his own longings:
the longings of a man of consciousness for the wordlessness of immediacy, the
longings of a poet burdened with the legacies of literary tradition for the
151
directness of peasant speech, the longing of the intellectual for the silences of the
everyday.
304
While Costlow examines Turgenev’s aesthetics of restraint as a way to curb the
overwhelming proliferation of discourse, Allen views Turgenev’s “ethics of distance and
constraint” as a way to stabilize erratic human experiences by “constructing a carefully
controlled, equable version of existence to supplant uncontrolled reality.”
305
Defining Turgenev’s
art as Apollonian in its focus on harmony and balance, Allen argues that Turgenev’s narratives
serve both aesthetic and ethical ends, as they become a defense mechanism to order the chaotic
existence. Given Turgenev’s simultaneous use of both tendencies – outlined by Costlow as his
move away from the narrative and by Allen as his obsession with creating the narrative – it is
precisely this dynamic interaction between the two, which, in my opinion, makes Turgenev’s
poetics subversive of the production of any narrative, including his own.
A telling example of this interaction is found in The Threshold. By approaching
Turgenev’s poetics of constraint as driven by both – a fear of and a desire for narratives – I
suggest that the combination of these attitudes is precisely what makes the Russian girl a
narrative monument to the realist crisis of female representation. Alternating between these two
aspects of Turgenev’s narrative control, The Threshold bestows the Apollonian narrative over the
Dionysian revolutionary feminine only to acknowledge the former’s failure to depict the martyr-
heroine as a verisimilar character. In his attempt to make sense of female revolutionaries who
304
Jane Costlow, Worlds within Worlds: The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990),
11, 29.
305
Elizabeth Allen, Beyond Realism: Turgenev's Poetics of Secular Salvation (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1992), 44.
152
threaten to plunge the world into the revolutionary void, Turgenev at first resorts to the power of
the narrative, seeking to accommodate and, thus, control the destructive impulses of the martyr-
heroine. At the same time, Turgenev’s suspicion of extended discourse makes him realize the
restrictive nature of traditional novelistic female portrayals, which, in turn, results in his release
of the martyr-heroine into the space beyond the realist narrative.
With the Russian girl safely gone into the indescribable void of female revolutionary
martyrdom, the final two words used to describe her narrative exodus, “a fool” and “a saint,”
further emphasize the unknown nature of her narrative future, which is neither defined by family
tropes nor limited by traditional female binaries, such as “saint and whore” or “saint and sinner.”
While labeling the martyr-heroine a saint or a holy fool may suggest the positive view of her
future sacrifice, it also reflects Turgenev’s concerns about his character’s narratability in other
than hagiographical terms. In resorting to a familiar religious paradigm, Turgenev demonstrates
the reluctance of the traditional narrative to frame revolutionary women in any other way but
through the religious meaning of their martyrdom. Aware of the limitations of this
hagiographical model, Turgenev purposefully expands the traditional definition of a “female
saint” to include female violence and rejection of the patriarchal narrative, thus deconstructing
the original meaning of female sanctity. Habitually seen as an example of Turgenev’s uncertainty
about the moral implications of female violence, this dual definition not only destabilizes the
traditional view of female sacrifice as righteous, but also, in a typically Turgenevian way, avoids
the final judgment about his heroine’s future.
Whether deemed a fool, a saint, both, or neither, Turgenev’s Russian girl consistently
undermines her narrative status as she deconstructs the very premises of the realist discourse,
namely – its reliance on family tropes. In his final pronouncement on the nature of the martyr-
153
heroine as twofold, Turgenev suggests another narrative path for depicting women – the one not
based on tropes, but grounded in the perception of a woman’s behavior as foolish and, possibly
irrationally, or saintly and, potentially ideal. Given the ensuing literary era of Decadence and
Symbolism, whose narrative is founded on the dichotomy between the uninhibited Femme Fatale
and the ethereal Eternal Feminine, The Threshold’s concluding statement is no less than
prophetic in its prediction of an altogether different narrative approach to portraying the modern
concept of the Russian feminine.
306
306
Further support for this assertion is found in the positive reappraisal of Turgenev’s female figures by two
Symbolist writers Merezhkovsky and Bal’mont. For Merezhkovsky, Turgenev’s art is important because his “artistic
thought” is “the eternal feminine” and because Turgenev is “the world poet of the Eternal Feminine” [творческая
мысль Тургенева - вечная женственность,” “всемирный поэт Вечной Женственности]. See Dmitrii
Merezhkovsky, “Poet vechnoi zhenstvennosti. I. S. Turgenev,” in Vechnye sputniki (Moscow: “Shkola-Press,”
1996), 630, 631. Likewise, for Balmont, Turgenev’s main achievement is that he “taught us to understand, through
beautiful love, that the best and the truest essence, valued in art, is the Girl-Woman” [научившего нас понимать,
через красивую любовь, что лучшая и самая верная сущность, благовеющая в художественном творчестве,
есть Девушка-Женщина]. See Balmont, “Mysli,” 316.
154
Section IV
From all the Russian writers, he is the most mnemonic writer. He is a genius of
the poetic memory.
307
—Chukovskii
Russian literature created the lofty images of submissive, obedient, resigned
characters, but Korolenko made it his goal to create a gallery of the rebellious,
resistant, and revolting [protagonists] to defend one’s violated rights.
308
—Chukovskii
Korolenko’s The Strange One or Returning to the Narrative
While Polonsky and Turgenev depart from the familial canon in their depictions of the
martyr-heroine, Korolenko places his female revolutionary in a more traditional realist narrative.
Faced with the similar challenges of adapting the previous form for the new content, Korolenko
does not abandon the realist portrayal of the feminine, but instead stretches its boundaries to
accommodate the martyr-heroine as one of its less known manifestations. Known for his belief in
the synthesis between romanticism and realism, Korolenko presents his martyr-heroine as a
narrative compromise, inscribing her into the traditional story of female victimization, while
highlighting her exceptional, almost mythological status.
309
It is this compromise that enables
Korolenko’s martyr-heroine to acquire a context and lays the foundation for her subsequent
307
“Из всех русских писателей он писатель наиболее мнемонический. Он гений поэтической памяти.” See
Kornei Chukovskii, “Vladimir Korolenko kak khudozhnik,” vol. 2 of Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh. Kriticheskie
rasskazy (Moscow: Pravda, 1990), 187; my translation.
308
“Русская литература создала высокие образы покорных, послушных, смирившихся, но Короленко как
будто целью себе поставил создать галерею бунтующих, несдавшихся, восставших на защиту попранных
прав.” See Kornei Chukovskii, “Vladimir Korolenko kak publitsist,” vol. 2 of Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh.
Kriticheskie rasskazy (Moscow: Pravda, 1990), 202; my translation.
309
See Leonard A. Polakiewicz, “Korolenko,” in Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. Victor Terras (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1985), 232. For more on Korolenko’s synthesizing approach to literature, see B. Averin,
“Lichnost’ i tvorchestvo V.G. Korolenko,” introduction to vol. 1 of Sobranie sochinenii. Povesti i rasskazy 1879-
1888, by V. G. Korolenko (Leningrad: “Khudozhestvennaia literatura,” 1989), 8-12.
155
portrayals in Tolstoy’s Resurrection and Gorky’s Mother as an actual personage with a narrative
history.
310
One of the reasons for Korolenko’s attempt to show the “realist” pedigree of his martyr-
heroine lies in his own revolutionary background. Exiled to Siberia because of his populist
leanings in 1879, Korolenko experienced facets of revolutionary sacrifice firsthand and, thus,
was considerably more familiar with the actual life of revolutionaries than Polonsky or
Turgenev.
311
While both of these writers investigate the phenomenon of female revolutionary
martyrdom from a political, social, and geographical distance, Korolenko portrays his martyr-
heroine not only as an abstract symbol or a mythologized sufferer for a cause, but also as a living
and, by implication, imperfect human being. Without rejecting the pathos of his heroine’s
suffering, Korolenko nevertheless makes her susceptible to common human weaknesses such as
pride, shortsightedness, disillusionment, and stubbornness. Hence, by depicting the female
revolutionary as a resolute, yet frustrated and angry young girl, Korolenko is able to provide a
more realistic portrayal of the martyr-heroine – the portrayal that successfully combines the myth
of female revolutionary martyrdom with the gloomy reality of a female revolutionary’s life.
Another reason for Korolenko’s more down-to-earth depiction of his heroine is his
training as a journalist. Given Korolenko’s dual skills as a correspondent and a writer, it is not
310
For a more recent examination of Korolenko’s influence on Gorky, see Barry Scherr, “Reshaping the Past:
Gorky’s Reminiscences of Korolenko,” The Russian Review 73, no. 4 (2014): 532–49. The importance of Korolenko
as a prominent literary figure was corroborated by contemporary critics who referred to the period from the 1880s
until the 1920 as the “age of Korolenko.” Cited in Victoria Babenko, “Nature Descriptions and Their Function in
Korolenko’s Stories,” Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 16, no. 3 (1974): 424. For the
original source, see A. B. Petrishchev, “Mysli o nem,” in Pamiati VI. G. Korolenko, ed. V. A. Miakotina (Moscow:
Zadruga, 1922), 83.
311
For more on the history of Korolenko’s exile, see A. K. Kotov, V. G. Korolenko. Ocherk zhizni i literaturnoi
deiatel’nosti (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1957), 10–18 and Averin,
“Lichnost’,” 10-11.
156
surprising that the “literary-journalistic” spirit of his Siberian essays also makes his portrayal of
the female revolutionary exile more lifelike.
312
In contrast to Polonsky and Turgenev, whose
martyr-heroines, while inspired by real revolutionary women such as Figner and Zasulich, were
still written as a fictional abstraction, Korolenko was not only personally acquainted with the
prototype for his martyr-heroine, but also familiar with the circumstances of her exile – an
important factor that enabled Korolenko to provide his character with a more realistic context.
The presumed model for Korolenko’s “strange one” was Evelina Ulanovskaia - a twenty-
year-old female midwifery student who, like Korolenko, was exiled to the village Berezovskie
Pochinki in Viatka region in 1879.
313
Korolenko’s meeting with Ulanovskaia clearly left a lasting
impression on an aspiring writer, who first examined the phenomenon of the revolutionary
feminine in his fictional story The Strange One and then – in a much later autobiographical work
The History of My Contemporary (Istoriia moego sovremennika, 1905-1921).
314
Ulanovskaia’s
dual status in Korolenko’s oeuvres, as a literary character in The Strange One and a real person
in The History of My Contemporary, suggests the writer’s early awareness of the realistic
narrative potential of the martyr-heroine, whose actual suffering and physical death in The
Strange One make her a more convincing character than Polonsky’s immobile prisoner or
Turgenev’s allegorical Russian girl.
312
Lauren Leighton, “Korolenko’s Stories of Siberia,” The Slavonic and East European Review 49, no. 115 (1971):
207.
313
See M. A. Sokolova, “Chelovek sozdan dlia schast’ia,” introduction to Izbrannoe: Rasskazy i povesti, by
Vladimir Korolenko (Kiev: Izdatel’stvo TsK LKSMU “Molod’,” 1987), 7-8. For more on Ulanovskaia’s life in
exile, see A. V. Pribylev, “V gody nevoli: perepiska E. L. Ulanovskoi-Kranikhfel’d (prototipa geroini rasskaza V. G.
Korolenko ‘Chudnaia’) s mater’iu,” Katorga i ssylka 24 (1926): 223-50.
314
In The History of My Contemporary, Ulanovskaia is the main character of chapter VIII in book III called “The
Broad is Brought” (“Devku privezli”).
157
The fact that Korolenko includes The Strange One in his Siberian cycle, consisting of
sixteen different stories, also contributes to a sense of realism.
315
Instead of isolating his martyr-
heroine in a separate publication, Korolenko tries to contextualize her tale as an important
expression and a formative component of contemporary Russian culture. By including a
revolutionary woman in his Siberian gallery of other socially marginalized characters, Korolenko
validates the trope of the martyr-heroine as part of a larger narrative – that of revolutionary-
minded exiles. While still named “the strange one,” meaning both wondrous and eccentric,
Korolenko’s martyr-heroine is no longer alone in her quest for martyrdom. In contrast to
Polonsky’s secluded prisoner or Turgenev’s detached Russian girl, Korolenko’s “strange one” is
surrounded by other unconventional, marginalized characters, whose uncanny stories frame hers
not as an aberration, but as a more familiar phenomenon. This sense of community, created
through the shared themes of Siberian exile and human suffering, provides Korolenko’s martyr-
heroine with the factual context and enables her to become a more grounded personage.
316
In addition to placing the revolutionary feminine in a larger narrative of similarly
alienated characters, Korolenko also highlights the importance of the martyr-heroine by making
The Strange One the opening story. Bearing in mind Korolenko’s penchant for portraying male
types and a “man’s world,” the appearance of a female protagonist in a story, leading the whole
315
For more about Korolenko’s Siberian cycle, see Leighton, “Korolenko’s stories,” 200-203. Due to censorship
restrictions, the story was not officially published in Russia until 1905, when it appeared in Russkoe bogatstvo under
the title “A Business Trip” (“Komandirovka”). For more on the publication history of The Strange One, see Mark
Conliffe, “Isolation and Russian Short Fiction, 1877-1890: Garshin, Chekhov, and Korolenko” (PhD diss.,
University of Toronto, 1999), 228.
316
The subject of women in Siberian exile was first touched upon in the exiled Archpriest Avvakum’s references to
his wife in his autobiography Life (Zhitie). See Avvakum, Zhitie protopopa Avvakuma, im samim napisannoe: i
drugie ego sochineniia, ed. N. K. Gudzii (Moscow: ZAO “Svarog i K,” 1997). It was brought into focus again after
the Decembrist revolt in 1825, when many Decembrists wives chose to accompany their husbands to Siberia. See
Leighton, “Korolenko’s stories,” 200.
158
cycle, is by all means significant.
317
By choosing the tale of a dying female revolutionary as a
starting point of all his Siberian stories, Korolenko emphasizes the twofold role of his heroine –
that of a symbol and of a realistic tragic personage– whose individual misfortune sets the tone for
the rest of the cycle.
318
The ambiguity of the story’s title, Chudnáia, further suggests the possible
overlap of the idealistic and dubious perceptions of the martyr-heroine, preparing the ground for
the equally ambivalent heroes from other stories. In the end, because of “the strange one’s” dual
symbolic and literal functions, Korolenko manages to de-romanticize the concept of the martyr-
heroine through the rough Siberian backdrop without losing its high ideological and cultural
significance.
The Male Guardians of the Realist Narrative
The Siberian exile setting is not the only device that allows Korolenko to position his
martyr-heroine in concrete time and space. In contrast to Polonsky and Turgenev, who only have
one male narrator to inscribe their martyr-heroines in the story, Korolenko finds this number
insufficient and secures his female character in the narrative with not one but two male narrators
– the “strange one’s” former guard Stepan Petrovich Gavrilov and Gavrilov’s current prisoner,
the stylized Korolenko. To ensure an even stronger narrative control over the martyr-heroine,
Korolenko introduces three more male personages – Gavrilov’s superior Ivanov; the colonel who
317
For more about the abundance of male characters and the lack of female voice in Korolenko, see Radha
Balasubramanian, “The Craft of V. G. Korolenko’s Fiction: Towards a Descriptive Poetics of His Short Stories”
(PhD diss., Indiana University, 1987), 176.
318
For more about the duality of Korolenko’s poetic world, see Babenko, “Nature,” 430. In her analysis of
Korolenko’s twofold approach to portraying nature, Babenko observes Korolenko’s propensity for synthesizing
realistic and symbolic descriptions: “His nature descriptions have also a dual aspect: the precise, sharply observed,
realistic descriptions, and the mystical, symbolical ones.”
159
refuses the “strange one’s” request; and “the strange one’s” friend-in-exile, the revolutionary
Riazantsev. On the one hand, such a strong presence of men from different social strata helps to
frame Korolenko’s martyr-heroine as a more authentic personage by portraying her from various
vantage points. On the other hand, the abundance of male figures, surrounding “the strange one,”
also raises a valid concern about the narratability of the revolutionary feminine in realist terms,
namely, how many male characters are actually needed to tie the martyr-heroine to the
narrative?
319
Aside from the increased number of male personages, Korolenko also diverges from
Polonsky and Turgenev in the type and range of his narrators. Whereas Polonsky’s and
Turgenev’s narrators are not in direct contact with their female protagonists, Korolenko’s
storytellers either have first-hand familiarity with the martyr-heroine or share a similar
revolutionary background. For example, the narrator Gavrilov personally knows “the strange
one,” whereas the other narrator, the stylized Korolenko, is a political prisoner. The familiarity of
both narrators with the context of revolutionary exile gives stronger credibility to their account
and makes their portrayal of the martyr-heroine more believable. Given that the two have
contrasting worldviews – that of a prison guard and of a male revolutionary, their dual depiction
of the martyr-heroine not only enhances the complexity of her character, but also reveals her
ability to bridge the gap between men from the opposing poles of the political spectrum.
320
319
The fact that the only other female characters in the story – “the strange one’s” mother and the house servant –
appear in the story after the “strange one’s” death further emphasizes the male-oriented nature of the narrative quest
for defining the “martyr-heroine.”
320
For more on women functioning as an object of exchange between men, see Claude Lévi-Strauss, The
Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 52-68 and Sedgwick, Between.
160
In addition to framing the martyr-heroine as a positive unifying force, the double male
narrative – Gavrilov’s tale and the stylized Korolenko’s retelling of Gavrilov’s tale – further
contributes to Korolenko’s synthesizing portrayal of “the strange one” as both a realistic and
symbolic character. Whereas the tale of Gavrilov describes the actual appearance and behavior of
the martyr-heroine, the retelling of his story by the stylized Korolenko, who is not directly
acquainted with “the strange one,” emphasizes her larger symbolic role as a source of
transformative experience for Gavrilov.
321
Because the stylized Korolenko – a revolutionary
himself – intrinsically understands the subversive nature of the martyr-heroine, he is unable to
describe her in traditional, familial terms and is therefore only used by Korolenko to highlight
“the strange one’s” symbolism.
322
On the other hand, the guard Gavrilov is a representative of
traditional values, which enables him rather than his male counterpart to provide an “estranged”
perception of the martyr-heroine by showing the extent of her physical and mental alienation
from the realist narrative.
323
The Rebirth of a Female Martyr: Scratch Politichka, Find Boiarynia Morozova
Gavrilov’s “estranged” depiction of “the strange one’s” bodily and emotional discord is
one of several narrative anchors that adds stronger realism to her portrayal in comparison to that
321
In line with the traditional function of women as spiritual guides in earlier Russian fiction, Korolenko’s heroine
“brought out the human qualities” in Gavrilov. See Balasubramanian, “The Craft,” 92. Along with awakening the
human side in her guard, “the strange one” also introduces Gavrilov to the world of Russian revolutionaries,
humanizing their agenda through her sacrifice.
322
Leighton also notes the supplementary role of the stylized Korolenko: “The story itself…is told and resolved by
Gavrilov, and his conclusion is elaborated by the main narrator to complete the frame and restate the significance of
the story in more educated terms.” See Leighton, “Korolenko’s Stories,” 202.
323
For more on the use of “estrangement” (ostranenie) as a device in Korolenko’s oeuvres, see Balasubramanian,
“The Craft,” 119-120. Given that ostranenie is an essential part of Korolenko’s poetics, it is not surprising that he
chooses it to portray an alien narrative phenomenon of the revolutionary feminine.
161
of previous martyr-heroines. Departing from Polonsky’s ephemeral prisoner and Turgenev’s
abstracted personification of Russian womanhood, “the strange one” is neither ephemeral nor
abstracted, but defined by her last name – Morozova – and her social status – “a political female
prisoner” (politichka). Both Morozova’s name and her position fix the martyr-heroine in the
narrative as a tangible character, whose present imprisonment implies some kind of previous
revolutionary experience in the Populist movement and whose last name identifies her as an
actual descendant of the Morozov family.
324
Even though Morozova’s past is not covered in the
story, the announcement of her name and status suggests that her fictional history is narratable in
realist terms as opposed to that of Polonsky’s and Turgenev’s anonymous heroines.
Besides increasing Morozova’s textual verisimilitude, these narrative anchors also allow
Korolenko to downgrade the idealistic concept of the revolutionary feminine to a factual
portrayal of a dying female political prisoner, Morozova. By substituting such generalizations as
Polonsky’s “suffering image” (obraz stradal’cheskii) or Turgenev’s “Russian girl” (Russkaia
devushka) with concrete biographical details, Korolenko is able to create a more factual and
credible portrayal of his martyr-heroine. Furthermore, by using the prosaic “political female
prisoner” (politichka) instead of a more romantic “female revolutionary” (revoliutsionerka) or
“female prisoner” (uznitsa), Korolenko also takes away from the quixotic perception of
revolutionary women and presents his martyr-heroine on a smaller, more realistic scale.
What makes Morozova’s surname particularly relevant for Korolenko’s synthesizing
portrayal of the realistic and symbolic features of the “strange one” is its larger cultural
significance. Besides establishing the heroine’s fictional ancestry, the name “Morozova” also
suggests an important historical lineage – that of Russian female martyrdom. In particular, it
324
Leighton, “Korolenko’s stories,” 211.
162
means to evoke the memory of a famous religious martyr-heroine from the seventeenth-century
Muscovite Russia, Boiarynia Morozova, known for her fervent dedication to religious causes and
willingness to die for her beliefs.
325
Given that Boiarynia Morozova opposed the religious
reforms that were initiated by the male heads of the Church, the Patriarch Nikon, and of the
Russian state, Tsar Alexis, it was only logical that her fundamentally anti-patriarchal character
made her experience of martyrdom especially appropriate for contextualizing the plight of the
martyr-heroine in The Strange One.
The first implicit association of Korolenko’s revolutionary martyr-heroine with her
religious predecessor happens in the beginning of the story, when Gavrilov is first introduced to
his female prisoner by her last name. The second explicit comparison with Boiarynia Morozova
comes at the end of the story, when Morozova’s revolutionary comrade-in-arm, Riazantsev,
explains her stubbornness in the context of her predecessor’s refusal to compromise: “You’re
every inch the [boiarynia] Morozova” (Nastoiashchaia vy Boiarynia Morozova).
326
Because
these two references to Morozova occur at the starting and culminating points in Gavrilov’s
narrative, they frame “the strange one” as a clear spiritual descendant of her zealous ancestor by
overtly identifying the story of her fictional martyrdom with Boiarynia Morozova’s real
sacrifice.
The narrative progression from a simple mention of Morozova’s last name to a clear
parallel with the historical Boiarynia Morozova also corresponds to Gavrilov’s growing
understanding of the ‘martyr-heroine’ phenomenon. Obsessed with decoding his prisoner,
325
Korolenko returns to the persona of Boiarynia Morozova in his later article “Two Paintings” (“Dve Kartiny,”
1887), in which he compares two pictures – “Christ and the Sinner” by Polenov and “Boiarynia Morozova” by
Surikov. By contrasting the portrayal of two female figures – the Prostitute and the Religious Martyr, Korolenko
reaffirms an important connection between these subversive tropes.
326
Korolenko, “The Strange One,” 238.
163
Gavrilov becomes so involved in resolving the “Morozova’s puzzle” that he cannot stop thinking
about her fate even after her death. Akin to Polonsky’s and Turgenev’s narrators, who are
strongly perturbed by their encounters with the martyr-heroine, Gavrilov also loses sleep and his
happy disposition after his meeting with Morozova. In his attempts to comprehend the martyr-
heroine, Gavrilov goes through several stages of misidentification, each time failing to place
Morozova in a larger cultural narrative of female martyrdom. Either because of his unfamiliarity
with the tale of Boiarynia Morozova or because of his refusal to associate the frail prisoner with
her strong predecessor, Gavrilov continuously misses the connection between political and
religious female martyrdoms.
The first overlooked parallel happens in the beginning of the story when Gavrilov briefly
mentions Morozova’s last name without detecting its symbolic undertones. Consistent with his
initial disregard for Morozova’s cultural heritage, Gavrilov does not refer to “the strange one” by
her last name throughout the story, but instead views her as a young, pitiful, child-like girl:
When she was led out, I was struck by her youth. She seemed a mere child. Her
fair hair was drawn back into a single braid, and her cheeks were flushed. But
later I was to see how really pale she was, in fact, chalk-white, all through the
journey. I pitied her the moment I saw her.
327
By describing the martyr-heroine through a more traditional narrative of a “maiden-in-
distress,” Gavrilov fails to notice the heroic, active, Morozovesque pathos of his prisoner.
Even when, by the end of story, Gavrilov finally hears the direct comparison of “the
327
Ibid., 227.
164
strange one” with Boiarynia Morozova from Riazantsev, he still misreads the allegory
and asks whether there is an actual familial kinship between the two Morozovas. The fact
that Gavrilov interprets Riazantsev’s comment literally further demonstrates the guard’s
inability to view his prisoner’s revolutionary ideals in the context of religious martyrdom
and heroic sacrifice.
In response to Gavrilov’s erroneous supposition, Riazantsev emphasizes the
symbolic nature of his comparison by rejecting the idea of a blood relationship in favor of
an ideological one: “Boyar or no boyar, but she sure comes of a stock you can break –
you’ve broken her already, as a matter of fact – but never bend. That you saw for
yourself. People of her kind do not bend.”
328
Thanks to Riazantsev’s explanation,
Gavrilov finally recognizes the importance of the ideological rather than familial ties for
Russian revolutionary culture and, consequently, realizes the affinity between the
revolutionary and religious narratives.
329
In addition to clarifying the significance of ideological bonds for Gavrilov, the
expansion of Morozova’s last name from blood to spiritual kinship also adds symbolic
value to Gavrilov’s earlier factual portrayal of “the strange one.” The dual meaning of
“the strange one’s” surname allows for a more integrated portrayal of the martyr-heroine,
who is no longer just a part of the Morozov family, but also a member of an ideological
group (politichka). Whereas Polonsky and Turgenev purposefully reject any family ties in
their depictions of the martyr-heroine, which leads to their characters’ one-sided
portrayal, Korolenko appropriates Morozova’s culturally loaded last name not to refute,
328
Ibid., 239.
329
For more on the substitution of family for an ideological comradeship, see Engel, Mothers.
165
but to extend our understanding of ancestry from family to ideology. Under such
circumstances, Morozova is able to embrace both narratives and emerge as a realistic
personage as well as a symbol of fanatical ideological beliefs.
By framing revolutionary Morozova as a spiritual descendant of religious Morozova,
Korolenko not only demonstrates the behavioral similarities between the two, but also places
“the strange one” in a long tradition of Russian martyr-heroines. Meant to highlight the historical
legacy of this phenomenon, Gavrilov’s story about revolutionary Morozova is, in fact, a re-write
of the tale of religious Boiarynia Morozova in a contemporary Russian context. While the
religious foundation of female revolutionary martyrdom is previously suggested by Polonsky and
Turgenev through their allusions to an icon and a holy fool, Korolenko further solidifies this
connection through a real historical personage. By directly invoking Boiarynia Morozova,
Korolenko presents the revolutionary feminine as something familiar to Russian culture and
substantiated by Russian history. Firmly rooted in the cultural and historical narrative of Russian
religious heroism, Korolenko’s martyr-heroine is, thus, no longer an alien narrative phenomenon,
but a continuation of the earlier Russian tradition of female martyrdom.
The Rebirth of a Female Martyr: Scratch Politichka, Find Baryshnia
Another narrative anchor that contextualizes “the strange one” as a recognizable social
and literary type is Gavrilov’s reference to his prisoner as “noble miss” (baryshnia).
330
The
addition of baryshnia to politichka not only identifies Morozova by her class, but also frames
330
According to Vladimir Dal’, the word baryshnia referred to “a woman of a noble title” (devitsa blagorodnogo
zvaniia). See Vladimir Dal’, vol. 1 of Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka, 6th ed. (Moscow:
Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo inostrannykh i nat
͡ sional’nykh slovarei, 1955), 49; my translation. While Gavrilov
perceives Morozova as baryshnia, he refers to another female character in the story – a servant – as a “wench” or a
“broad” (devka), clearly indicating his understanding of class distinctions and his ability to identify the woman
based on her social standing.
166
politichka as a likely successor of the baryshnia narrative. Suggestive of her noble or intellectual
pedigree, the frequent mention of baryshnia evokes the context of traditional realist novels,
famous for their enigmatic, strong-willed, and well-educated heroines. As a likely product of this
narrative environment, “the strange one” indeed exhibits many features that support her
baryshnia lineage.
For example, Gavrilov’s descriptions of Morozova’s sensitive nature, educated speech,
weak physical disposition, and poor health conjure an image of a sheltered maiden, who lacks
the mental and physical capacity to handle the difficulties of the trip to Siberia.
331
Similarly,
Morozova’s angry outburst against her guards, in which she called them “Barbarians!” and
“Slaves!” (Varvary! Kholopy!), as well as Gavrilov’s ensuing derogatory comment about her
imprudent behavior, “noble brat” (dvorianskoe otrod’e), also insinuate her genteel background.
In the end, Morozova’s continuous suffering on the road and her inability to relate to common
folks like Gavrilov reinforce the impression of Morozova as a rather pampered baryshnia,
neither ready for life in harsh Siberian conditions, nor accustomed to dealing with men from
lower classes.
Because of Morozova’s possible gentry or intelligentsia origins, her dislike of a common
man, Gavrilov, has usually been interpreted by Korolenko scholars in the context of the failure of
the Populist movement to connect with peasants.
332
A telling example of this reading is found in
331
Gavrilov does not always understand what Morozova is saying, which highlights the gap between their levels of
education and upbringing.
332
For more on the Populist movement in Russia, see Maureen Perrie, The Agrarian Policy of the Russian Socialist-
Revolutionary Party from Its Origins through the Revolution of 1905-1907 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1976), 5-52; Vladimir C. Nahirny, The Russian Intelligentsia: From Torment to Silence (New Brunswick:
Transaction Books, 1983), 7-12; Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to
Marxism, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), 222-67; and Franco Venturi,
Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia, trans. Francis
Haskell (New York: Knopf, 1960).
167
Leighton’s analysis of Morozova’s antagonistic relationship with Gavrilov as motivated by their
class disparity: “the roles of narod [the people] and intelligentsia are reversed by Gavrilov’s pity
for the girl, and all of his attempts to comfort her – to ‘go to the intelligentsia,’ so to speak – are
rudely and resentfully rejected.”
333
While this interpretation appropriately addresses the social
distinction between Gavrilov and Morozova, it does not venture beyond Morozova’s sensibilities
as baryshnia and reduces the ideological pathos of Morozova’s resentment of Gavrilov’s
patriarchal beliefs to her class-based misunderstanding of Gavrilov’s intentions.
Departing from Leighton’s view of Morozova as another deluded Populist baryshnia, I
suggest that “the strange one’s” antipathy towards Gavrilov is not so much prompted by their
class differences, but emerges as a result of her ideological allegiance. As a political prisoner,
Morozova views all her guards as representatives of the oppressive state and, hence, her
ideological enemies. The fact that the guards are men may have further deepened Morozova’s
antagonism, as she feels subjugated by the patriarchal narrative not only in terms of her political
ideals, but also because of her gender. By identifying her male guards as instruments of the
tsarist regime, Morozova is, therefore, unable to perceive them as individuals or relate to them
without animosity.
For instance, when asked by Riazantsev to recognize Gavrilov’s humanity and forgive
him before her imminent death, Morozova refuses to change her hostile attitude towards her
guard:
Yes, we are enemies! The business of the likes of him is to keep an eye on us; our
business is to try and outsmart them. Look at him standing there listening – and I
333
Leighton, “Korolenko’s stories,” 211.
168
assure you if he knew what we were talking about he’d hurry up and put it all
down in a report against us.
334
Even though Morozova eventually takes Gavrilov’s hand, she still insists on his enemy status: “I
still hold us to be enemies for life, but I’ll shake hands with you. And I do wish, aside from
orders, you turn into a human being one day.”
335
Morozova’s sarcastic remark about Gavrilov’s penchant for orders reveals a fundamental
difference between their positions. Given Gavrilov’s respect for authority and hierarchy, it is not
surprising that he cannot understand Morozova’s rebellious attitude or political convictions.
336
Accustomed to receiving directives from his superiors, Gavrilov does not rebel against the
authorities and willingly acts his part as a guard of political prisoners. While bending some rules
in order to visit Morozova in exile, Gavrilov neither denounces his job, nor confronts the system
as unjust. Because of his ability to combine the opposing roles as Morozova’s guard and
Morozova’s guardian, Gavrilov is surprised to find out that Morozova cannot do the same:
“‘What have I done, miss,’ I blurted out, ‘for you to be so mad with me? Do you take me for an
enemy?’”
337
Not recognizing the strength of Morozova’s beliefs, Gavrilov can neither
comprehend her refusal to compromise, nor explain the reasons for her rejection of his help. In
turn, Gavrilov’s ability to maintain a status quo between his own contradictory personal and
334
Korolenko, “The Strange One,” 237.
335
Ibid., 238.
336
During his talk with the stylized Korolenko, Gavrilov questions his prisoner’s reasons for becoming a
revolutionary and, in so doing, shows his view of the revolutionary political agenda as a waste of time, “‘It beats
me,’ he said, ‘why young persons like yourself, well-bred and educated, as can be seen, do this to their lives’.” See
Korolenko, “The Strange One,” 224.
337
Ibid., 236.
169
political affiliations is not accepted by Morozova, for whom Gavrilov’s compromising position
designates him as a “stranger” (strannyi chelovek), an “enemy” (vrag), and a “mad man”
(sumasshedshii).
Due to Morozova’s polarized division of the world into ideological friends and enemies, I
would argue that the previous class-based categories of gentry, intelligentsia, and narod, while
still important, have lost their former prominence. The fact that Gavrilov is a representative of
narod no longer matters because he is also Morozova’s ideological opponent, which outweighs
his peasant background and determines her negative attitude. Unable to notice the shift from
class alliances to ideological allegiances, Gavrilov predictably interprets Morozova’s unfriendly
behavior towards him as a sign of her baryshnia sensibilities and misses the ideological
component of her politichka role. Unaware of any other but the baryshnia narrative, Gavrilov,
therefore, explains Morozova’s actions in the only way he is familiar with, namely, through the
traditional class-based perception of the noble maiden, offended by sharing tea with a lower class
representative:
‘You’re a funny fellow! Have you gone out of your senses to think I’m going to share
your tea with you?’ How hurt I was by her words! To this day the blood rushes to my
face when I think of them. Take yourself, you aren’t squeamish about sharing our meals.
Nor was the gentleman Rubanov, another exile, the son of an army officer, mind her. But
that miss was.
338
338
Ibid., 232.
170
Without outright rejecting Gavrilov’s interpretation of Morozova’s actions, I suggest that
his perception is hindered by his ignorance of the martyr-heroine phenomenon. Because of
Gavrilov’s unfamiliarity with the new concept of the revolutionary feminine, his explanation,
while plausible, anachronistically portrays the martyr-heroine as a variation of a Turgenevian or
Tolstoian maiden. As illustrated by the aforementioned passage, Gavrilov’s rationalization of
Morozova’s “squeamishness” as a symptom of her class superiority and gender sensibilities
clearly echoes the conventional perception of women from noble backgrounds as being more
refined than the common folk. What escapes Gavrilov’s attention is the fact that it is not so much
baryshnia Morozova, but politichka Morozova, who stoically refuses his help and treats him
with disdain reserved for her political enemies. Hence, while familiar in the sense of her class
pedigree, Morozova nevertheless remains a stranger to Gavrilov in terms of her current political
ideals.
Decoding Politichka as Daughter, Bride, Wife, and Lover
Representing a new narrative phenomenon, Morozova’s political designation quickly
becomes a source of inspiration and anxiety for Gavrilov. Intrigued by Morozova’s status of a
female political prisoner (politichka), Gavrilov embarks on a narrative quest to understand the
revolutionary feminine: “Curious I was, I suppose, because it was my first trip, and I wondered –
what was a girl political prisoner like?”
339
Similar to Polonsky’s and Turgenev’s narrators,
Gavrilov tries to use several family-based female tropes in order to place “the strange one” in a
more familiar category. And, just like his fictional predecessors, Gavrilov finds it unproductive
to employ the labels of Daughter, Bride, Wife, and Lover to frame his prisoner. In fact, each time
339
Ibid., 226.
171
Gavrilov wants to apply these definitions to Morozova, she is able to elude them as unsuitable
for portraying the martyr-heroine.
As shown above, Gavrilov’s first impression of politichka is that of pity, which leads him
to perceive “the strange one” as a maiden-in-distress and prevents him from defining the concept
of the martyr-heroine in its own ideological terms, “She must have committed some political
crime, sure enough, but still I pitied her from the bottom of my heart.”
340
By describing
Morozova as a victimized, frail girl, Gavrilov activates the familiar narrative of a persecuted
female prisoner and begins to view himself as her protector. The fact that Gavrilov is supposed
to pick up his prisoner from a “fortress/castle” (zamok) also implies his role of a symbolic helper.
Likewise, Gavrilov’s subsequent attempts to make the trip easier for Morozova further suggest
his chivalrous attitude to “the strange one.” Whereas Gavrilov’s knightly stance may have been
suitable for a Romantic story about saving a female prisoner, it does not appease the martyr-
heroine, who resists Gavrilov’s efforts and the overall narrative of female victimization.
Having undermined the Romantic image of an imprisoned maiden, Morozova continues
to thwart any attempts to describe her via other traditional female roles, namely through her
sexuality. While Gavrilov first perceives Morozova as a child-like girl, the other guard, Ivanov,
views her as a sexually available Bride rather than an innocent Daughter and offers to strip
search her. In turn, Morozova quickly dispenses with both the Daughter and the Bride metaphors
by standing her ground and defining herself and, by proxy, the trope of the martyr-heroine as
unavailable for sexual advances.
The next attempt to place Morozova in a more familiar narrative happens during the road
trip to Siberia, when Gavrilov thinks about making Morozova his wife in order to save her:
340
Ibid., 227.
172
But then it looked odd to me – wherefore, I thought, are we taking this chit of a
girl to some godforsaken place? Don’t judge me too harshly, sir, if I tell you I
thought of asking the proper permission to wed the miss. I’ll knock the nonsense
out of her, I said to myself.
341
According to this passage, what appears particularly strange to Gavrilov as a man and a narrator
is the continuing lack of a specific familial role for Morozova. Set on finding an appropriate
descriptive label for his prisoner, Gavrilov changes his view of Morozova from that of a child to
that of a wife, making this a second – after the incident with Ivanov – attempt to suggest the
transformation of a childlike maiden into a sexually active woman. While Gavrilov – in contrast
to Ivanov – does not describe his interest in his prisoner in sexual terms, his suggestion of
marriage nonetheless hints at a possibility of a legitimate sexual encounter, allowed by
Gavrilov’s male supervisor and sanctified by patriarchal law.
Unable to relate to Morozova in any other context but through traditional gender roles,
Gavrilov begins to create his own imaginary narrative by superimposing an image of Morozova
as his bride or wife onto his earlier pictures of Morozova as a vulnerable girl-child. All three of
these portrayals – a daughter, a bride, and a wife – present Morozova as an object of Gavrilov’s
own familial plot, denying her any other definition but the one based on a male-controlled
discourse. Consistent with Gavrilov’s previously discussed perception of self as a savior, his
current assessment of Morozova’s behavior as “foolish” (dur’) is yet another example of the
traditional perception of women as irrational and in need of male supervision. By imagining
341
Ibid., 229.
173
himself in the position of regulating Morozova’s behavior as her potential husband, Gavrilov
further demonstrates the resistance of the male narrator to view the revolutionary feminine
outside of the patriarchal paradigm.
Morozova’s next rejection of Gavrilov’s familial concepts happens when she states her
preference for dying surrounded by her ideological kin: “If I have to die, I’d much rather it was
out of prison, among my own.”
342
In line with his understanding of kin as family, Gavrilov
interprets Morozova’s wish literally, assuming that Morozova has some relatives in Siberia.
When Morozova responds that by family she means other exiled comrades, her explanation stuns
Gavrilov, whose perception of family – as seen from the earlier discussion about Boiarynia
Morozova – is based on blood ties: “I was surprised to hear her call strangers ‘her own’; would
anyone bother to give her food without money when they did not know her?”
343
However, after
Gavrilov witnesses the help that Morozova receives from other exiles, his initial doubts about the
validity of Morozova’s argument dissipate: “Like old friends, they shook her hand, asked
questions, and before saying good-bye handed her some money and a fine wool shawl to keep
her warm on the way.”
344
Thanks to Morozova’s blurring of the boundaries between familial and
non-familial hierarchies, Gavrilov learns a new kind of ideological solidarity and undergoes
another breakdown of his values.
In view of the gradual collapse of Gavrilov’s patriarchal definitions of the feminine, it is
not surprising that the final female trope – that of a lover – also fails to apply to Morozova.
Importantly, the rumor of Morozova’s sexual relationship with Riazantsev is neither spread nor
342
Ibid., 230.
343
Ibid.
344
Ibid., 234.
174
trusted by Gavrilov. Having already realized a need for a different way to describe “the strange
one,” Gavrilov repeats the allegation against Morozova’s chastity only to debunk it as unsuitable
for the martyr-heroine: “There’s some as say she ails and there’s others that say she’s his
mistress. People will wag their tongues.”
345
By showing his mistrust of local gossip, Gavrilov
makes an important first step towards breaking out of his own patriarchal mold and
understanding the martyr-heroine on her own terms.
With no family-based tropes left to define Morozova, Gavrilov has no other way to
comprehend the phenomenon of the martyr-heroine but to visit her on her territory – in a small
village house shared with Riazantsev. Because of Riazantsev’s intermediary position as a
negotiator between Gavrilov and Morozova, Gavrilov learns more about the ideological
worldview of the martyr-heroine and begins to perceive Morozova through Riazantsev’s eyes.
No longer acting as a guard or a man, but behaving as a human genuinely concerned about
Morozova’s well-being, Gavrilov does not try to inscribe the “strange one” in his narrative, but
instead attempts to adjust to hers. It is also at this point – the moment when Morozova finally
gains her own voice and declares her ideological stance to Gavrilov – that she finally crosses the
threshold of the male-controlled narrative and seals her fate with death.
Death as Narrative Escape
With no narrative anchors to keep Morozova in the familial paradigm, her death as a
fictional character becomes imminent. Not surprisingly, the final rupture that releases the
“strange one” from the confines of the plot occurs right after Riazantsev redefines Morozova’s
kinship with Boiarynia Morozova in ideological rather than familial terms. After this last
345
Ibid.
175
connection with Morozova’s blood family is gone, so is Morozova as a personage no longer
narratable in realist terms. Having escaped her realist portrayal as a dying, angry, stubborn,
imprisoned young exile, Morozova proceeds to the narrative existence on a symbolic plane and
becomes an emblem of female revolutionary martyrdom. Hence, similar to the mythologization
of Turgenev’s Russian girl, who disappears behind the curtain of the threshold after denouncing
the traditional narrative, Morozova’s fictional death also signifies the beginning of the martyr-
heroine’s myth beyond the boundaries of the story.
346
Further support for this argument can be found in the way Gavrilov and the stylized
Korolenko react to Morozova’s death. Not only are they both distraught by Morozova’s passing,
but they also begin to view Morozova in symbolic terms. For example, Gavrilov resorts to
superstition to explain his lack of appetite as well as his physical and mental distress after he
receives the news of Morozova’s death, “I returned to my quarters so put out that I could not take
a morsel of food for two days. It was from that time on that a sadness came over me – like a
worm eating me.”
347
In a similar fashion, the stylized Korolenko implies a religious allegory to
voice his anguish upon hearing about Morozova’s demise, “The sad image [obraz] of the dead
girl loomed in the darkness amidst the muffled wailing of the storm.”
348
The evocation of superstitious and religious symbolism in relation to deceased Morozova
demonstrates the tendency of both narrators to mythologize her image after death as a powerful
entity beyond their reach. Similar to Polonsky’s and Turgenev’s protagonists, Korolenko’s
narrators eventually place the martyr-heroine outside the story, highlighting the inability of the
346
There is a strong artistic connection between Turgenev and Korolenko, with the latter describing himself as “a
fanatic devotee of Turgenev.” See G. A. Bialyi, V. G. Korolenko (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo
khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1949), 310.
347
Korolenko, “The Strange One,” 239.
348
Ibid., 240.
176
patriarchal narrative to accommodate the non-familial features of the revolutionary feminine.
Akin to Polonsky’s and Turgenev’s storytellers, who fail to save the martyr-heroine or deter her
from a hazardous revolutionary path, Korolenko’s tale is yet another example of a collapsed
male-controlled narrative. With the erosion of traditional gender roles, Polonsky’s, Turgenev’s,
and Korolenko’s narrators can no longer rely on the traditional perceptions of women and have
no other choice but to release the martyr-heroine into the non-familial, figurative dimension.
Hence, whether portrayed as a “suffering image” (obraz stradal’cheskii) by Polonsky, as a “fool”
and a “saint” (dura/sviataia) by Turgenev, or as a “sad image of a dead girl” (skorbnyi obraz
umershei devushki) by Korolenko, the martyr-heroine always transcends to a symbolic level of
description by the end of the story.
Notwithstanding the similarities between these three heroines, what makes Korolenko’s
approach to “the strange one” different from that of Polonsky or Turgenev is Morozova’s actual
physical death in the story. In contrast to Polonsky’s and Turgenev’s female characters, who
withdraw from the narrative in a symbolic, narratively harmless way, Korolenko’s martyr-
heroine is forcefully removed from the story by the ultimate narrative erasure – her death. On the
level of the plot, Morozova’s demise is motivated by her progressing disease. However, on the
level of the narrative, Morozova’s withering away becomes a metaliterary commentary on the
unnarratable nature of the martyr-heroine, who resists the family-based portrayals and, hence,
has to depart from the realist narrative.
349
Given these noticeable parallels between Morozova’s
349
For more on the different layers of the narrative phenomenon, such as “fabula,” “story proper,” and “the
narrative,” see Mieke Ball, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 3rd ed. (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2009). For the Russian formalists’ theory of narration, see B. Tomashevskii, Teoriia literatury:
poetika (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1927); V. Shklovsky, Razvertyvanie siuzheta (Petrograd:
“Opoiaz,” 1921); V. Shklovsky, O teorii prozy (Moscow: “Federatsiia,” 1929; repr., Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985).
177
physical and narrative disintegration, can it be possible that the only martyr-heroine narratable
within the parameters of a traditional patriarchal narrative is, in fact, a dead one?
My tentative answer is yes. Never given a chance to survive, Morozova strikes the reader
as a doomed character from the very beginning of the story.
350
Both Morozova’s unlikely future
and her non-existent past contribute to the perception of her just passing through the story and
not really belonging in its narrative space. Morozova’s transitory nature is further highlighted by
her “traveling status,” portraying the martyr-heroine as a temporary visitor rather than a
permanent inhabitant of the realist plot.
351
Consistently described as sick, coughing, feverish, and
unconscious, Morozova is not meant to be a living example of the revolutionary feminine, but
has to die in order to become a true martyr-heroine. As sacrifice becomes the only way to
accommodate female revolutionaries in a realist story, there is nothing else to do with Morozova,
but to erase her from the account in order for the patriarchal narrative to continue. Having
pronounced Morozova dead, the narrator, the author, and, by proxy, the readers are then free to
mythologize Morozova outside the traditional family-based female tropes without compromising
their validity.
By proclaiming - the heroine is dead, long live the martyr – Korolenko finds a way to
frame Morozova’s sacrifice as not motivated by her actual contributions to social justice, but as
driven by the demands of the realist narrative. Since Morozova’s death is not an outcome of her
heroic behavior or revolutionary accomplishments, the only way to explain her untimely demise
350
Mark Conliffe also notes the doomed nature of Morozova’s character: “One might say that she has cut herself off
from her past, from all other life in fact, and is awaiting death.” See Conliffe, “Isolation,” 229.
351
In her discussion about the use of spatial form in Korolenko’s stories, Radha Balasubramanian observes the
importance of the in-between narrative space of Korolenko’s poetics: “The narrator and the characters occupy a
transitional place due to their travelling status. They are on their way – away from where they were and towards
where they will be. Their life is in motion.” See Radha Balasubramanian, “Spatial Form and Character Revelations:
Korolenko’s Siberian Stories,” Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 35, no. 3/4 (1993): 260.
178
is to view it as a consequence of Morozova’s deviation from the familial tropes. The fact that
there is no discussion of Morozova’s revolutionary past further suggests that she can neither
fulfill her heroic potential, nor die a heroic death within the confines of the narrative.
352
Instead,
the narrative describes Morozova through a more familiar story of female victimization and
sacrifice, downplaying her role of a revolutionary for that of a martyr.
By utilizing Morozova’s death to make sense of her otherwise unnarratable revolutionary
life, Korolenko further highlights the paradox of the traditional narrative, in which the
elimination of the martyr-heroine not only prevents the story from disintegration, but, in fact,
contributes to its proliferation.
353
In contrast to Polonsky’s and Turgenev’s martyr-heroines, who
stay alive and impede the development of the plot, Korolenko’s “strange one” invigorates the
narrative with her fictional death. Indeed, the story does not end with the death of the martyr-
heroine, but continues with the appearance of two more female characters – Morozova’s mother
and a village servant of loose behavior. Both of these characters, firmly grounded in the
patriarchal narrative as mother and lover/prostitute tropes, present a strong contrast to
Morozova’s non-familial portrayal. By bringing these characters into the story, Korolenko
suggests the longevity of family-based female tropes and their ability to co-exist in the same
narrative with the martyr-heroine. At the same time, the fact that they appear only after
352
A similar case of the unheroic death of an unrealized hero occurs with Insarov from Turgenev’s On the Eve and
Barazov from Turgenev’s Fathers and Children. Each character has a strong potential to become a revolutionary or
a scientist, and both are undone by the narrative that is unable to accommodate their heroic future.
353
The idea that the death of the individual is instrumental for the rebirth of the narrative of the collective received
extensive coverage in Bakhtin’s discussion of the topsy-turvy nature of carnival in Rabelais. See Mikhail Bakhtin,
Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul’tura Srednevekov’ia i Renessansa (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia
literatura, 1990). Similar to Rabelais’ subversive novel, which acts as a symbol of the evolving modern era, the
subversive martyr-heroine also functions as an emblem of the emerging modern concept of the Russian feminine.
Given the antagonistic position of both the carnival and the revolutionary feminine vis-à-vis the official culture,
Bakhtin’s observation about the regenerative function of death in carnival may be useful to explain the narrative
function of the death of the martyr-heroine. Akin to the carnival’s participant, whose biological life has to conclude
in order for historical life to prevail, the fictional martyr-heroine also has to die in order for the narrative to carry on.
179
Morozova’s death also suggests that in order for the narrative to continue and for these
traditional female portrayals to emerge, the martyr-heroine has to die.
The arrival of Morozova’s mother becomes the last narrative anchor, which
contextualizes Morozova as a daughter and, hence, an authentic personage with a family history.
By reinstating Morozova posthumously into the story through a family-based trope, Korolenko
not only locates her literary origins in the traditional familial narrative, but also highlights the
realism of her death in the eyes of Gavrilov. Whereas the news of Morozova’s passing upsets
Gavrilov, it is not until his encounter with Morozova’s mother that he fully realizes the scope of
the tragedy: “The old lady was still talking to the station mistress and her chatter rang in my ears.
I can’t tell you how terrible I felt on her account.”
354
As the reality of Morozova’s death dawns
on Gavrilov, so does the symbolic significance of her passing – leading to Gavrilov’s
unexplained recurrent visions of Morozova, which he presents in both realistic and symbolic
terms, “And all the while I was unable to put that angry young lady out of my mind. Even as I
speak now she is there before my eyes. What could it mean? Is there anyone who could explain
it?”
355
Gavrilov’s last two questions echo the earlier queries about the nature of the
revolutionary feminine voiced by Polonsky’s and Turgenev’s narrators, placing “the strange one”
in a larger debate about the narratability of the martyr-heroine. Having failed to explain the
impact of “the strange one” in words, Gavrilov, similar to his fictional predecessors, abandons
family-based female tropes and resorts to philosophical generalizations, revealing his inability to
accommodate the martyr-heroine in a realist narrative. While this narrative predicament affects
354
Korolenko, “The Strange One,” 240.
355
Ibid.
180
not only Korolenko’s, but also Polonsky’s and Turgenev’s narrators, its consequences for
Korolenko’s later depictions of women are far-more reaching. In fact, as Korolenko becomes
aware of the incompatibility of traditional female roles with the changing concept of the
feminine, he is also more reluctant to portray women as central characters after writing The
Strange One.
The lack of women in Korolenko’s oeuvres is first noticed by Chekhov, who aptly
observes: “In all your book the woman is stubbornly missing” (Vo vsei vashei knigi upriamo
otsutstvuet zhenshchina).
356
In turn, Korolenko responds to Chekhov in a cryptic, yet telling way:
I do not avoid, of course, female figures […] but I have not yet taken plots, in
which a woman plays the main role as a woman […] The attention is geared
towards the other sides of human relationships.
357
Both Chekhov’s observation and Korolenko’s response are later examined by Kornei
Chukovskii, who explains Korolenko’s evasion of female characters as his defense mechanism
against the horrors of modernity:
In all his stories, there is no woman, a woman-lover, a woman as such, and, when
reading his books, you cannot understand why a contemporary poet would
356
Cited in Chukovskii, “Vladimir Korolenko kak khudozhnik,” 196.
357
“Я не избегаю, конечно, женских фигур […] но я не брал до сих пор сюжетов, где женщина играет
главную роль, как женщина […] Внимание направлено на другие стороны человеческих отношений.” See
Kornei Chukovskii, Kniga o sovremennykh pisateliakh (Saint-Petersburg: Shipovnik, 1914), 224-225; my
translation.
181
exclaim: “You are a woman! A witchy drink!” – and you cannot fully believe,
that somewhere exist the women of Degas, Beardsley, Stuck, and Rops.
358
As a product of the Symbolist and Decadent aesthetics, Chukovskii motivates the absence
of women in Korolenko’s work by their potential threat to the writer’s idealistic narrative world.
While admitting this possibility, I also suggest that Korolenko’s unwillingness to choose women
as characters stems from his understanding of the failure of traditional female tropes to portray
the modern concept of the feminine. The fact that Korolenko’s one main female character – the
martyr-heroine in The Strange One – subverts all family-based roles further indicates the writer’s
recognition of the breakdown of conventional plots, in which women perform their biological
gender. In this case, Korolenko’s hesitancy to narrate “women in their main role as women”
may, in fact, be his pioneering realization of the inability of the male-controlled, objectified
perception of the feminine to capture the modern notion of gender as a social construct. With no
narrative mechanisms available to portray women other than through their familial designation,
Korolenko’s narrative silence on the subject of women becomes yet another expression of the
cultural polemics about the problematic nature of the modern concept of the Russian feminine.
Conclusion
An outcome of several narratives, including Siberian prison literature, the strong woman
of realist fiction, and the female revolutionaries of Polonsky and Turgenev, Korolenko’s martyr-
heroine represents a complex, multi-layered narrative phenomenon. As a successor to Polonsky’s
358
“У него во всех его рассказах совершенно нет женщины, женщины-любовницы, женщины как таковой, и,
читая его книги, никак не поймешь, почему это воскликнул современный поэт: “Ты женщина! Ты
ведьмовский напиток!” – и как-то не верится, что где-то есть женщины Дегаса, Бердсли, Штука и Ропса.”
See Chukovskii, “Vladimir Korolenko kak khudozhnik,” 196.
182
“prisoner” and Turgenev’s “threshold-crosser,” Korolenko’s “strange one” is de-facto a more
familiar literary personage grounded in previous narratives about revolutionary martyr-heroines.
In an attempt to establish continuity between different facets of the female revolutionary
experience, Korolenko picks up “the strange one” where Turgenev leaves his Russian girl off –
on the other side of the threshold – and then expands the narrow prison experience of Polonsky’s
heroine to a greater story of revolutionary exile in Siberia. Capitalizing on these earlier
portrayals, the “strange one” hence embodies the elements of both Polonsky’s and Turgenev’s
characters as she becomes a prisoner after having crossed the threshold of revolutionary
martyrdom. What appears as a result of these narrative manipulations is a more realistic portrayal
of a female revolutionary – not only framed by the stories about other exiles, but also informed
by the earlier fictional representations of the martyr-heroine.
Because of her synthesizing nature, Korolenko’s “strange one” is both a departure from
and a continuation of her earlier counterparts. As a dynamic experiment with familial and non-
familial female portrayals, Korolenko’s The Strange One reveals the complexities of the cultural
debate about the changing concept of the feminine in general, and the revolutionary martyr-
heroine in particular. Anchored through the allegory of her last name, as well as her former and
current social status, Morozova is able to diverge from the traditional narrative of family-based
female tropes without sacrificing her verisimilitude. On the other hand, despite providing a more
realistic portrayal of the revolutionary feminine in comparison to Polonsky’s The Prisoner and
Turgenev’s The Threshold, Korolenko’s The Strange One still lacks the means to describe the
instances of female revolutionary activism and, as such, remains a product of the ongoing crisis
of female representation.
183
Chapter 4
Rewriting the ‘Martyr-Heroine’: The Prostitute in Garshin
Section I
When from the darkness of delusion
With an ardent word of persuasion
I rescued your fallen soul,
And, full of profound torment,
Wringing your hands, you cursed
The vice that had ensnared you;
When your forgetful consciousness
By recollection punishing
You told me the story
Of all that was before me,
And, suddenly, having covered your face with your hands,
Filled with shame and horror,
You broke down in tears,
Revolted, shaken.
Believe me: I was not listening without concern,
I was hungrily capturing every sound,
I understood it all, a child of misfortune!
I forgave everything and forgot it all.
359
—Nikolai Nekrasov
359
Когда из мрака заблужденья
Горячим словом убежденья
Я душу падшую извлек,
И, вся полна глубокой муки,
Ты прокляла, ломая руки,
Тебя опутавший порок;
Когда забывчивую совесть
Воспоминанием казня,
Ты мне передавала повесть
Всего, что было до меня;
И вдруг, закрыв лицо руками,
Стыдом и ужасом полна,
Ты разрешилася слезами,
Возмущена, потрясена,-
Верь: я внимал не без участья,
Я жадно каждый звук ловил...
Я понял все, дитя несчастья!
Я все простил и все забыл…
See N. A. Nekrasov, “Kogda iz mraka zabluzhden’ia,” in vol. 1 of Izbrannoe v dvukh tomakh (Moscow:
Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1962), 44-45; my translation.
184
Garshin’s Fallen Woman – A Two-Tier Historical Phenomenon
The familial literary tropes of Bride, Lover, Wife, Mother, and Daughter are not the only
female representations that undergo changes in the Russian fiction of late 1870s – early 1880s.
Whereas Polonsky, Turgenev, and Korolenko react to the appearance of real revolutionary
women by creating an altogether non-familial literary character of a revolutionary martyr-
heroine, Garshin responds by re-evaluating the portrayal of a fallen woman in his two short
stories – “An Incident” (“Proisshestvie,” 1878) and “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” (“Nadezhda
Nikolaevna,” 1885). This chapter investigates Garshin’s narrative of prostitution in three parts.
The first part historicizes and contextualizes both stories as the writer’s timely response to the
changing concept of the feminine. The second part examines the subversive function of the
prostitute and its symbolic contribution to violence in “An Incident.” The third and final part
focuses on the redeeming role of an artist and the metaliterary implications of female sexual and
political transgression in “Nadezhda Nikolaevna.” In the end, I argue that by challenging the
traditional portrayal of the fallen woman as victimized, compassionate, or ready for marriage,
Garshin enables the prostitute to transition from a marginalized character in the realist novel to
the central character of the modernist writing.
Written over the span of seven years, both stories feature the same protagonist – the noble
prostitute Nadezhda Nikolaevna – who continuously disrupts the patriarchal narrative by
provoking male violence and causing destruction. Nadezhda Nikolaevna first demonstrates her
destabilizing ability in “An Incident” when she leads her unwanted admirer Ivan Ivanovich
Nikitin to suicide by rejecting his attempts to save her from prostitution. In “Nadezhda
Nikolaevna,” the heroine generates even more damage by triggering a fatal dual between her
185
former lover, the bureaucrat Bessonov, and her present admirer, the artist Lopatin, – a fight that
leaves Lopatin severely wounded and both Bessonov and Nadezhda Nikolaevna dead.
As the bloodshed and the gravity of the crime intensify from “An Incident” to “Nadezhda
Nikolaevna,” so does the parallel between the main protagonist and the revolutionary feminine.
While Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s rebellious nature in “An Incident” is expressed by her refusal of
the traditional marriage scenario, in “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” Garshin draws an explicit
comparison between the narratives of the prostitute and the female revolutionary by turning
Nadezhda Nikolaevna into a model for the portrait of the French political assassin Charlotte
Corday.
360
No longer a rebellious fallen woman but a stand-in for a female terrorist, Nadezhda
Nikolaevna now expands the narrative capabilities of the trope of the traditional Russian
prostitute to include another form of transgression – namely, murder for a political cause.
Whereas Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s direct analogy with Corday in the second story appears
to be more pertinent for our discussion of the revolutionary martyr-heroine, the fact that
Nadezhda Nikolaevna is a serial character makes both stories important for our understanding of
the late nineteenth-century concept of the Russian feminine as an evolving phenomenon. What is
it about the fallen woman from “An Incident” that inspires Garshin to use her again? Why does
Garshin endow his later portrayal of the prostitute with another meaning – that of a narrative
360
Charlotte Corday was a young Girondin conservative who was executed by guillotine for the assassination of the
Jacobin French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat in 1793. After her death, Corday became a source of inspiration for
artists and writers, including Jacque-Loius David, Jean-Jacque Hauer, Percy Shelly, François Ponsard, Alexander
Pushkin, Oscar Wilde, Drieu La Rochelle, and Lorenzo Ferrero. For more on the interpretations of Corday’s
dramatic act, see Nina Corazzo and Catherine Montfort, “Charlotte Corday: femme-homme,” in Literate Women and
the French Revolution of 1789, ed. Catherine Montfort-Howard (Birmingham: Summa Publications Inc, 1994), 33-
54; Nina Rattner Gelbart, “Death in the Bathtub: Charlotte Corday and Jean-Paul Marat,” in The Human Tradition in
Modern France, ed. K. Steven Vincent and Alison Klairmont-Lingo (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2000),
17-32. For more about Corday as an important example of female revolutionary violence in Garshin’s story, see
Lynn Patyk, “‘The Double-Edged’” and V. Fedorov, “Il’ia Muromets protiv Sharlotty Korde. (“Nadezhda
Nikolaevna”),” in vol. 3 of Vsevolod Garshin at the Turn of the Century: An International Symposium in Three
Volumes, ed. Peter Henry, Vladimir Porudominsky, and Mikhail Girshman (Oxford: Northgate Press, 2000), 37-39.
186
model for the martyr-heroine? And, most importantly, what changes about the perception of the
feminine between the publications of both stories? By reading Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s two-tier
narrative holistically, this chapter aims to reveal the continuity and mobility of Nadezhda
Nikolaevna’s character, whose earlier revolt against the patriarchal narrative in “An Incident” in
1878 sets the foundation for her later association with the radical figure of Corday in “Nadezhda
Nikolaevna” in 1885.
361
While each story separately has received much scholarly attention, the examination of
Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s makeover from “An Incident” to “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” is yet to be
done. One of the possible reasons behind this oversight is that both stories classify as Garshin’s
writings on the theme of the fallen woman – a generalization that has led many critics to
overlook the fact that “An Incident” and “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” feature the same prostitute or,
conversely, to take it for granted.
362
Either way, a key aspect of the narration is left unheeded. A
known critic Nikolai Mikhailovskii, for example, laments Garshin’s lack of imagination for
calling both of his prostitutes Nadezhda Nikolaevna: “Nadezhda Nikolaevna also appears two
times – in ‘An Incident’ and in a big story, for which the author could not even come up with a
361
The use of the comprehensive approach for the analysis of these two stories is both timely and warranted. For
example, in their study of Garshin’s war stories, Iezuitova and Son suggest that the works with similar themes
should be examined holistically, “The four stories of Garshin present a whole ‘novel’ with the consecutive
development of his main motifs – the tragedy of consciousness and the tragedy of war” [Четыре рассказа Гаршина
представляют собой единый роман с последовательным развитием его главных мотивов – трагедии совести
и трагедии войны]. See Liudmila Iezuitova and Chung R. Son, “Vsevolod Garshin, Leonid Andreev i drugie.
Chelovek na voine,” in vol. 2 of Vsevolod Garshin at the Turn of the Century: An International Symposium in Three
Volumes, ed. Peter Henry, Vladimir Porudominsky, and Mikhail Girshman (Oxford: Northgate Press, 2000), 75-76;
my translation.
362
A noticeable exception to this pattern is a study by Evnin, who suggests that “An Incident” and “Nadezhda
Nikolaevna” “are essentially a single unit” [представляют собой, по существу, единое целое]. See F. I. Evnin, “F.
M. Dostoevsky i V. M. Garshin,” Izvestiia Akademii Nauk SSSR. Otdelenie literatury i iazyka 4 (1962): 295.
However, Evnin neither examines the relationship between the two stories in detail, nor discusses the historical and
narrative context behind the transformation of Garshin’s main heroine, other than by comparing her with the
Dostoevskian female protagonists.
187
title other than ‘Nadezhda Nikolaevna.’ It is very, very unimaginative.”
363
In his subsequent
discussion of the second story, Mikhailovskii once again expresses his belief in the existence of
two different prostitutes, “This Nadezhda Nikolaevna, just like the first one that appears in ‘An
Incident,’ is a coquette.”
364
An even stronger misunderstanding of Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s dual appearance in
Garshin’s oeuvre is found in Mikhail Stoliarov’s discussion of both stories. Not only does
Stoliarov consider Nadezhda Nikolaevna from “An Incident” a separate character with the same
name, “the heroine of this story has the same name,” but he also reverses the order of the stories,
“In the story ‘An Incident’ Garshin puts even stronger finishing touches on the type of Nadezhda
Nikolaevna.”
365
Stoliarov’s inverted perception of the sequence of Garshin’s works provides yet
another example of the lasting scholarly confusion over the character of Nadezhda Nikolaevna,
who is viewed as a “type” (tip) rather than an individual and, as such, often interpreted in static
rather than dynamic terms.
Although later critics have since corrected Mikhailovskii’s and Stoliarov’s
misconceptions, they still tend to disregard Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s transformation and instead
focus on her victimized plight in one story or the other without providing an overarching
argument for both works.
366
The reasons offered by scholars to justify Garshin’s return to the
363
“Надежда Николаевна тоже является два раза – в ‘Происшествии’ и в большом рассказе, для которого
автор и заглавия не мог придумать иного, как ‘Надежда Николаевна’. Очень, очень неизобретательно.” See
Nikolai Mikhailovskii, “O Vsevolode Garshine,” in vol. 6 of Sochineniia N. K. Mikhailovskogo (Saint-Petersburg:
Russkoe bogatstvo, 1897), 308; my translation.
364
“Эта Надежда Николаевна, как и первая, что фигурирует в ‘Происшествии’, есть кокотка.” Ibid., 320.
365
“…героиня этого рассказа носит то же имя,” “В рассказе ‘Происшествие’ Гаршин еще более сильными
штрихами дорисовывает тип Надежды Николаевны.” See Mikhail Stoliarov, Noveishie russkie novelisty (Kiev:
Iuzhno-russkoe knigoizdatel’stvo F. A. Iogansona, 1901), 9; my translation.
366
One of the critics to notice Mikhailovskii’s mistake is Kaidash-Lakshina, “The critic [Mikhailovskii] did not
understand that it was one and the same heroine, who was portrayed in different periods of her life” [Критик
[Михайловский] не понял, что речь идет об одной и той же героине, изображенной в разные периоды ее
188
same personage tend to be exceedingly general statements, such as Garshin’s dissatisfaction with
the first story and his recurrent interest in the redeeming narrative of prostitution.
367
While
certainly plausible, these interpretations fail to account for changes in the socio-cultural
environment between these two stories and, as a result, deprive each one of its specific historical
context. By proposing a diachronic approach to the study of Garshin’s prostitute trope, I hope to
show how historicizing both stories reveals two other narrative functions of Nadezhda
Nikolaevna’s sexual transgression – that of a rebel against the patriarchal narrative and of a
female contributor to deadly violence.
Garshin’s Fallen Woman as a Response to the Revolutionary Feminine
What makes Garshin’s sequels particularly valuable for examining this relationship is
their appearance during two different stages of female revolutionary martyrdom in Russia. The
first story “An Incident,” written in 1878, belongs to the period marked by the famous trial of the
symbolic avenger Zasulich, discussed in Polonsky’s The Prisoner, Turgenev’s The Threshold,
and Korolenko’s The Strange One. The second story “Nadezhda Nikolaevna,” conceived in 1878
but only finished in 1884 and published in 1885, is an outcome of another historical moment –
the one defined by the female revolutionary assassin Perovskaia.
368
Because the stories are
жизни]. See Svetlana Kaidash-Lakshina, “Obraz padshei zhenshchiny v tvorchestve V. M. Garshina,” in vol. 1 of
Vsevolod Garshin at the Turn of the Century: An International Symposium in Three Volumes, ed. Peter Henry,
Vladimir Porudominsky, and Mikhail Girshman (Oxford: Northgate Press, 2000), 114; my translation.
367
For an example of this interpretation, see Vladimir Korolenko, “Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin. Literaturnyi
portret (2 fevralia 1855 g. – 24 marta 1888 g.),” in vol. 3 of Sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: “Khudozhestvennaia
literatura,” 1990), 642-673.
368
According to Elizabeth Valkenier, the year 1884 was “a decisive time in Russian politics,” during which both
Garshin and his friend and artist Ilia Repin, “tried to come to terms with the 1881 assassination of Alexander II by
young revolutionaries.” See Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, “The Writer as Artist’s Model: Repin’s Portrait of Garshin,”
Metropolitan Museum Journal 28 (1993): 207. For more on the thematic links between the two artistic responses to
regicide – Garshin’s story “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” and Repin’s “Ivan the Terrible and His Son” – “even down to the
similar murder weapons used in both” – see David Jackson, “Garshin and Repin. Writer and Artist in a Creative
189
affiliated with different phases of female revolutionary activism, a comparison offers a unique
chance to correlate changes in Garshin’s portrayal of the prostitute with changes in types of
female revolutionary violence. Furthermore, the fact that Garshin uses the same fallen woman
Nadezhda Nikolaevna in response to both historical periods also suggests his growing awareness
of a conceptual connection between the narratives of prostitution and female revolutionary
martyrdom.
This connection was not immediately recognized by Garshin’s contemporaries, many of
whom were puzzled by the writer’s preoccupation with the plight of the fallen woman in the
midst of intensified revolutionary activity in Russia. Questioning the historical appropriateness
of Garshin’s theme, reviewers began to criticize his stories for what Garshin himself referred to
as “peripheral things: the absence of politics, my concern with love and jealously in this day and
age.”
369
Unable to view Garshin’s “concern with love and jealousy” as an actual expression of
his active civic engagement, critics not surprisingly deemed Gashin’s style and content outdated.
The scope of their complaints about Garshin’s presumable escapism ranged from accusing
Garshin of “pre-Gogolian Romanticism and unwholesome French naturalism” to calling his
choice of subject matter “irrelevant” and his content – untimely.
370
Relationship,” in vol. 2 of Vsevolod Garshin at the Turn of the Century: An International Symposium in Three
Volumes, ed. Peter Henry, Vladimir Porudominsky, and Mikhail Girshman (Oxford: Northgate Press, 2000), 103
and Leland Fetzer, “Art and Assassination: Garshin’s ‘Nadezhda Nikolaevna’,” Russian Review 34, no. 1 (1975):
55-65.
369
“… за вещи посторонние: за отсутствие политики, за занятие любвями и ревностями в наше время.” See
Vsevolod Garshin, Pis’ma, vol. 3 of Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, ed. Iu. G. Oksman (Moscow-
Leningrad: Academia, 1934), 353; my translation.
370
For an example of such a critical review, see A. M. Skabichevskii, “Nashi novye belletristicheskie sily,” Novosti
84, March 28, 1885. Cited in Garshin, Pis’ma, 508-509.
190
The need to rationalize Garshin’s choice of a fallen woman during Russia’s political
crisis has persisted into present-day scholarship, compelling one of Garshin’s leading researchers
– Peter Henry – to address the writer’s withdrawal from politics “as curious and yet in
character.”
371
Echoing Garshin’s contemporaries, Henry acknowledges that the year 1878,
marked by the famous crime of Zasulich, “was perhaps hardly the time to publish a sentimental
and pessimistic story about a fallen woman.”
372
Faced with the noticeable discrepancy between
Garshin’s generally sympathetic attitude to revolutionaries and his apparent lack of enthusiasm
for writing about them, Henry views Garshin’s focus on prostitution as a rebellion against the
cliché-ridden political discussions of the progressive intelligentsia.
373
In Henry’s opinion, the
theme of prostitution allows Garshin not only to express his protest against “a major social
abuse, which, he felt, had to be faced up to,” but also to voice his “disenchantment with the
populist insistence on writing along prescribed lines on prescribed topics.”
374
While this
explanation offers plausible political and social motives for Garshin’s interest in the figure of the
prostitute, it does not answer a larger question of female literary representation, namely why
does Garshin repeatedly choose a prostitute, rather than a populist or a revolutionary as his main
female character?
375
371
Peter Henry, A Hamlet of His Time: Vsevolod Garshin. The Man, His Works, and His Milieu (Oxford: Willem A.
Meeuws, 1983), 66.
372
Ibid.
373
For more on Garshin’s ambivalent relationship with the revolutionaries, see Grigorii Bialyi, V. M. Garshin i
literaturnaia bor’ba vos’midesiatykh godov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1937), 11-20 and Henry,
Hamlet, 290-301.
374
Henry, Hamlet, 66, 65.
375
Notably, Garshin has no problem depicting his male heroes, such as Ivanov, Nikitin, Aleksei Petrovich, and
Riabinin, as “the intellectuals of the populist type” [герои-интеллигенты народнического толка]. See Iury
Miliukov, “V. M. Garshin i nauchnoe vozzrenie russkoi intelligentsii 1870-1880 gg. XIX v.,” in vol. 2 of Vsevolod
Garshin at the Turn of the Century: An International Symposium in Three Volumes, ed. Peter Henry, Vladimir
Porudominsky, and Mikhail Girshman (Oxford: Northgate Press, 2000), 123.
191
Because of Garshin’s recurrent use of the image of the prostitute, I would argue that his
perception of the fallen woman extends beyond a traditional realist depiction of prostitution as a
social evil to reflect greater narrative concerns about the changing concept of the feminine. In
this case, Garshin’s fallen woman transcends its traditional role of a literary character and
becomes a narrative device that facilitates the transition of the non-fictional revolutionary
feminine into a fictional personage. By approaching the fallen woman as a mechanism of
narration as well as an actual personage, I, therefore, suggest that Garshin’s interest in
prostitution is not, as the aforementioned critics claim, a “withdrawal from” or a “rebellion
against” the burning political issues, but an aesthetic engagement with their most radical
manifestation – the revolutionary martyr-heroine.
376
The Prostitute – From Sexual to Political Transgression
In addition to being historically relevant, Garshin’s focus on the prostitute in the wake of
female revolutionary movement is also artistically justified. Not only does the fallen woman in
Garshin, “bring together two major themes of Russian fiction: those of moral integrity and socio-
economic status,” but she also introduces an important third theme – that of defiance.
377
Both
prostitutes and female revolutionaries are public women who transgress the law and threaten the
376
This assertion is supported by the historian Richard Stites, who argues that the topic of prostitution provides a
important perspective on a nexus of larger social and political matters: “the phenomenon [of prostitution] is not only
interesting in its own right as an example of social behavior, but also because its relative luxuriance in a given
society is a barometer of the larger sexual culture and of the power and temper of public opinion…” See Richard
Stites, “Prostitute and Society in Pre-Revolutionary Russia,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 31, no. 3
(1983): 348.
377
Matich, “A Typology,” 327.
192
traditional norms of appropriate female behavior.
378
As perpetrators of sexual and political
transgression, prostitutes and female revolutionaries continuously demonstrate their subversive
nature against the familial structure of the patriarchal narrative.
379
By translating his impressions
of contemporary martyr-heroines into the portrayals of a fallen woman, Garshin not only
underlines similarities between their marginalized social roles, but also expands the literary
genealogy of female revolutionary martyrs – previously consisting of virtuous or religious
figures – with the prostitute as another one of their ideological precursors.
What makes Garshin’s recognition of the shared transgressive thread between these two
female representations especially important is that it enables him to contextualize the unknown
concept of the revolutionary feminine within a more familiar literary narrative of prostitution.
Whereas there were no immediate literary precedents for revolutionary martyr-heroines, the
fictional portrayals of prostitutes were well-known to the Russian public from the earlier works
by Gogol, Nekrasov, Chernyshevsky, and Dostoevsky. Depicted as both saintly and
transgressive, fallen women in nineteenth-century Russian literature were ethically ambiguous
characters, who combined the traits of a suffering victim and an upholder of moral truth with
those of a vengeful victimizer and a major contributor to the male loss of sanity, dignity, and
378
In their study of the politically active women during the French Revolution, Rachel Fuchs and Victoria
Thompson discuss the close association between “public women” and prostitutes, “referring to them [the Society of
Revolutionary Republic Women] as public women associated them with prostitution since the phrase “public
women” usually meant prostitutes.” See Rachel G. Fuchs and Victoria E. Thompson, Women in Nineteenth-Century
Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 17. Similarly, in his analysis of prostitution in pre-revolutionary
Russia, Richard Stites observes that “anti-revolutionary writers often characterized socialist revolutionary women
(and men) as promoters and practitioners of prostitution because of their “advanced” ideas on sexual equality and
the informal nature of their underground liasons.” See Stites, “Prostitute and Society,” 358-359. Also see Richard
Stites, “Women and the Russian Intelligentsia: Three Perspectives,” in Women in Russia, ed. Dorothy Atkinson et al.
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), 39-62 and Elizabeth A. Wood, “Prostitution Unbound: Representations
of Sexual and Political Anxieties in Post-revolutionary Russia,” in Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture, ed.
Jane Costlow, Stephanie Sandler, and Judith Vowles (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 124-38.
379
For example, Stites mentions “a spirit of rebelliousness against orderly society and its ways,” as one of the
documented motivations for engaging in prostitution. See Stites, “Prostitute and Society,” 353.
193
even life.
380
Due to the inherent duality of the prostitute trope as well as its strong intertextual
foundation in Russian belles-lettres, the fallen woman is, therefore, a suitable alternative for
depicting the revolutionary martyr-heroine as a recognizable literary portrayal deeply rooted in
the traditional Russian concepts of female victimization, suffering, and revenge.
381
In addition to providing the martyr-heroine with a rich narrative tradition, the prostitute is
also a fitting substitute for the revolutionary feminine because of its intermediary position in the
patriarchal narrative. On the one hand, the fallen woman destabilizes the traditional hierarchy of
familial female roles by posing a threat to family values – a behavior that makes her compatible
with the transgressive martyr-heroine. On the other hand, in contrast to revolutionary women,
who reject female roles determined by one’s biological gender and, therefore, have no space in a
patriarchal structure, the fallen woman is a character defined by her sexuality, framed by male
discourse, and, as such, accepted by the realist narrative. More than that, the fact that the
prostitute is consistently reduced to a sexualized object of male desire and control makes her not
only an easily narratable, but also a highly popular female personage of Russian realist literature.
Both a transgressor of and an accessory to the patriarchal narrative, the fallen woman functions
380
Most prominent examples of righteous fallen women aka martyrs are Liza from Dostoevsky’s novella “Notes
from the Underground” (“Zapiski iz podpol’ia,” 1864) and Sonia from Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment
(Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866). Most prominent examples of dangerous fallen women aka femme fatales include
the blonde-haired prostitute from Gogol’s story “Nevsky Prospect” (“Nevskii prospekt,” 1835), Nastas’ia Filipovna
from Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot (Idiot, 1869), and Grushen’ka from Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers
Karamazov (Brat’ia Karamazovy, 1880).
381
In her discussion about the use of the prostitute trope in “Nadezhda Nikolaevna,” Lynn Patyk observes that
“Garshin explicitly superimposes the image of the prostitute, who in the literary tradition had also assumed the dual
image of criminal/saint, onto the female terrorist, and initiates what in the first decade of the twentieth will become a
fertile tradition of representation.” See Patyk, “The Double-Edged,” 145. While Patyk rightfully asserts that the
portrayals of the prostitute and the female terrorist are both rooted in the “cultural coding of female transgression as
sexual transgression,” she does not examine larger narrative issues behind Garshin’s use of female sexuality for
portraying political transgression by women. See Patyk, “The Double-Edged,” 146. Taking Patyk’s argument
further, I extend my focus from Garshin’s known interest in revolutionary bloodshed to his particular concerns about
narrating radical female violence.
194
as a mediating concept, capable of bridging the gap between the non-familial revolutionary
feminine and realist female tropes.
Another aspect of the in-between status of the fallen woman, which makes her narrative
applicable for the portrayal of the revolutionary feminine, is her potential to move from a
transgressive into a traditional female role. Caught between disrupting norms of sexual propriety
and performing her feminine gender through sexuality, the prostitute is the “prodigal daughter”
of the patriarchal narrative, whose plots often entertain a promising, albeit tenuous, possibility of
her return to more traditional family-based female roles. A case in point is Nekrasov’s seminal
poem about a reformed prostitute “When from the Darkness of Delusion” (“Kogda iz mraka
zabluzhden’ia”), published in 1848 and considered a vital contribution to the subsequent Russian
literary gallery of fallen women. The halfway position of Nekrasov’s prostitute, who is on the
verge of returning to the patriarchal plot, provides an instructive example of narrative tensions
between her initially ostracized status of a “fallen soul” (padshaia dusha) and the possibility of
her subsequent inclusion in the familial narrative: “And my house bravely and freely / Enter as a
complete mistress” (I v dom moi smelo i svobodno / Khoziaikoi polnoiu voidi).
Accepted by many of Nekrasov’s contemporaries as a blueprint for sensible male
behavior with fallen women, Nekrasov’s poem creates an important narrative precedent for
translating a sexually transgressive prostitute into a sexually controlled family member. The fact
that Nekrasov’s male narrator offers the prostitute – an outsider to conventional familial
characters – a chance to transcend her marginal status and to rejoin the traditional narrative in a
more accepted role of his bride, wife, and potential mother, reveals the narrator’s self-serving
rather than altruistic goals. By way of saving the prostitute, the narrator actually hopes to restore
narrative control over the subversive female personage that has fallen outside of the traditional
195
familial hierarchy.
382
When viewed in the context of Nekrasov’s redemption plan for the
prostitute, Garshin’s choice of the fallen woman as a model for the martyr-heroine may have also
been suggestive of his similar attempt to return the non-familial revolutionary feminine to the
confines of the realist narrative.
While Garshin’s turn to a marginalized, yet familiar, image of a prostitute appears to be
an adequate response to the emergence of another transgressive female character – that of the
martyr-heroine, the purely sexual identification of the fallen woman is both a drastic departure
from and a challenge to the previously nonsexual portrayals of the revolutionary feminine found
in the works of Polonsky, Turgenev, and Korolenko. How was Garshin’s prostitute supposed to
overcome her sexuality and become a chaste martyr-heroine? In turn, how could the martyr-
heroine retain the subversiveness of the fallen woman but avoid her sexual enslavement by the
patriarchal narrative? And, finally, what implications did the synthesis of these two characters
have for the subsequent portrayals of the feminine in late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century
fiction? By examining the evolution of Garshin’s portrayal of the fallen woman from “An
Incident” to “Nadezhda Nikolaevna,” the next two parts will show how Garshin’s reassessment
of the prostitute trope has provided a creative way to accommodate revolutionary martyr-
heroines in later Russian fiction and made sexuality and violence the integral components of the
modern concept of the Russian feminine.
382
Eliot Borenstein also perceives “the [male] impulse to ‘save’” prostitutes as a way for male characters “to
dominate” them, “Indeed, one may argue that attempts at redemption work precisely in that they sublimate the initial
sexual arousal provoked by the prostitute into a moral one: it is her plight, and not her body, that is so seductive.”
See Eliot Borenstein, “Selling Russia – Prostitution, Masculinity and Metaphors of Nationalism after Perestroika,”
in Gender and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Russian Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo and Andrea Lanoux
(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 177.
196
Section II
This incident suggests the possibility that there is another, entirely different side
to Nadezhda Nikolaevna – one that erupts in violence.
383
—Karl Kramer
Garshin’s interest in the figure of the prostitute begins with his short story “An Incident.”
Typically viewed as another contribution to the long list of Russian narratives about fallen
women, “An Incident” has not yet been examined in the historical context of Zasulich’s attempt
to assassinate Trepov. Nor has Garshin’s heroine been studied in the cultural context of the
changing perception of the feminine or in the literary context of the crisis of realist female
tropes. This part of the study aims to fill this lacuna by reassessing these three aspects of
Garshin’s story. First, it will approach “An Incident” as evidence of Garshin’s active engagement
with Russian history by investigating the writer’s penchant for allegory and his modernist
sensibilities. Then, the chapter will examine Garshin’s symbolic portrayal of female violence,
reflective of the symbolism surrounding Zasulich’s failed assassination attempt. Finally, it will
address Garshin’s drastic re-evaluation of the character of the fallen woman as neither a victim to
be saved, nor a male savior, but a modern subject with a narrative of her own.
The Prostitute as an Allegory of Modernity in “An Incident”
The historical subtext of “An Incident” is not easy to recognize. In contrast to its sequel
“Nadezhda Nikolaevna,” which has clear revolutionary undertones through the image of the
French revolutionary figure Charlotte, “An Incident” does not come across as related to
contemporary female radicalism. In fact, Garshin himself describes his work as apolitical: “My
383
Karl Kramer, “Impressionist Tendencies in the Work of Vsevolod Garshin,” in vol. 1 of Vsevolod Garshin at the
Turn of the Century: An International Symposium in Three Volumes, ed. Peter Henry, Vladimir Porudominsky, and
Mikhail Girshman (Oxford: Northgate Press, 2000), 206.
197
piece is not going to touch upon war, social, political or any other questions. Just the torments of
two broken souls.”
384
Despite Garshin’s earnest attempt to downplay the civic symbolism of his
story, the scholar Bialyi stresses the political and social importance of “An Incident,” “But
Garshin also showed that the souls were broken by a particular social structure, and in this case,
the question was, in fact, social and political.”
385
While Bialyi does not examine the Zasulich
affair as a specific context for Garshin’s story, his discussion on the trials of violent female
offenders during Garshin’s stay in Saint Petersburg provides a useful basis for reevaluating the
seemingly trivial love tragedy in “An Incident” as a possible allusion to greater historical
issues.
386
Further support for this assertion is found in the timing of the story’s creation and
publication. In a letter to his mother from February 16, 1878, written three weeks after Zasulich’s
attempted assassination of Trepov on January 24, 1878, Garshin mentioned “An Incident” for the
first time and added that the story was not yet finished.
387
According to a later letter from
February 19, 1878, Garshin was still in the process of writing.
388
Only a month later, in a letter
from March 14, 1878, Garshin finally confirmed that the story was completed and accepted for
publication.
389
These dates are important because they place the writing of “An Incident”
immediately after the Zasulich affair. Therefore, even though in its subject matter “An Incident”
384
“Отрывок мой до войны, до социальных, политических и иных вопросов вовсе не коснется. Просто
мученья двух изломанных душ.” See Garshin, Pis’ma, 154.
385
“Но Гаршин сам показал, что ‘души изломаны’ определенным общественным устройством, а раз так, то
вопрос получался именно социальным и политическим.” See Bialyi, V. M. Garshin, 82; my translation.
386
Ibid., 129-130.
387
Garshin, Pis’ma, 154.
388
Ibid., 156.
389
Ibid., 159.
198
may not come out as a direct response to female revolutionary violence, Garshin’s choice of a
transgressive female character, who involuntarily causes a man’s suicide, suggests the writer’s
implicit engagement with the changing perception of women as subversive of patriarchy.
390
The indirect nature of this engagement is not atypical for Garshin but, on the contrary,
reflects his metaphorical writing style. Indeed, many Garshin’s contemporaries and later scholars
identify allegory as one of Garshin’s favorite narrative devices.
391
For example, Kostrzhitsa
states that in Garshin’s works “many images, and sometimes the whole stories become
allegories,” noting that for Garshin “the allegory becomes a particular feature and a consequence
of [his] aesthetic and ideological quests.”
392
Henry also observes Garshin’s propensity to
frequently employ “allegories, visual innuendoes, semi-concealed signs and leitmotifs,” while
Mikhailovskii explicitly encourages Garshin’s readers to unpack the writer’s allegories, “this is
something, in which you need to search for allegories, for something bigger, related to our life as
a whole, and not limited by this or that specific science.”
393
Garshin’s penchant for allegories receives a particularly interesting explanation in the
article by Uspenskii, who argues that the writer resorts to allegories because of his excessive
sensitivity to the ugly prose of life:
390
One of the critics who argued for “the political subtext of Garshin’s stories” was Mikhailovskii. See
Mikhailovskii, “O Vsevolode Garshine,” 322-323 and Henry, Hamlet, 300.
391
See Gleb Uspenskii, “Smert’ Garshina,” in vol. 9 of Sobranie sochinenii, ed. V. P. Druzina (Moscow:
Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1957), 148.
392
“… многие образы, а иногда и целые рассказы превращаются у Гаршина в аллегории,” “Аллегория
становится специфическим свойством и следствием эстетических и идейных исканий Гаршина.” See V.
Kostrzhitsa, “Deistvitel’nost’, otrazhennaia v ispovedi (K voprosu o stile Garshina),” Voprosy literatury 12 (1966):
141; my translation.
393
Peter Henry, “Imagery of Podvig and Podvizhnichestvo in the Works of Garshin and the Early Gor’ky,” The
Slavonic and East European Review 61, no. 1 (1983): 143. Mikhailovsky writes, “… то есть нечто такое, в чем
надо искать аллегории, подкладки чего-то большого, общежитейского, не вмещающегося в рамки той или
другой специальной науки.” See Mikhailovskii, “O Vsevolode Garshine,” 323.
199
Writing about about some fact of life “in detail,” comprehensively and
exhaustively, - was not possible for Garshin’s nerves: he had to free himself from
the oppressive impression of the experienced facts as soon as possible; they were
strikingly clear to him, and the fairy-tale and the allegory helped him.
394
In view of Mikhailovskii’s and Uspenskii’s arguments, Garshin’s turn to a prostitute in the
aftermath of the Zasulich affair no longer appears untimely or accidental. Instead, it emerges as a
uniquely Garshinian defense mechanism against the horrors of modern life, specifically female
revolutionary violence. Thanks to the prostitute, Garshin is able not only to abstain from
commenting on an actual female revolutionary, but also to meditate on female transgression
through a safer medium of an allegory.
Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the allegorical motifs in the works of another modernist,
the French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, provides another useful parallel to this line of
argument.
395
Two aspects of Benjamin’s discussion are particularly relevant for investigating
what Olga Wickerhause calls Garshin’s “surprisingly modern insight into human psychology”:
the importance of the prostitute figure for modern consciousness and the compensating function
of allegory.
396
Addressing both of these aspects in Baudelaire’s oeuvres, Benjamin describes the
394
“Написать о каком-либо явлении жизни ‘обстоятельно’, подробно и много, - было не по нервам Гаршина:
ему нужно было как можно скорее освобождать себя от угнетающего впечатления переживаемых фактов;
они ясны ему до поразительности, и вот на помощь ему пришла сказка и аллегория.” See Uspenskii, “Smert’,”
148; my translation.
395
Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, with the
assistance of Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974).
396
Olga Wickerhause, review of From the Reminiscences of Private Ivanov: And Other Stories, by Vsevolod
Garshin, trans. Peter Henry, Liv Tudge, Donald Rayfield, and Philip Taylor, New York Times, January 8, 1989,
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/08/books/in-short-fiction-334789.html. For more on Garshin’s focus on individual
200
prostitute in Baudelaire as an “embodiment of commodity” and an “allegory made human,”
defining the fallen woman as an ultimate allegory of modernity.
397
According to scholar of
feminist theory Shannon Bell, in Benjamin’s discussion of Baudelaire “the modern prostitute
body acts as a hieroglyph providing a trace to the sublime body, promising a connection with the
sacred which can, however, only be maintained for a fleeting moment.”
398
As a tentative link to a
lost or absent sense of totality, the modern prostitute, therefore, itself becomes an allegory,
defined by a recent theorist of Benjamin as a “mode of expression [that] arises in perpetual
response to the human condition of being exiled from the truth that it would embrace.”
399
Since
the allegory, according to Benjamin, serves as a way to counteract human separation from the
truth, its literary embodiment in modernity – the prostitute – then compensates for our loss of
understanding the modern world.
Benjamin’s classification of the prostitute as an allegory of modernity supports our
discussion of the fallen woman in “An Incident” as an allegory of another quintessentially
modern phenomenon, the revolutionary martyr-heroine. On the one hand, Garshin’s use of an
allegory for the martyr-heroine highlights his awareness of an inherently modern nature of both
tropes. On the other hand, it also raises larger concerns about the narratability of the
revolutionary feminine in other than allegorical terms. According to Joel Fineman, the search for
rather than social psychology, see Mikhail Stoliarov, Noveishie russkie novelisty, 1-18. For more on Garshin’s
modernist sensibilities, see Henry, Hamlet, 305-308.
397
Benjamin, Gesammelte, 1151. For more on the Benjamin’s concepts of allegory and the prostitute in Baudelaire,
see Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (Malden: Blackwell Publishers Inc, 2002), 57-87. For
more on women as allegory of the modern, see Christine Buci-Glucksmann, “Catastrophic Utopia: The Feminine as
Allegory of the Modern,” in The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed.
Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Walter Laqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 220-229.
398
Shannon Bell, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1994), 44.
399
Bainard Cowan, “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory,” New German Critique 22 (1981): 114.
201
allegorical representations intensifies in the period of “critical or polemical atmospheres, when
for political or metaphysical reasons there is something that cannot be said.”
400
With Russia
experiencing both “critical and polemical atmospheres” in the wake of female radical activism in
late 1870s – early 1880s, it is not surprising that the martyr-heroine emerges as something that
“could not be said” and, hence, requires an allegory for both “political and metaphysical
reasons.”
While the political motives play an important role in substituting the politically
subversive martyr-heroine with a more appropriate figure of the prostitute, another reason for
using an allegory of the fallen woman in “An Incident” is the metaphysical incompatibility of the
Russian martyr-heroine with familial female tropes. As a narratively subversive concept, the
revolutionary martyr-heroine generates an empty narrative space by deconstructing the
conventional patriarchal definitions of earlier female characters. This sense of void, manifested
as the crisis of female representation in Polonsky, Turgenev, and Korolenko, demands an
allegory to fill the vacuum created by the destabilizing concept of the revolutionary feminine. In
response to this narrative demand, Garshin writes “An Incident” with the only allegory that in his
view embodies the spirit of modernity, satisfies his artistic and emotional needs, and provides a
plausible context for the gap created by Zasulich’s memorable shot – the character of a
prostitute.
The Fallen Woman and Symbolic Violence in “An Incident”
By expanding the perception of Nadezhda Nikolaevna from yet another fallen woman to
400
Joel Fineman, “The Structure of Allegorical Desire,” in Allegory and Representation, ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 28.
202
an allegory for the revolutionary feminine, it becomes possible to re-evaluate Garshin’s portrayal
of the prostitute in “An Incident” through the topos of violence. In contrast to its sequel
“Nadezhda Nikolaevna,” which provides examples of real violence by evoking lethal Corday and
describing two graphic murders, “An Incident” is marked by symbolic rather than literal
violence.
401
As a figurative response to Zasulich’s attempted murder, “An Incident” probes the
dimensions of female contributions to violence, questioning the direct role of women as
perpetrators of crime and emphasizing the implicit nature of their participation. By portraying his
main protagonist Nadezhda Nikolaevna as neither guilty nor innocent of her suitor’s suicide,
Garshin aptly expresses a general sense of ambivalence, which has characterized the public
perception of female violence in the aftermath of Zasulich’s shot.
Consistent with the divided opinion on Zasulich’s culpability, the question whether
Nadezhda Nikolaevna is to blame for the fact that Nikitin, a young civil servant, falls madly in
love with her, fails to persuade her to marry him, and commits suicide out of desperation is never
fully resolved. On the one hand, Nadezhda Nikolaevna neither personally kills Nikitin, nor
wishes for his demise, suggesting the symbolic rather than factual nature of her guilt.
402
Indeed,
Nadezhda Nikolaevna even tries to save Nikitin at the very last moment, and, despite being late
by a proverbial second, shows her compassion and concern about Nikitin’s well-being, “Run!
Perhaps there’s still time! Lord, stop him! Lord, don’t take him away from me! I was gripped by
mortal terror such as I had never known. I ran back like a madwoman, colliding with people.”
403
401
Kramer also argues that “this [violent] aspect of her [Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s] character is only hinted at in ‘An
Incident’ but receives explicit treatment in the second Nadezhda Nikolaevna story.” See Kramer, “Impressionist
Tendencies,” 206.
402
For example, Henry suggests that Nikitin’s suicide, as “Garshin seems to imply, was largely the result of social
conditions.” See Henry, Hamlet, 74.
403
Vsevolod Garshin, “An Incident,” in From the Reminiscences of Private Ivanov and Other Stories, trans. Liv
Tudge (London: Angel Books, 1988), 51.
203
Notwithstanding Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s redeeming final sprint, one can also argue that
she, albeit involuntarily, does cause Nikitin’s death by consistently rejecting his advances and
ignoring his deteriorating mental condition. A similar opinion is voiced by Peter Henry, who
suggests that, “his [Garshin’s] strong sense of personal responsibility for others has Garshin
make Nadezhda bear the burden of guilt for Nikitin’s death.”
404
Whereas Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s
direct confession, “I killed him [Nikitin],” only appears six years later in “Nadezhda
Nikolaevna,” the symbolic intimation of her “capacity for inducing violence” is already evident
in “An Incident.”
405
The fact that Nadezhda Nikolaevna acknowledges her role in Nikitin’s
downfall, but still chooses not to give in to Nikitin’s demands, further increases the degree of her
culpability for Nikitin’s tragic end.
Faced with hints at Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s responsibility for Nikitin’s suicide, the reader
cannot help but wonder – what would have happened, had Nadezhda Nikolaevna given Nikitin
hope, agreed to become his wife, or noticed the signs of his impending suicide? Could she have
possibly prevented Nikitin from shooting himself? Would she have then been spared from
becoming an involuntary accomplice in Nikitin’s suicide? With both “innocent” and “guilty”
interpretations given equal weight in the story, Garshin avoids an unequivocal judgment on
Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s contribution to Nikitin’s death, refusing to categorize her as either a
virtuous heroine or a genuine perpetrator of violence. In so doing, Garshin not only expresses the
complexity of his heroine, but also emphasizes an inherent dichotomy and an unresolved tension
in the public perception of a modern female character.
404
Henry, Hamlet, 74.
405
Kramer, “Impressionist Tendencies,” 206.
204
In line with Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s ambiguous status of a symbolic rather than real
culprit, her suitor Nikitin also plays a role of a symbolic victim, whose death is insinuated rather
than unequivocally pronounced. Permeated by a sense of uncertainty similar to that of Nadezhda
Nikolaevna’s questionable liability, the final scene of Nikitin’s suicide only has circumstantial
evidence of his actual death, implied by a single shot behind the closed door. Since the story
ends with Nadezhda Nikolaevna losing consciousness immediately after hearing the shot, neither
she nor the reader has any narrative proof of Nikitin’s death, emphasizing the symbolic nature of
his implied suicide. Given the lack of information about the result of Nikitin’s shot, which itself
takes place outside the narrative, how can one be fully convinced without any other narrative
confirmation that Nikitin actually dies and not only wounds himself or altogether misses his
mark?
Whereas some may object that Garshin hints at Nikitin’s suicide by providing a number
of clues in the text, such as Nikitin’s gloomy mood, his desire to leave, and a recently written
letter, the presence of these clues still fails to explain why Garshin decides to avoid the direct
description of Nikitin’s death and, instead, resorts to its symbolic implication. Given Garshin’s
known fascination with literary and visual portrayals of blood, death, and human cruelty, his lack
of visual and narrative commentary on Nikitin’s suicide strikes one as uncharacteristic of his
writing style.
406
Based on Garshin’s earlier graphic depictions of violence and physical decay in
his military story “Four Days” (“Chetyre Dnia,” 1877), the writer’s refusal to describe Nikitin’s
suicide in “An Incident” is not likely due to his aesthetic and ethical sensibilities. Nor is it a
406
Garshin was known for his simultaneous abhorrence and fascination with the themes of blood and violence. In
his notorious response to the hanging of the revolutionary Mlodetskii, Garshin states, “Blood perturbs me, but blood
is everywhere” [Кровь возмущает меня, но кровь отовсюду]. See Garshin, Pis’ma, 208. In another famous
incident, Garshin reacts to seeing Repin’s painting of “Ivan the Terrible and His Son” at the exhibition in 1885 with
an exclamation, “Why, why so much blood?” [Зачем, зачем столько крови?]. See Nikolai Demchinskii, “V. M.
Garshin pered kartinoi Repina,” Solntse Rossii, no. 13 (March 23, 1913): 9. Cited in S. Durylin, Repin i Garshin (iz
istorii russkoi zhivopisi i literatury) (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia akademiia khudozhestvennykh nauk, 1926), 78.
205
typical feature of Garshin’s stories about prostitutes, since in his later “Nadezhda Nikolaevna”
Garshin provides a detailed depiction of the murder scene with explicit description of two dead
bodies. A clear outlier in Garshin’s oeuvre, “An Incident” raises a valid concern about Garshin’s
motivation for not picturing Nikitin’s dead body – if not for any of the aforementioned reasons,
why does Garshin have reservations about narrating violence in “An Incident”?
Refusing to overlook the oddity of Nikitin’s implied suicide, I suggest that Garshin’s
choice to end “An Incident” without any narrative verification of Nikitin’s death is another
indication of Garshin’s intention to portray violence symbolically. By evading the depiction of
Nikitin after the shot, Garshin substitutes the literal representation of violence with an allusion to
violence, never confirming Nikitin’s death within the confines of the narrative. With Nikitin’s
death neither substantiated nor refuted, the already equivocal perception of Nadezhda
Nikolaevna’s guilt becomes even more ambiguous, highlighting her role of a symbolic
contributor to symbolic violence.
This lack of clarity on both aspects of the crime makes particular sense when examined in
the context of Zasulich’s failed shot at General Trepov. The fact that Trepov does not die and
Zasulich is acquitted decenters the traditional “poor victim-evil victimizer” binary, contributing
to the public view of female violence in symbolic rather than literal terms. Along with the
progressive Russian public that perceived Zasulich’s assassination attempt as a symbol of
vengeance, “An Incident” also focused on the symbolic role of violence and its female
contributor. As such, Garshin’s refusal to narrate the disastrous consequences of Nikitin’s
implied suicide and to portray Nadezhda Nikolaevna as a definite culprit serves as yet another
reminder that “An Incident” is not an irrelevant trifle, but Garshin’s timely response to the major
issue of the time – female contribution to violence.
206
The Fallen Woman as a Rebel
Another way in which “An Incident” expresses Garshin’s awareness of the changing
perception of the feminine in the late 1870s is by making Nadezhda Nikolaevna rebel against the
patriarchal narrative. Akin to female revolutionaries, who subvert the traditional view of the
feminine as nurturing and family-oriented, Nadezhda Nikolaevna undermines the accepted
literary functions of the prostitute as a male victim and/or a male rescuer.
407
Whereas the earlier
portrayals of prostitutes in Russian fiction often employ the so-called “saving narrative,” in
which the man attempts to save the prostitute or the prostitute tries to save the man, “An
Incident” combines these approaches to demonstrate their inadequacy for depicting a modern
fallen woman – the one imbued with rebellious undertones.
408
Refusing to be saved or to become
a savior, Nadezhda Nikolaevna reveals the hidden iconoclastic potential of the fallen woman
capable of destabilizing the traditional literary treatment of prostitution. In so doing, Nadezhda
Nikolaevna interrogates the very prostitute role, questioning the ability of the patriarchal
narrative to accommodate the changing concept of the feminine in general, and its most
transgressive trope, the fallen woman, in particular.
409
407
For more on the binary classification of prostitutes as male victims/victimizers in Russian literature, see George
Siegel, “The Fallen Woman in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature,” Harvard Slavic Studies 5 (1970): 81-107
and Matich, “A Typology.”
408
An example of a man trying to save a prostitute is found in Gogol’s short story “Nevsky Prospect,” whereas an
example of a prostitute trying to save a man is best illustrated by Dostoevsky in his novel Crime and Punishment.
Whereas Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s refusal of Nikitin’s proposal and his subsequent suicide seem to be patterned after
the plot of “Nevsky prospect,” Garshin’s intelligent, sensible, and complex Nadezhda Nikolaevna is a far departure
from Gogol’s shallow and narrow-minded prostitute.
409
In his discussion of literary prostitutes, Eliot Borenstein examines a later example of a disruptive prostitute who
undermines “the comradely harmony of the revolutionary soldiers” and is, consequently, punished with death is
found in Blok’s poem “The Twelve” (“Dvenadtsat’,” 1918). See Borenstein, “Selling Russia,” 178. In my opinion,
the destabilizing function of the fallen woman towards the male narrative surfaces much earlier – with Garshin’s
Nadezhda Nikolaevna serving as a prominent example of this tendency.
207
The fact that Nadezhda Nikolaevna does not want to abandon the marginalized position
of the prostitute for the presumed comfort of familial tropes not only suggests the intensity of her
revolt, but also challenges the inferior status of the fallen woman in a patriarchal hierarchy of
female tropes. Departing from the earlier negative, religious, or victimized portrayals of the
prostitutes put forward by Gogol’, Dostoevsky, and Nekrasov, Nadezhda Nikolaevna emerges as
a new type of a prostitute with a conscious understanding of her narrative as a male construct.
Neither ignorant nor naive, Nadezhda Nikolaevna is a well-educated woman who knows French
and German and reads Pushkin and Lermontov. As a result of her noble upbringing in a cultured
household, Nadezhda Nikolaevna continuously demonstrates a high level of intellectual and
emotional development, which ranges from astute comments on social hypocrisy to a
perspicacious analysis of a fallen woman’s plight. That her name, Nadezhda Nikolaevna, is an
unusually reputable way of addressing a prostitute further adds to her overall portrayal as a
mature and knowledgeable individual, who invites respect rather than pity or contempt.
410
Because of Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s ability to understand her misfortune as an expression
of larger social issues, she refuses to be judged, but instead passes her own judgment on society
and its artificial constructs of female propriety:
410
In her discussion of Nadezhda Nikolaevna, Mironenko notices her exceptionality, “She has the makings of an
extraordinary personality, which reveal themselves in extreme situations, but are also immediately obvious” [В ней
задатки незаурядной личности, раскрывающейся в экстремальных ситуяциях, но и сразу очевидные]. See L.
Mironenko, “Obraz ‘padshei zhenshchiny’ v natsional’no-khudozhestvennoi sisteme (Garshin i Mopassan),” in vol.
3 of Vsevolod Garshin at the Turn of the Century: An International Symposium in Three Volumes, ed. Peter Henry,
Vladimir Porudominsky, and Mikhail Girshman (Oxford: Northgate Press, 2000), 52; my translation. Henry also
observes that “Garshin strikes a fresh note in his well-drawn and credible portrait of the woman herself. She is no
mere object of pity, no stereotype, but a strongly individualised person with qualities and attitudes of her own.” See
Henry, Hamlet, 71.
208
Exactly why are all these fine folk giving me such despising looks? What if I am
in a sordid, repulsive line of business, performing the most despicable duty? It is a
duty, all the same! That magistrate is performing a duty too. And I think that we
both…
411
By validating her position in the existing social structure, Nadezhda Nikolaevna not only
discloses the hypocrisy of public prejudice against prostitution, but also deems all social
strata similarly immoral:
If this very day I were offered the chance to go back to refined society, to those
people with their refined hair-partings, chignons, and turns of phrase, I would not
go back. I would stay and die at my post.
412
The use of the word “post” (post) – albeit ironic – suggests that Nadezhda Nikolaevna
interprets her occupation as a social task fulfilling a social need, “Oh yes, even I have a
post! I too am necessary, am essential,” which, in turn, implicates the whole society in
her fall.
413
That Nadezhda Nikolaevna rejects to return to the “refined” (iziashchnaia) life
of her youth further indicates the erosion of the boundaries between her past and present,
challenging the honorable standing of the former and the shameful status of the latter.
411
Garshin, “An Incident,” 38.
412
Ibid.
413
Ibid.
209
Herself a hybrid between respectable and fallen women, Nadezhda Nikolaevna, in fact,
undermines the very criteria that separate these two female portrayals. In her telling comment
about the flawed depictions of women in art, Nadezhda Nikolaevna criticizes an unknown male
artist for unequivocally dividing women in his painting into two types – proper and disreputable.
Faced with this binary model, Nadezhda Nikolaevna at first identifies herself with the
disreputable type of women:
And the row leading downwards, in the opposite direction, was a young girl with
a package from a shop, then me, me, and me again. The first was me as I am now;
the second was me sweeping streets, and the third was an utterly repulsive, vile
old hag.
414
However, on second thought, Nadezhda Nikolaevna notices the faulty nature of this dual
perception because, in contrast to the artist’s direct parallel between a woman’s childhood and
adulthood, Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s noble past does not correspond to her fallen present:
That illustrator was a strange one, though! Why must it inevitably follow that a
girl at a boarding school or a high-school becomes a demure young maiden, a
respected mother, and grandmother? Then what about me? Praise be, even I can
flaunt my French or German out on the Nevsky! And I don’t think I’ve forgotten
414
Ibid., 37.
210
how to draw flowers, and I can remember ‘Calypso ne pouvait me consoler de
départ d’Ulysse.’
415
Unable to find her place in the artist’s restrictive narrative, Nadezhda Nikolaevna uses her own
mixed experience to challenge the rigid male hierarchy of female tropes and blur the boundaries
between approved and marginalized female depictions.
Having rejected the one-dimensional approach to female characterization in Russian art,
Nadezhda Nikolaevna continues to search in vain for self-definition and, in so doing, further
exposes the crisis of female representation in contemporary Russian fiction. To illustrate, in a
scene featuring Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s transformation from her alter ego – the brazen and
vulgar prostitute Evgeniia – into a shy, modest, and anguished woman, Nadezhda Nikolaevna
expresses the difficulty of self-identification, “This broken, suffering woman, pale-faced and
with such a haunted look in her big, black eyes set in dark circles – this is something quite new,
not me at all. Or perhaps it really is me?”
416
Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s inability to classify herself or to provide a name for a woman she
sees in the mirror suggests that the contemporary concept of the feminine is in the process of
changing and that the earlier patriarchal characterization of women is no longer valid. Having
become aware of a new, unknown, nameless female entity within her, Nadezhda Nikolaevna
expectedly rejects her alter ego, a fallen woman trope, as an artificial, damaging construct, which
destroys her real, albeit unspecified, identity, “And that Evgeniya whom everybody sees and
415
Ibid.
416
Ibid., 48.
211
knows is something alien that has settled on me, that is crushing me, killing me.”
417
By refusing
her present role of the prostitute Evgeniia as a foreign concept to her true self, Nadezhda
Nikolaevna not only denounces the public identification of her with Evgeniia as false, but also
demonstrates the greater failure of the traditional prostitute trope to encompass the complex
multifaceted nature of a modern woman.
The Prostitute – Not a Victim to be Saved
Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s attack on the patriarchal hierarchy of women continues with her
rejection of Nikitin as her supposed male savior and potential husband.
418
According to a more
traditional interpretation, offered by Henry, “she [Nadezhda Nikolaevna] rejects him [Nikitin]
out of loyalty to a higher morality and to a misunderstood duty.”
419
While Henry does note that
Nadezhda Nikolaevna “becomes intuitively aware that marriage would bring the same depravity,
it would be ‘another sale’,” he does not approach Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s negation of marriage
as a sign of a larger crisis of familial female tropes.
420
In my opinion, it is precisely Nadezhda
Nikolaevna’s refusal of realizing the traditional “saving through marriage” plot that demonstrates
its ineffectiveness for portraying a modern woman and its ultimate manifestation – the prostitute.
Even though Nadezhda Nikolaevna is cognizant of her power to alter her marginalized
position with the help of Nikitin, she does not rush into accepting Nikitin’s redemption proposal.
Instead, she examines the family-based options offered to the women of her status by the
417
Ibid.
418
In this respect, Nadezhda Nikolaevna subverts the earlier successful examples of the redemption plot found in
Nekrasov’s “When from the Darkness of Delusion” and in Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?.
419
Henry, Hamlet, 74.
420
Ibid.
212
patriarchal narrative with a critical eye, “I need only drop a hint, and I could be a legally wedded
wife. The wedded wife of a poor but noble man, and I could even become a poor but noble
mother…”
421
Whereas the adjectives “legally” (zakonnuiu) and “noble” (blagodornoiu) are
supposed to provide a favorable contrast to the fallen woman’s ostracized standing, they have
already lost their original value for Nadezhda Nikolaevna, who begins to question the
redemption narrative as another form of patriarchal control over her body, “Marry him? Would I
dare? And would that not be just another kind of sale? Oh Lord, no – it would be even worse!
[...] Would it not be just the same debauchery – only not straightforward?”
422
The economic
parallel of a “sale” that Nadezhda Nikolaevna uses to describe her attitude to both marriage and
prostitution presents the narrative of marriage in a particularly unfavorable light, emphasizing
the false substance behind its promise of legal rights, noble statue, and spirituality.
423
Not satisfied with simply equating marriage and prostitution, Nadezhda Nikolaevna goes
further by insinuating that the fate of a married woman is actually worse than that of a prostitute.
This suggestion not only undermines the significance of the wife/mother roles, but also casts
doubt on the traditional value of husband/father tropes, whose familial status is seen by
Nadezhda Nikolaevna as another form of deception:
421
Garshin, “An Incident,” 40.
422
Ibid., 45.
423
A similar perception of marriage as another form of prostitution is later voiced by Tolstoy in his novella The
Kreutzer Sonata (Kreitserova Sonata, 1889) and in his last major novel Resurrection (Voskresen’e, 1899).
213
And can I believe that there are any [good people], when I receive here husbands
with young wives, and children (all but children – fourteen and fifteen years old)
from ‘good families’, and old men, bald men, paralytics, and dotards?
424
By implicating every traditional male trope in sinful actions with fallen women, Nadezhda
Nikolaevna obscures the distinction between accepted and transgressive male behaviors – an
important rhetorical move that reinforces her earlier criticism of the conventional binary
portrayal of women as either respectable or fallen and further distorts the positive image of the
familial narrative.
While Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s suspicious attitude towards all men explains her distrust of
the marriage plot, it also informs her fear of the subsequent change in the power dynamics –
namely, of her potential husband’s cruel behavior towards her in the future, “I suspect that if I
gave him power over me, this man would torture me with just the memory…And I wouldn’t be
able to endure that…”
425
Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s view of marriage as a way for men to take over
the woman highlights the problematic nature of the patriarchal redemptive narrative, which
promises to rescue the woman but, in actuality, further enslaves her, “At this moment he is ready
to lick my hand, but then…then he would trample me underfoot and say, ‘You actually opposed
my wishes, you despicable creature! You scorned me!’ Would he say that? I think he would.”
426
By describing Nikitin’s dramatic transformation from a man, licking a prostitute’s hands, into a
man, stepping over his wife, Nadezhda Nikolaevna reveals a deeply-seated anxiety about the
424
Garshin, “An Incident,” 37-38. A very similar description of prostitute’s clients, who come from all walks of life,
is found in Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection.
425
Garshin, “An Incident,” 45.
426
Ibid., 46.
214
abusive nature of the institution of marriage, which, in her opinion, will deny her present power
in exchange for subjugation and reproach.
That Nadezhda Nikolaevna chooses prostitution over marriage is particularly startling,
given her revulsion of her present life of a fallen woman, “And indeed, isn’t horreur just the
word for it?”
427
Even though Nadezhda Nikolaevna does admit the horrors of her current
position, she still does not see Nikitin as a viable alternative, “You’ve got a mind to save me?
Get away from me – there’s nothing I need! Better leave me to breathe my last alone rather
than...”
428
By referring to her future with Nikitin as inferior to “dying alone,” Nadezhda
Nikolaevna extends her earlier misgivings about the redemption narrative in general onto a
specific man Nikitin whose ability to save or guide the fallen woman falls under serious scrutiny.
Notwithstanding Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s overall disappointment with the familial structure, is
there something about Nikitin in particular that prevents him from becoming Nadezhda
Nikolaevna’s savior?
Given the long literary tradition of unsuccessful love affairs attempted by the Russian
superfluous men, Nikitin’s failure to alter Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s story is not particularly
original.
429
In Garshin’s interpretation, Nikitin becomes a quintessence of an unproductive
romantic hero who is superfluous not only to the Russian society or to Nadezhda Nikolaevna, but
to the redemption narrative itself. In fact, the main reason for Nikitin’s fiasco lies in the absence
of a clear vision for his future life with Nadezhda Nikolaevna. In line with his generic name and
427
Ibid., 37.
428
Ibid., 40.
429
Other male characters who fail to save a prostitute include Piskarev from Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect,” the
underground man from Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground,” Vasil’ev from Chekhov’s story “The Attack
of Nerves,” (“Pripadok,” 1888), and Likhonin from Kuprin’s novel The Pit (Iama, 1909-1915).
215
patronymic, Ivan Ivanovich Nikitin also lacks specificity and nuance in his proposed plan to save
Nadezhda Nikolaevna:
Does she know that there exists a man who would count himself happy just to sit
in the same room with her and, without even touching her hands, simply gaze into
her eyes? A man who would case himself into the flames if that would help her to
get out of this hell, if only she wanted to?
430
Nikitin’s poetic description of his feelings sharply contrast with the prosaic language used by
Nadezhda Nikolaevna, who expects Nikitin to be her “support” and envisions heself as “a legally
wedded wife, noble mother.” While Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s intentions are concrete and future-
oriented, such as “to get married” (vyiti zamuzh), Nikitin’s plans are, on the other hand, abstract
and focused on changing Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s past, “to get out of this hell” (vyiti iz ada),
rather than outlining their common future.
Like his abstract pronouncements, the statements in Nikitin’s diary neither directly
proclaim his decision to marry Nadezhda Nikolaevna, nor describe her as his wife or the mother
of his children. Instead, the diary evokes Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s former status of a prostitute by
stating that Nikitin, in contrast to other men, does not have to touch her, which is another
indication of Nikitin’s difficulty to perceive Nadezhda Nikolaevna in any role other than that of a
prostitute. Aside from Nikitin’s promise to work hard, it is also unclear what kind of life, other
than “carefree, peaceful, honorable,” he envisions for Nadezhda Nikolaevna.
431
This lack of
430
Garshin, “An Incident,” 42.
431
Ibid., 44.
216
detail in Nikitin’s projections parallels the absence of specifics in Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s
perception of him, which is always marked by ellipsis, “a new life, new hopes…” (novaia zhizn’,
novye nadezhdy…).
432
Unable to transcend his own romantic discourse, Nikitin fails to verbalize
his future with Nadezhda Nikolaevna in more practical realist terms, which likely contributes to
Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s increasing skepticism about his proposed role as her savior.
What further disqualifies Nikitin from coming to Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s rescue is his
reversal of the traditional “saving through marriage” plot, in which the true victim in the story is
no longer the prostitute, but her supposed savior. In fact, several critics have noticed that the real
incident in “An Incident” is not Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s fall but Nikitin’s suicide – making the
man rather than the fallen woman the problematic character of the story. This view is aptly
expressed by Mikhailovskii, who claims that the story centers around Nikitin, “this is a story
about how Ivan Ivanovich fell in love and killed himself” (eto rasskaz o tom, kak vliubilsia i
samoubilsia Ivan Ivanovich).
433
By altogether omitting the reference to Nadezhda Nikolaevna in
his summary of the story, Mikhailovskii perceptibly identifies Nikitin as the victimized party,
whose inability to control his obsession with Nadezhda Nikolaevna weakens his ability to save
her.
That Nikitin is always portrayed in a state of mental and emotional distress is a far
departure from the traditional depiction of a woman’s protector as strong and dependable. When
Nadezhda Nikolaevna first introduces Nikitin to the reader, she calls him her “support” (opora)
and her “straw” (solominka), framing Nikitin as a possible yet dubious solution to her plight. As
the story progresses, the word “support” is always used with the quotations marks, implying
432
Ibid., 46.
433
Mikhailovskii, “O Vsevolode Garshine,” 319.
217
Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s increasing disbelief in Nikitin’s ability to function as her protector. The
word “straw” also has feminine connotations with an implication of weakness and fragility,
which, when combined with a later expression used by Nikitin’s colleague to criticize the young
man’s interest in Nadezhda Nikolaevna, “Oh, you womanbody – you sentimental womanbody!,”
further contributes to one’s perception of Nikitin as a delicate man with feminine sensibilities.
434
Nikitin’s unheroic disposition is further reinforced by his irrational behavior with
Nadezhda Nikolaevna. Unable to control his obsession, Nikitin succumbs to alcohol and begins
to behave foolishly, as he shows up at Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s apartment drunk and begs for her
love on his knees. During this scene, Nikitin experiences something of a metaphorical “fall” as
he feels “that with every word he was plunging deeper and deeper” – an important indication of
Nikitin’s own “fallen” status, in which he is hardly capable of rescuing another human being.
435
In contrast to Nikitin’s hysterical behavior, Nadezhda Nikolaevna appears logical and rational, as
she observes Nikitin’s emotional outburst from a distance and calmly evaluates her feelings
towards him: “And he crawled across the floor on his knees before her. But she stood motionless
by the wall, her head braced against it and her hands behind her back. Her gaze was fixed on
some point in space.”
436
Able to retain composure under the direst circumstances, Nadezhda
Nikolaevna does not fit the “saving through marriage” narrative and neither does Nikitin, whose
lack of plan and uncontrollable lovesickness prevent him from rescuing either Nadezhda
Nikolaevna or himself.
434
Garshin, “An Incident,” 41.
435
Ibid., 45.
436
Ibid., 44. The fact that Garshin uses the third-person narrative to describe the encounter further emphasizes
Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s maturity and presence of mind.
218
The Prostitute – Not a Male Savior
In addition to rejecting the role of a victim to be saved, Nadezhda Nikolaevna also
refuses the second possible scenario traditionally deemed appropriate for the Russian literary
prostitute – that is, saving the male, sometimes from himself. Even though Nadezhda Nikolaevna
is aware of Nikitin’s miserable state of mind, she does not want to sacrifice her life for him and
chooses to be true to herself, “No, I had best stay as I am....”
437
Far from being a spontaneous
reaction, Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s decision to deny the role of a male savior results from several
inner dialogues that highlight Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s conscious reassessment of a sacrificial
ideal of the Russian feminine, “Do I pity him? No, I don’t. What can I do for him? Marry him?
Would I dare? And would that not be just another kind of sale?”
438
Since the female ability to experience “pity” (zhalost’) has long been a staple feature of
the traditional Russian concept of the feminine, Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s lack of compassion for
drunken Nikitin is a noticeable departure from the earlier empathetic portrayals of prostitutes
such as Liza from Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground” and Sonia from Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment. For example, Liza hugs the narrator in spite of his insulting comments
because she feels sorry for him and thinks that he is unhappy:
Liza, whom I had so abused and humiliated, understood a great deal more than I
imagined. She understood that part of it that a woman always understands first, if
she sincerely loves, and that was that I myself was unhappy… On some sort of
irresistible impulse she sprang up from her chair, and straining towards me but
437
Ibid., 45.
438
Ibid.
219
still timid and not daring to move from the spot, held out her arms to me.... Then
she rushed towards me, flung her arms round my neck, and burst into tears.
439
Similarly, Sonia does not hesitate a moment to pledge her life to Raskol’nikov after she
learns about his murder because she feels empathy for his suffering:
Jumping up from her knees, she threw herself on his neck, embracing him and
gripping him as hard as she could in her arms. […] There’s no one, no one in the
whole world more unhappy than you are now. […] I’ll never leave you, no matter
where you go! I’ll follow you, I’ll follow you everywhere! […] Together,
together, […] we’ll go and do penal servitude together!
440
In contrast to Liza and Sonia, Nadezha Nikolaevna does not demonstrate the same
behavioral pattern, “She wanted to pity him, but felt incapable of pity. He aroused only revulsion
in her. And what other feeling could he have aroused in this pitiful condition – drunk, dirty,
abjectly pleading?”
441
Instead of pity, Nadezhda Nikolaevna experiences disgust towards Nikitin,
whose pathetic appearance is not enough to make Nadezhda Nikolaevna want to save him at the
expense of her values. Even though later Nadezhda Nikolaevna does admit feeling some pity for
439
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Jessie Coulson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2009),
117.
440
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. David McDuff (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 491-92. In
his discussion of Dostoevskian intertexts in Garshin, Evnin also highlights the gap between Nadezhda Nikolaevna
and Sonia, “in the appearance of Nadezhda Nikolaevna there is is nothing that reminds one of a sacrificial and
humble heroine from Crime and Punishment” [в облике Надежды Николаевны нет ничего, напоминающего
самоотверженную и смиренную героиню ‘Преступления и Наказания’]. See Evnin, “F. M. Dostoevsky,” 295.
441
Garshin, “An Incident,” 44.
220
Nikitin, she does not consider pity a substitute for love and again refuses to sacrifice her
principles for another man, “He is wholly beyond help. What support can I offer him? Can I
change my attitude towards him? [...] Could the pity that I do after all feel for him perhaps turn
into love? No!”
442
Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s decision to subvert traditional expectations of women to support
the man, to save him, or to act out of pity becomes another expression of her rebellious,
profoundly modern nature. By separating pity from love, Nadezhda Nikolaevna further
highlights her modern sensibilities as she conceptualizes love rather than pity or financial
obligation as the basis for marriage.
443
As Nadezhda Nikolaevna tries to articulate her concerns
against marrying Nikitin, she does not at first recognize why his offer does not suit her, “I don’t
know why I don’t want to seize my chance to give up this terrible life and be free of this
nightmare.”
444
It is only after realizing that she does not love him, Nadezhda Nikolaeva
resolutely rejects Nikitin, suspecting that her inability to fall in love with Nikitin will eventually
change his affectionate behavior towards her to abusive.
In contrast to Nadezhda Nikolaevna, who views mutual love as a necessary component of
marriage, Nikitin feels that his love for Nadezhda Nikolaevna is enough for accomplishing his
saving mission and, as a result, fails to understand the motivation behind her negative response,
“But she doesn’t want to… And even now I don’t know why she doesn’t want to. I just cannot
believe that she is rotten to the core; I cannot believe that I know it is not so, because I know her,
442
Ibid., 45-46.
443
For more on the romantic love as a characteristic of modernity, see Anthony Giddens, Transformation of
Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1992).
444
Garshin, “An Incident,” 45.
221
because I love her, I love her…”
445
Interestingly, the thought of Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s lack of
feelings for him does not even cross Nikitin’s mind as a viable reason for her rejection, which
suggests that Nikitin’s view of marriage is based on a woman’s need rather than her love. By
appealing to Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s kindness and pity in his later letter, Nikitin further
demonstrates his reliance on the traditional concept of female compassion – and not the freely-
given love of an independent human being – as a way to secure Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s
acceptance of his invitation. As such, Nikitin’s ignorance of Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s emotional
state is yet another illustration of his outdated perception of women as objects of rescue rather
than the subjects of their own destiny – an important pitfall of Nikitin’s character that deems his
quest unsuccessful and his approach doomed.
Nikitin’s failure to revise his view of the prostitute is symbolic of the difficulties
experienced by contemporary writers, who were searching for appropriate ways to depict modern
women and reshape the traditional patriarchal narrative. Because of Garshin’s unsureness about
the capacity of a conventional male character to break the literary tradition, he portrays Nikitin as
unable to find an alternative solution to the standard paradigm of “saving the fallen woman
through marriage” and then has the bewildered Nikitin choose suicide as a way out of his
predicament. Under these circumstances, Nikitin’s tragic end acquires an additional metaliterary
meaning because it highlights the inability of the realist narrative to rewrite the relationship
between a man and a fallen woman outside familial literary clichés.
Whereas Nikitin fails to overcome his male-oriented perspective, Nadezhda Nikolaevna,
on the other hand, succeeds in reversing the previous portrayal of the prostitute as a subjugated,
giving, and passive vehicle, controlled by male desires, into a new image of a modern, reflective,
445
Ibid., 42.
222
and, paradoxically, socially conscious fallen women. No longer just a victim of circumstances,
but an agent of resistance, Nadezhda Nikolaevna negates the traditional feminine paradigm of
sacrifice as she takes a stand against performing the role prescribed to her by the patriarchal
narrative. As a timely response to the changing concept of the feminine at the time of increased
female revolutionary activitism, the subversive portrayal of Nadezhda Nikolaevna in “An
Incident” reflects Garshin’s search for ways to describe female transgression, discuss female
contribution to violence, and examine female ability to undermine the familial narrative. By
leaving the story open-ended, with Nadezhda Nikolaevna falling and losing consciousness upon
hearing the gunshot in Nikitin’s apartment, Garshin, similar to Polonsky and Turgenev, suggests
the unknown literary future of his female character and, by proxy, of the Russian concept of the
modern feminine.
223
Section III
It [“Nadezhda Nikolaevna”] offers insight […] on how a model can serve an artist
in resolving his compositional problems with a painting.
446
—Valkenier, “The Writer”
Garshin’s second story about prostitution “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” shows a clear political
subtext through the figure of Charlotte Corday. Called a symbolic “commentary on the meaning
of assassination in his [Garshin’s] Russia,” “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” has been perceived by
scholars as an example of Garshin’s responsiveness to “all events of social and political
significance.”
447
However, this perception is yet to place “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” in the context
of “An Incident” or to address the evolution of Garshin’s approach to the changing concept of
the feminine and to the portrayal of female revolutionary violence.
The first part of the study unpacks Garshin’s sequel on several levels, including its
conceptual link with “An Incident,” historical motivation, and the accuracy of the heroine’s
prototype. The second part examines several critical reviews to reassess the presumed failure of
“Nadezhda Nikolaevna” as actual evidence of the heroine’s experimental nature. The third part
provides examples of Garshin’s innovative depiction of the fallen woman, who resolves her
plight not by reverting to the familial tropes of the realist novel, but by becoming an artist’s muse
and a stand-in for the martyr-heroine. In Garshin’s new economy of female characters, there is
no more place for a wife, a mother, or a married prostitute, which is why the engaged fallen
woman Nadezhda Nikolaevna dies, but the portrait of her as Corday remains. In the end, by
privileging an artist over a groom and a muse over a familial woman, Garshin not only finds a
446
Valkenier, “The Writer,” 212.
447
Fetzer, “Art and Assassination,” 62 and Fan Parker, Vsevolod Garshin: A Study of a Russian Conscience (New
York: King’s Crown Press, 1946), 4.
224
creative way to include a martyr-heroine into a narrative, but also prefigures the modernist
interest in the relationship between a male artist and a woman as his source of inspiration.
448
From Zasulich to Perovskaia – The Road to “Nadezhda Nikolaevna”
Our discussion of “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” as an experimental work begins with the
troublesome story of its creation. Whereas Garshin wrote “An Incident” in several weeks, its
sequel “Nadezhda Nikolaena” was a far more laborious task. As observed by Garshin’s scholar
Stepanov, “Garshin worked on ‘Nadezhda Nikolaevna’ longer than on any other of his
works.”
449
In addition to “its exceptionally long period of gestation,” “Nadezhda Nikolaevna”
also presented Garshin with psychological challenges, “one has to recall the enormous emotional
energy that went into the writing of Nadezhda Nikolaevna – there were times when Garshin was
sobbing uncontrollably as he wrote it…”
450
On the whole, from the moment of its inception in
1878 to its final publication in 1885, “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” took six years in the making, with
several important emotional and artistic low and high points documented in Garshin’s personal
correspondence.
According to the records, Garshin first refers to what would later turn into “Nadezhda
Nikolaevna” in a letter to his mother from March 5 1879, written almost a year after the
publication of “An Incident,” “now I started a somewhat large piece that will require some time
448
For more on the importance of the character of the muse in Russian Symbolist literature, see Presto, Beyond the
Flesh; Matich, Erotic; and Avril Pyman, A History of Russian Symbolism (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1994);
449
“Гаршин работал над ‘Надеждой Николаевной’ дольше, чем над каким-либо другим своим
произведением.” See A. Stepanov, commentary to Krasnyi tsvetok: Rasskazy i skazki, by Vsevolod Garshin (Saint-
Petersburg: Izdatel’skii dom “Azbuka-klassika,” 2008), 342; my translation.
450
Henry, Hamlet, 200.
225
[…] ‘Large’ is, of course, relative. Perhaps, it will be about five pages.”
451
Garshin mentioned
his new project again in another letter from December 18, 1879, in which he dated the genesis of
“Nadezhda Nikolaevna” a year and a half back, emphasizing its chronological closeness with
“An Incident,” “I want to write a story that was already thought through a year and a half ago
and is now accumulating and changing (for now in my head, of course).”
452
In addition to establishing Garshin’s immediate interest in writing a sequel to “An
Incident,” the letter outlined the thematic continuity between the two stories with the latter’s
similarly “apolitical” focus on a private love affair, “A completely personal story with love
affairs and with a very bloody denouement.”
453
Upon revealing the romantic plot of “Nadezhda
Nikolaevna,” the letter further confirmed Garshin’s intention and readiness to begin writing, “but
I will nonetheless write because all my characters are really moving in my head.”
454
Given
Garshin’s enthusiasm for and commitment to his new story as of December 1879, one cannot
help but wonder what caused him to abandon his project soon afterwards and why it took him
five more years to resume his work on “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” in 1884 and finally publish it in
1885.
Since both “An Incident” and “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” constitute Garshin’s larger
narrative of the fallen woman, the factors that may have prevented Garshin from finishing the
second story before 1884 provide an important context for understanding the development of that
451
“[…] я теперь принялся за довольно большое ‘произведение’, за которым нужно посидеть […] ‘Большое’,
конечно, относительно. Должно быть листов пять выйдет.” See Garshin, Pis’ma, 179. In its final version,
“Nadezhda Nikolaevna” is not five but seventy-seven pages, which makes it Garshin’s longest work.
452
“Писать я хочу уже года полтора тому назад продуманную, а теперь дополняющуюся и изменяющуюся
(пока в моей голове, конечно) историю.” Ibid., 196.
453
“Совершенно личная история с любовными делами и с очень кровавою развязкой.” Ibid., 197.
454
“[…] а писать все-таки буду, потому что уж очень ходят все мои действующие лица в моей голове.” Ibid.
226
narrative. While Garshin’s letters do offer some clues for his initial failure to write “Nadezhda
Nikolaevna” immediately, his ambiguous explanations often raise more questions than they
answer. To illustrate, in a letter from December 1879 Garshin stated that he had postponed
writing of the sequel in 1878 because of his “enslavement” by the critics and the story’s lack of
political direction, “I did not write it at the time – even though I started – for no reason other than
some form of slavery. The thing is that there isn’t any kind of direction in the story.”
455
In view
of Garshin’s recent publication of “An Incident,” which – in Garshin’s view – also lacked any
“direction” (napravleniia) and, therefore, invited criticism from many civic-minded reviewers,
Garshin’s sudden fear of critics’ opinions about the unsuitable content of his next story appeared
slightly out of character.
456
Without fully discounting Garshin’s “enslavement” explanation, I nevertheless suggest
that the main reasons for Garshin’s slow start with “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” was a creative
stalemate. This hypothesis finds support in Garshin’s later letter from January 1880, in which the
writer no longer complained about his dependence on the critics, but lamented the “falsity” of his
own writing process, “The writing of my story is going really slow, mainly because I see much
falseness in it.”
457
Unsure about the future and authenticity of the story, “I do not know if I can
455
“Не написал я ее в свое время – хотя начинал – не из чего иного, как из какого-то рабства. Дело в том, что
‘направления’ какого бы то ни было в рассказе совсем нет.” Ibid.
456
Bialyi also suggests that Garshin’s explanation of his sequel’s lack of direction because of its romantic theme is
exaggerated, given the presence of the romantic theme in Garshin’s socially-minded “An Incident,” “He [Garshin]
clearly simplifies the issue: the actual fact of using the love plot did not yet indicate ‘the absence of politics’: the
love plot was also used in ‘An Incident’” [Он [Гаршин], несомненно, упрощает вопрос: самый факт
использования любовного сюжета еще не свидетельствовал об ‘отсутствии политики’: любовный сюжет был
и в ‘Происшествии’]. See Bialyi, V. M. Garshin, 123. According to Bialyi, the difference between Garshin’s use of
the romantic theme in both stories lies in its function – whereas in “An Incident” Garshin shows the hero’s
encounter with social injustice, in “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” he focuses on the hero’s battle with it through the power
of love. While insightful, Bialyi’s argument neither explains the delay in Garshin’s work on “Nadezhda
Nikolaevna,” nor places it in a larger historical context.
457
“Писанье рассказа у меня идет очень медленно, главном образом потому, что в нем я вижу большую
фальшь.” See Garshin, Pis’ma, 199.
227
get out of it [falseness]”, Garshin was unable to make progress and had to put “Nadezhda
Nikolaevna” aside until 1884, when he mentioned his project again in a letter to V. M. Latkin
from August 10, “I am only starting the writing of that old piece about an artist, his love interest
and the evil killer that you, as far as I can remember, approved.”
458
This time around, the story
took Garshin not six years but only six months to finish, marking 1884 a far more favorable year
for Garshin to return to the topics of prostitution and violence than either 1879 or 1880.
It is customary for scholars to view Garshin’s postponement of “Nadezhda Nikolaevna”
in terms of his progressing madness and subsequent hospitalization from September 1880 to May
1882. However, Garshin’s letters from 1879 and 1880 suggest that his initial failure to write a
sequel to “An Incident” may be explained by his professional – rather than personal – crisis,
specifically in regards to the portrayal of the fallen woman.
459
The problematic references to
“Nadezhda Nikolaevna” most likely suggest a writer’s block, revealing Garshin’s inability to
continue the story of the prostitute beyond her initial depiction in “An Incident” as a symbolic
contributor to violence. When Garshin finally resolves his creative impasse six years later, his
portrayal of the fallen woman in “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” acquires a clear parallel with terrorist
458
“Не знаю, выберусь ли я из нее.” Ibid., 199. “Приступаю только к написанию той самой старинной штуки
о художнике, его аманте и злодее-убийце, которою ты, помнится, одобрял.” Ibid., 336.
459
According to Parker, the two events that prompted Garshin’s attack of nerves and, consequently, prevented him
from finishing “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” were an assassination attempt on Alexander II made by the revolutionaries
from the organization “People’s Will” on February 5, 1880 and an assassination attempt on the Head of the Supreme
Executive Committee Count Loris-Melikov made by a revolutionary Ippolit Mlodetskii three weeks later on
February 20, 1880. In the case of Mlodetskii, Garshin tried to intercede on his behalf by first writing a letter to
Loris-Melikov and then seeing the count in person in order to spare Mlodetskii from death by hanging. Despite
Garshin’s frantic pleas, Mlodetskii was executed the next day, which deeply distressed Garshin and contributed to
his flight from Saint Petersburg and a later fit of insanity. For more on Garshin’s response to the case of Mlodetskii,
see Parker, Vsevolod, 20-23; Henry, Hamlet, 103-114; Uspenskii, “Smert’,”146-147, 662; V. I. Porudominskii,
Grustnyi soldat ili zhizn’ Vsevoloda Garshina (Moscow: Kniga, 1986), 56-83; and Bialyi, V.M. Garshin, 17. To read
Garshin’s letter to the count Loris-Melikov, see Garshin, Pis’ma, 207.
228
Corday, signifying an important change in Garshin’s perception of female revolutionary violence
as no longer symbolic, but literal and lethal.
460
To understand the roots of this change, one needs to evoke the historical context for
Garshin’s works by examining chronological and thematic connections between Garshin’s two
portrayals of Nadezhda Nikolaevna and the two most publicized cases of female revolutionaries
in late 1870s-early 1880s – Zasulich and Perovskaia. Given that “An Incident” is published in the
aftermath of Zasulich’s shot and “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” – in the aftermath of Perovskaia’s trial,
it is only logical that Garshin’s pre-Perovskaia attempts to create a sequel to “An Incident”
without a corresponding historical female personage strike him as fake and futile. The fact that
Garshin still complains about the falsity of “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” in 1880 but successfully
overcomes it in 1884 further indicates that the missing component to his sequel has something to
do with the changes in Russian historical framework in general, and in the public perception of
the feminine in particular.
Both of these criteria are successfully fulfilled by the appearance of a female
revolutionary terrorist Sofia Perovskaia in 1881. Indeed, it is hardly a coincidence that Garshin
finishes “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” not before but after the Perovskaia’s assassination of the tsar
Alexander II – an event that not only alters the Russian history, but also makes deadly violence
in the name of an idea an important constituent of the modern concept of the Russian feminine.
While Garshin’s immediate response to Perovskaia’s involvement is unknown because of his
nervous breakdown at the time of the assassination, Garshin’s earlier preoccupation with the
460
That Garshin was especially interested in examining the themes of deadly violence and revolutionary culture ca.
1884 is further supported by his own modelling for two paintings by Ilia Repin, “Ivan the Terrible and His Son” and
“They Did Not Expect Him.” See Valkenier, “The Writer,” 207 and Henry, Hamlet, 183-184. For more on the
collaboration between Garshin and Repin, see Jackson, “Garshin and Repin,” 102-111.
229
plight of a failed male terrorist Mlodetskii serves as a good indicator of a similar, if not stronger,
level of engagement with Mlodetskii’s successful female counterpart.
461
Accordingly, the fact
that “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” explicitly evokes the theme of revolutionary terrorism through the
image of Corday further suggests Garshin’s awareness of the Perovskaia affair.
Despite the general consensus that the story “was occasioned by the assassination of
Alexander II,” not all critics concur that the comparison between Nadezhda Nikolaevna and
Corday is inspired by the terrorist Perovskaia.
462
Instead, some researchers evoke Zasulich, while
others avoid naming the female revolutionary in question altogether.
463
A telling example of this
disparity is the way different scholars interpret a comment made by Garshin’s contemporary Petr
Kropotkin about Corday’s symbolism in “Nadezhda Nikolaevna,” “Is the name of the French
Girondin– the weapon of the reactionaries – placed instead of some other, Russian name?”
464
Prompted by the Aesopian language of Kropotkin’s statement, critics take turns guessing whom
Kropotkin has in mind for Garshin’s Russian equivalent of Corday. For instance, Garshin’s
biographer Henry mentions Zasulich when discussing Kropotkin’s phrase, whereas another
461
Leland Fetzer concludes, “We have no record of Garshin’s reaction to the assassination of Alexander II because
at the time, March 1881, he was incapacipated as the result of a nervous breakdown.” See Fetzer, “Art and
Assassination,” 62.
462
Valkenier, “The Writer,” 212.
463
For instance, while Fetzner argues that “In Garshin’s eyes Nadezhda Nikolaevna is a symbol for the young
Russian terrorists who had been involved in attempts against the life of the tsars and their officials…,” he does not
address the gender or the names of Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s possible historical predecessors. Fetzer, “Art and
Assassination,” 63.
464
“Не поставлено ли имя французской жирондистки – орудия реакции – на место какого-нибудь другого,
русского имени?” See Petr Kropotkin, Idealy i deistvitel’nost’ v Russkoi literature, trans. V. Baturinskii (Saint-
Petersburg: Izdanie tovarishchestva “Znanie,” 1907), 338; my translation.
230
Garshin’s scholar Stepanov takes Kropotin’s remark as an allusion to Perovskaia, “[Kropotkin]
was hinting at the veiled portrayal of the revolutionary female assassin of the tyrant.”
465
This lack of specificity on the subject of Garshin’s prototype for Corday is problematic
because it obscures the connection between Garshin’s evolving narrative of the fallen woman
and changes in the perception of female revolutionary martyrdom in Russia. In other words, by
designating Zasulich rather than Perovskaia as a prototype for Corday in “Nadezhda
Nikolaevna,” one downplays Garshin’s recognized ability to respond to major contemporary
events and express the atmosphere of his time – a skill highly valued by Garshin’s contemporary
Gleb Uspenskii who observes that “in his [Garshin’s] short stories…sometimes in several lines,
the entire content of our life is absolutely exhausted, [life] in whose conditions Garshin and all of
his readers had to live.”
466
If one is to agree with Uspenskii’s – and then later Parker’s – view of
Garshin as a “barometer” of Russian life and history, one has to acknowledge that the scholarly
mix-up between Zasulich and Perovskaia in regards to Garshin’s reference to Corday does not do
justice to the writer’s acute historical sensibilities.
467
While the roots of this misunderstanding likely stem from the fact that the Russian and
Western press habitually referred to Zasulich as the Russian Corday in the aftermath of her trial
in February 1878, it is important to remember that this analogy was born before Perovskaia’s
public appearance in 1881.
468
Since Perovskaia surpasses Zasulich as the ultimate martyr-heroine
465
Henry, “Imagery,” 151 and Henry, Hamlet, 198, 201. “[Кропоткин] намекал на завуалированное
изображение тирано-убийцы-народоволки.” See Stepanov, commentary, 342.
466
“[…] в его маленьких рассказах и сказках, иногда в несколько страничек, положительно исчерпано все
содержание нашей жизни, в условиях которой пришлось жить и Гаршину и всем его читателям.” See
Uspenskii, “Smert’ Garshina,” 148.
467
Parker, Vsevolod, 32.
468
For more on the perception of Zasulich as the Russian Corday by the Western press, see Siljak, Angel, 284 and
Jay Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), 43.
231
by reaching the highpoint of female revolutionary terrorism in Russia through deadly violence,
she becomes a more qualified candidate for the title of the Russian Corday and, consequently,
challenges the validity of the original comparison between Corday and Zasulich.
In fact, when judged by the extent of violence, Perovskaia’s successful assassination of
Alexander II and her subsequent execution by hanging represented a much closer parallel to
Corday’s famous assassination of Marat and execution by the guillotine than Zasulich’s shot,
which neither killed general Trepov nor ended her life in prison or on the gallows. Because of the
symbolic rather than actual nature of violence in the Zasulich affair, she is a step behind Corday
and Perovskaia, both of whom commit real acts of deadly violence and receive a death sentence.
In view of this obviously stronger narrative resemblance, Perovskaia appears to be a better
candidate to inform Garshin’s interest in Corday and inspire the violent ending of “Nadezhda
Nikolaevna.”
469
This clarification is important not only because it helps to reevaluate the significance of
Perovskaia for the writing of “Nadezhda Nikolaevna,” but also because it reassesses the role of
Garshin’s sequel in resolving the larger crisis of female representation in Russian literature.
When viewed as a reaction to the Perovskaia affair, “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” is no longer just
another story about prostitution or a love tragedy with a political subtext about revolutionary
violence. Instead, Garshin’s sequel emerges as a literary experiment that directly evokes the
themes of female terrorism and its problematic representation in art. More than that, “Nadezhda
469
Further support for this hypothesis can be found in Garshin’s aforementioned failure to write “Nadezhda
Nikolaevna” before Perovskaia’s appearance. Had it been Zasulich who provoked Garshin’s interest in Corday, why
was Garshin unable to finish “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” in 1879 or 1880? Given that Zasulich was publicly hailed as
Corday in Russia and the West, what could have prevented Garshin from making a comparison between the latter
Nadezhda Nikolaevna and Corday in the aftermath of the Zasulich affair? Taking into account Garshin’s six-year
break between the stories as well as the absence of any references to Corday in “An Incident,” it it safe to conclude
that Perovskaia – rather than Zasulich – is a likely inspiration behind the Corday allegory and, as such, the main
impetus for Garshin’s return to “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” in 1884.
232
Nikolaevna” also becomes one of the first stories from the Russian literature of the early 1880s
that uses the narrative of prostitution to bridge the gap between the pre- and post-Perovskaia
perceptions of the Russian feminine.
Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s pioneering role in reopening the literary dialogue on the modern
Russian feminine after 1881 is particularly evident from the shortage of major fictional heroines
in the early post-Perovskaia period. In contrast to the previous literary attempts by Polonsky,
Turgenev, and Korolenko, who respond to the appearance of female revolutionaries with the
image of the martyr-heroine, the years between 1881 and 1884 strike one as a literary vacuum of
female portrayals, revolutionary or otherwise. Naturally, Dostoevsky’s death in 1881,
Turgenev’s death in 1883, Tolstoy’s spiritual crisis, and Garshin’s own attack of nerves largely
contributed to the dearth of new memorable female literary personages in the early 1880s. While
these factors are undeniably important, they are not the only cause of the aforementioned crisis
of female representation in Russian literature – a crisis fostered by changes in the perception of
the Russian feminine, to which the revolutionary martyr-heroines, and especially Perovskaia,
have made a major contribution.
Because of no clear precedent of lethal female terrorist violence in Russian literary or
cultural memory, it is not surprising that a Perovskaia-type heroine cannot transition into a
fictional personage as easily as her non-murderous revolutionary predecessors. Nor does she fit
into the earlier martyr-heroine trope developed by Polonsky, Turgenev, and Korolenko with an
intention to destabilize the patriarchal narrative rather than kill the patriarch. Since the main
function of the martyr-heroine trope is to reject family-based female representations and to
negate the familial hierarchy, it lacks the narrative means to construct positive depictions of
female revolutionary violence and, as such, is not fully suitable for describing an accomplished
233
female assassin. In the absence of a productive female literary prototype, most writers of the
early post-Perovskaia period face a challenge to incorporate the issue of female terrorism in their
perception of the feminine – a challenge that marks this phase a highpoint of the crisis of female
representation in late nineteenth-century Russian literature.
A welcoming antidote to this literary silence, Garshin’s “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” not only
fills the vacuum with a new female protagonist, but also finds a way to address a precarious topic
of women terrorists through the trope of a prostitute. What enables Garshin to perform this
literary breakthrough is that his pre-Perovskaia story “An Incident” responds to female
revolutionary activism not with an abstract and unfamiliar martyr-heroine, but with a tangible
and recognizable character of a fallen woman. As a fundamentally transgressive personage with
a rich literary tradition, the prostitute devised by Garshin in “An Incident” does not exhaust its
narrative potential in a post-Perovskaia world, but instead provides Garshin with a valuable
precedent for describing a female terrorist in “Nadezhda Nikolaevna.” By recognizing the
narrative similarities between Nadezhda Nikolaevna and Corday, Garshin validates the prostitute
trope as an appropriate female character to represent not only symbolic, but also deadly
revolutionary violence. Furthermore, the fact that Garshin uses a fallen woman in response to
different stages of female revolutionary martyrdom also suggests the applicability of the
narrative of prostitution for a larger literary discussion about the modern concept of the Russian
feminine and foreshadows Russia’s fin-de-siècle concern with transgressive female sexuality.
Rethinking the Failure of “Nadezhda Nikolaevna”
Recognized by both Garshin and his critics as “a breaking point” (perelomnyi punkt) in
Garshin’s oeuvre, “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” was nonetheless considered a failure in literary and
234
scholarly circles.
470
While Garshin’s own criticism of the story centered around his old-fashioned
manner of writing and an inability to transcend his inner self, his contemporaries and later
scholars had more specific complaints, such as the convoluted structure of the story, the
excessively heterogeneous portrayal of the main heroine, “a melodramatic ending, poorly
defined characters, and unnecessary elements of violence.”
471
These objections reveal the gap
between Garshin’s experimental approach to and his critics’ traditional expectations of the
portrayal of the fallen woman. What is it about Garshin’s female protagonist that bothers the
reviewers? How does Garshin’s decision to merge the prostitute with Corday resonate in
contemporary critical scholarship? And, most importantly, what do the perceived weaknesses of
the story tell us about the difficulty of creating a female personage in the aftermath of the
Perovskaia affair?
While the detailed examination of the story’s critical reception is beyond the scope of this
chapter, I have chosen three representative articles by critics known for their genuine
appreciation of Garshin’s talent – Mikhailovskii, Chukovskii, and Korolenko – to illustrate the
general sense of angst created by the publication of “Nadezhda Nikolaevna.” Placed in a
chronological order (1885, 1909, 1910), these responses provide a variety of reasons for the
470
According to Bialyi, “Garshin himself saw this novella as a document of an artistic search for something new, not
only in terms of content, […] but also in terms of the form” [Гаршин сам осознавал эту повесть как документ
художественных поисков чего-то нового и не только в области содержания, [...], но и в области формы]. See
Bialyi, V. M. Garshin, 126. After the publication of Nadezhda Nikolaevna, Garshin writes, “I feel that I need to
learn everything all over. For me, the time of terrible, broken screams, some kind of ‘poems in prose’ that I used to
preoccupy myself with, is gone: I have enough material and I need to be portraying not my own, but the big outside
world. But the old manner of writing is not going away and that’s why my first attempt to create some action and
introduce several characters definitely did not succeed” [Я чувствую, что мне надо переучиваться сначала. Для
меня прошло время страшных отрывочных воплей, каких-то ‘стихов в прозе’, какими я до сих пор
занимался: материала у меня довольно, и нужно изображать не свое, а большой внешний мир. Но старая
манера навязла в перо, и потому-то первая вещь с некоторым действием и попыткою ввести в дело
несколько лиц решительно не удалась]. See Garshin, Pis’ma, 356-357.
471
Bernard Penny, “Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin: A Study of the Dynamics of Guilt,” PhD diss., Georgetown
University, 1977, 172.
235
presumed failure of the story, ranging from a criticism of the plot to a criticism of the main
heroine. The fact that the scholarly dislike of Nadezhda Nikolaevna spans more than twenty
years of literary criticism suggests the transitional position of Garshin’s female character, who is
chronologically and conceptually located between the Realist and Symbolist depictions of the
prostitute and, therefore, perceived as a misfit by the critics from both eras.
472
Less concerned
with the accuracy of their judgments, I am mainly interested in how these reviewers’
preconceived notions on what constitutes the successful portrayal of the fallen woman contribute
to our understanding of Nadezhda Nikolaevna as an outlier – and in some way – a pioneer of the
prostitute narrative in late imperial Russia.
One of the first critics to express reservations about Garshin’s story was Nikolai
Mikhailovskii. In his article about Garshin from 1885, Mikhailovskii examines the weaknesses
of the plot and the strengths of Garshin’s secondary male characters, while evading a specific
discussion about the female protagonist:
In Garshin’s last work, “Nadezhda Nikolaevna,” the plot is extremely complex:
here one finds unexpected encounters, and the revival of the fallen woman, and
the image of Charlotte Corday, and the two murders, and so on. Meanwhile, we
472
Known as “the poet of the gap” (poet promezhutka), Garshin frequently combines features from both realist and
symbolist frameworks. See V. I. Porudominskii, introduction to vol. 1 of Vsevolod Garshin at the Turn of the
Century: An International Symposium in Three Volumes, ed. Peter Henry, Vladimir Porudominsky, and Mikhail
Girshman (Oxford: Northgate Press, 2000), 6. For more on Garshin’s intermediary position between Realism and
Symbolism, see Henry, Hamlet, 305-308 and N. A. Anisimov, “Realisticheskie techeniia i predsimvolistskie
tendentsii v proizvedeniiakh V. M. Garshina,” in vol. 3 of Vsevolod Garshin at the Turn of the Century: An
International Symposium in Three Volumes, ed. Peter Henry, Vladimir Porudominsky, and Mikhail Girshman
(Oxford: Northgate Press, 2000), 6-7.
236
paused before this story with a certain, not entirely pleasant, amazement, even
though it has some beautifully-written secondary characters […].
473
Despite identifying the story’s central themes of the fallen woman, Corday, and murderous
violence, Mikhailovskii does not view them synthetically, which contributes to his overall
perception of “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” as a story with “a complex, convoluted formula”
(slozhnaia, zaputannaia formula). In line with his dislike of the story’s confusing plot,
Mikhailovskii also considers “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” “the most imaginative from all Garshin’s
works” (naibolee ‘vydumannoe’ iz proizvedenii Garshina), concluding that the story cannot be
called a success.
Feeling unpleasantly startled by “Nadezhda Nikolaevna,” Mikhailovskii neither sees the
unifying thread behind Garshin’s combination of several concepts, nor accepts the figure of the
fallen woman as an integrating mechanism and a structural principle of the story. Instead,
Mikhailovskii perceives Nadezhda Nikolaevna as a fragmented character, whose two facets –
“the fallen woman” and “the image of Charlotte Corday” – are listed as separate themes along
other plot lines. The fact that Mikhailovskii does not engage in a more detailed discussion about
the female protagonist further suggests that the portrayal of the fallen woman does not impress
him, which, in turn, explains his stronger interest in “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” as a story rather
than in Nadezhda Nikolaevna as a character.
473
“В последнем произведении г. Гаршина, в ‘Надежде Николаевне’, фабула чрезвычайно сложна: тут и
неожиданные встречи, и возрождение падшей женщины, и образ Шарлотты Корде, и два убийства, и проч. А
между тем мы с некоторым, не совсем приятным недоумением остановились перед этой повестью, не
смотря на то, что в ней есть прекрасно написанные фигуры второстепенных действующих лиц […]” See
Mikhailovskii, “O Vsevolode Garshine,” 311.
237
While Mikhailovskii identifies the convoluted plot as the chief cause for his
disappointment with the sequel, a later critic Kornei Chukovskii argues that the main reason for
Garshin’s fiasco is the figure of the fallen woman. In his article from 1909, Chukovskii attacks
Nadezhda Nikolaevna as a pastiche of Dostoevskian literary prostitutes and a fake personage,
whose clichéd portrayal is an insult to Garshin’s talent. In Chukovskii’s opinion, Nadezhda
Nikolaevna is the epitome of everything cheap and melodramatic – a figure that deprives Garshin
of his originality and turns him into nothing but Dostoevsky’s epigone:
Everything in her is cheap: cheap psychology, cheap gestures, cheap
melodramatic effects! In the blink of an eye, a big careful artist turned into a
student, who is writing a novella “ala Dostoevsky” without any drafts and a
slightest doubt.
474
Building upon his view of Nadezhda Nikolaevna as an inferior replication of
Dostoevsky’s fallen women, Chukovskii calls Garshin’s narrative a helpless parody, which
produces “stillborn words – word-corpses” (mertvorozhdennye slova – slova-trupy) that even
Garshin is unable to revive. By arguing that everything lyrical in Garshin’s poetics, including
Garshin’s depiction of the fallen woman, is dead and unoriginal, Chukovskii refuses to see
another, less lyrical side to Garshin’s hybrid portrayal of Nadezhda Nikolaevna, that of a female
terrorist Corday. In so doing, Chukovskii completely overlooks the prostitute’s second narrative
474
“В ней все дешево: дешевая психология, дешевые жесты, дешевые эффекты мелодрам! Сразу как-то
большой, осторожный художник превратился в гимназиста, который прямо набело, нисколько не
сомневаясь, пишет повесть ‘совсем как у Достоевского’.” See Kornei Chukovskii, “O Vsevolode Garshine,”
Russkaia mysl’ 12 (1909): 137; my translation.
238
function, in which she acts as a stand-in for a martyr-heroine and an allegory for the modern
revolutionary feminine.
Chukovskii’s reluctance to view Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s dual nature as a positive
development is further reinforced by his subsequent complaint about the lack of clarity in her
portrayal:
To what extent is this schoolgirl among the prostitutes and the prostitute among
the schoolgirls, - syrupy as caramel and innocent as Garshin himself, - to what
extent she is not worthy of his talent.
475
In Chukovskii’s opinion, which is slightly reminiscent of Mikhailovskii’s piecemeal approach to
the main heroine, Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s failure as a character stems from her ability to move
between different female tropes and transcend their boundaries. This remark is particularly
important as evidence of Chukovskii’s recognition of the ambivalence inherent in Garshin’s
female protagonist, who, albeit not to Chukovskii’s liking, subverts the traditional hierarchy of
female tropes by combining “schoolgirl” (institutka) and “prostitute” (prostitutka) in one
character. While this combination strikes Chukovskii as false, it is precisely Nadezhda
Nikolaevna’s hybridity that reveals her experimental nature and makes her a fundamentally
modern heroine.
With Mikhailovskii attacking the plot and Chukovskii criticizing the female protagonist,
Garshin’s contemporary and writer Vladimir Korolenko presents a more balanced approach by
475
“До чего эта институтка меж проститутками и проститутка меж институтками, - приторная, как карамель,
и невинная, как сам Гаршин, - до чего она недостойна его дарования.” Ibid.
239
addressing both complaints in his article about Garshin from 1910.
476
Given that in 1880
Korolenko himself responded to female revolutionary activism with a story The Strange One
about a virginal martyr-heroine, Garshin’s counter choice of a fallen woman predictably fell
under serious scrutiny. Indeed, the focal point of Korolenko’s criticism is the incomplete
portrayal of Garshin’s heroine who, in Korolenko’s opinion, unfavorably departs from the
established canon:
To the disadvantages that were briefly noted in the cited review, one needs to add
[…] the unfinished portrayal of the heroine. Given the spiritual depth that the
author attributes to this fallen woman, it is hard to imagine her long and passive
reconciliation with her lot.
477
Having disapproved of the incongruity between Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s high spirituality
and her lack of agency, Korolenko also deems Garshin’s depiction of the prostitute idealistic and
one-sided:
476
Akin to Mikhailovskii, Korolenko notices some positive elements and expresses mixed feelings about the story:
“And yet, one has to admit the strange effect of the story: the feeling of frustration and, at the same time, a
remarkale, unforgettably bright impression” [И все же приходится констатировать странное действие рассказа:
одновременно и чувство неудовлетворенности, и необыкновенная, незабываемая яркость впечатления]. See
Korolenko, “Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin,” 658; my translation. Similar to Chukovskii, Korolenko concentrates
on the figure of Nadezhda Nikolaevna rather than on the intricacies of the plot. For more on Garshin and Korolenko,
see O. A. Chernysheva, “Narodnicheskaia problema ‘Narod i intelligentsiia’ v proizvedeniiakh V. G. Korolenko i V.
M. Garshina,” vol. 3 of Vsevolod Garshin at the Turn of the Century: An International Symposium in Three
Volumes, ed. Peter Henry, Vladimir Porudominsky, and Mikhail Girshman (Oxford: Northgate Press, 2000), 57-59.
477
“К недостаткам, бегло отмеченным в цитированном отзыве, нужно прибавить […] недорисованность
фигуры главной героини. При той душевной значительности, которую автор приписывает этой падшей
девушке, трудно представить долгое и пассивное примирение ее с своей участью.” See Korolenko, “Vsevolod
Mikhailovich Garshin,” 658.
240
The author does not reveal to us the “real truth” that surrounds fallen women and
so quickly poisons a female soul. He takes his Nadezhda Nikolaevna only in those
moments, when the reflection of Lopatin’s feeling falls onto her and when her
whole self is reborn by arising love. At these moments, he portrays her accurately,
albeit one-sided. The ideology of the 70s was naïve, often romantic. During our
times, literature [...] exposes the everyday surroundings of the prostitute with an
amazing, repulsive, stupefying accuracy.
478
According to Korolenko, Garshin’s description of Nadezhda Nikolaevna is not only old-
fashioned when compared with the more realistic, early twentieth-century representations of
prostitution, but is also outdated for its own times. By linking Nadezhda Nikolaevna of the 1880s
with Dostoevsky’s Sonia Marmeladova and other “naïve” depictions of prostitutes from the
1870s, Korolenko denies the innovative nature of Garshin’s heroine because of what he
considers to be a similarly romanticized portrayal.
479
The fact that Korolenko perceives “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” as a conventional rather than
an experimental approach to the fallen woman reveals the one-sided nature of his own analysis,
which, in line with Mikhailovskii’s and Chukovskii’s reviews, does not discuss Nadezhda
478
“Автор не раскрывает нам всю ‘реальную правду’, окружающую падших девушек и так быстро
отравляющую женскую душу. Он берет свою Надежду Николаевну лишь в те моменты, когда на нее падает
отсвет чувства Лопатина и когда ее самое перерождает возникающая любовь. В эти моменты он рисует ее
хотя односторонне, но правдиво. Идеология 70-х годов была наивна, часто романтична. В наше время
литература […] вскрывает бытовую обстановку проститутки с поразительной, отталкивающей, одуряющей
правдивостью.” Ibid.
479
Deeming the story’s apparent lack of realism as a sign of its outdated narrative, Korolenko sees its only value in
ensuring an “artistic synthesis” between the present realist and the past idealist depictions of prostitution. While all
three critics complain about Garshin’s lack of realism, the angle of their criticism is somewhat different. For
example, Mikhailovskii focuses on the unbelievable plot, Chukovskii attacks Garshin’s lyrical digressions, whereas
Korolenko wishes for a more realistic side to Garshin’s depiction of the evil of prostitution.
241
Nikolaevna’s parallel with Corday. Even though Korolenko does mention the French martyr-
heroine in his summary of the plot, he does not include Corday in his subsequent interpretation
of Garshin’s heroine. It is ironic that while complaining about the incomplete portrayal of the
main heroine, Korolenko himself writes an incomplete study of her portrayal with an exclusive
focus on the fallen woman trope rather than on its combination with an image of a female
terrorist. Because of his decision to exclude this important feature of Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s
description from his review, Korolenko predictably views Garshin’s depiction of the fallen
woman as lacking and interprets it as passé. The fact that this interpretative fallacy is made by an
accomplished writer and a known critic serves as yet another indication of how unusual for his
time is Garshin’s attempt to merge the fallen woman and the martyr-heroine narratives in one
female character.
Because each of the reviewers approaches Nadezhda Nikolaevna as a traditional fallen
woman rather than a stand-in for Corday, their criticism reflects not so much Garshin’s presumed
failure, as the critics’ own resistance to the composite nature of Garshin’s personage. By
complaining about the imitative, unrealistic, and incomplete portrayal of Nadezhda Nikolaevna,
all three scholars, in fact, show the limitations of their own traditional interpretative framework,
outside of which their very objections actually convey Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s synthesizing,
allegorical, and transitional functions.
480
It is precisely because of its reputation as one of the
most unsuccessful stories in Garshin’s oeuvres that “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” fulfills its
subversive mission. As such, it represents a literary monument to the crisis of female
representation in the early post-Perovskaia period and a daring, albeit misunderstood, narrative
experiment based on the trope of the fallen woman.
480
Unable to transcend the conventional criteria used to examine realist female characters, these reviews are product
of their time and an indication that the story’s supposed fiasco is not a given fact, but a cultural construct.
242
“Nadezhda Nikolaevna” and Its Literary Predecessors
Having established the historical and critical context for “Nadezhda Nikolaevna,” it is
now time to examine specific narrative mechanisms that separate Garshin’s sequel from its
predecessor “An Incident” and Garshin’s vision of the revolutionary feminine from that of
Polonsky, Turgenev, and Korolenko. When compared to “An Incident,” the first and, perhaps,
most significant change in Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s latter narrative is the gender of the narrator.
Whereas “An Incident” is largely written from Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s point of view with a
liberal sprinkling of Nikitin’s first-person narrative, “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” no longer features a
first-person female narrator. Instead, it alternates between the diary entries of two men who are
fighting for Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s attention – the kind and compassionate artist Lopatin and
the jealous and egoistical bureaucrat Bessonov.
The shift of the narrator’s viewpoint is reflected by the titles of the stories. In contrast to
“An Incident,” which discusses Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s experience with Ivan Ivanovich,
“Nadezhda Nikolaevna” centers not so much on the heroine’s perception, as on Lopatin’s (and
Bessonov’s) encounters with her. By switching from the story by a woman to a story about a
woman, Garshin suggests a new status of the main heroine, who changes from a subject of her
own narrative in “An Incident” to an object of a male narrative in “Nadezhda Nikolaevna.” This
transformation is further highlighted by the fact that in the second story Nadezhda Nikolaevna is
objectified not by one but by two conflicting male narrators, indicating Garshin’s departure from
his original focus on the prostitute as a character with a voice and a narrative of her own.
In addition to rewriting Garshin’s earlier portrayal of the prostitute from a male
standpoint, “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” also provides an alternative response to the previous
depictions of the martyr-heroine found in the works of Polonsky, Turgenev, and Korolenko.
243
Whereas the narrators of The Prisoner, The Threshold, and The Strange One portray the
revolutionary feminine as an unknown entity, the artist-narrator in “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” has a
remarkably clear vision of his martyr-heroine, “I carried about mentally the figure which I had
formed; I thought out the minutest details, and reached such a stage that, by closing my eyes, I
could clearly see the Charlotte I had decided to put to canvas.”
481
Characterized by precision and
lucidity, Lopatin’s preconceived image of what constitutes the portrayal of a female terrorist
offers a sharp contrast to the previously generalized and abstract descriptions of Polonsky’s
prisoner, Turgenev’s Russian girl, and Korolenko’s strange one.
Notably, the shift in the perception of the martyr-heroine from an alien phenomenon to a
recognizable character occurs after the appearance of the revolutionary assassin Perovskaia. As a
turning point between these two approaches to narrating the martyr-heroine, Perovskaia’s
assassination of the tsar and subsequent execution introduce a sense of finality to the previously
open-ended image of the revolutionary feminine. Since Perovskaia is an instructive example of
the type of women who reach the peak of female revolutionary martyrdom, it is not surprising
that Garshin’s Lopatin, as opposed to Polonsky’s, Turgenev’s and Korolenko’s perplexed
narrators, is able to familiarize himself with this type and acquire its exact image of in his mind,
“I read over and over again all that I could get hold of about her [Corday], studied her portraits,
and decided to paint a picture.”
482
What makes Lopatin’s ability to visualize Corday particularly important for
reconceptualizing the portrayal of the revolutionary feminine in Russian fiction is that it provides
481
W. M. Garshin, “Nadejda Nicolaievna,” in The Signal and Other Stories, trans. Captain Rowland Smith (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917), 160. I will change the spelling of “Nadejda Nicolaievna” to “Nadezhda Nikolaevna”
in the subsequent quotes in the text.
482
Ibid.
244
specific criteria for judging existing female characters as either able or unable to portray the
martyr-heroine. During his search for a perfect stand-in for Corday, Lopatin offers a detailed
explanation of why he rejects the first two female candidates, his current model Anna Ivanovna
and his cousin/bride Sonia, before accepting the fallen woman Nadezhda Nikolaevna in their
stead. A brief look at Lopatin’s rejection criteria suggests that Anna Ivanovna and Sonia are both
unfit to fill in for Corday because of their inability to participate in her narrative as full-fledged,
substantiated, and transgressive characters.
In the case of Anna Ivanovna, the main problem lies in her face, whose plainness does
not resemble Lopatin’s multifaceted image:
I painted her hand, shoulders, and pose; but when it came down to her face,
despair seized me. The small, plump, young face, with its slightly upturned nose,
the kind grey eyes which gazed trustfully and somewhat dolefully from under
very arched brows, shut my vision.
483
Lopatin’s thorough depiction of Anna Ivanovna’s facial features highlights what does not belong
in the portrait of a revolutionary martyr-heroine.
484
Specifically, she should not have a young,
sympathetic, naïve, gullible, and pitiful look, which suggests Lopatin’s rejection of the traits
traditionally considered appropriate for portraying a positive female personage. Notably, for
Lopatin the assassin Corday is not an evil character but a virtuous heroine or “a fanatic for the
483
Ibid., 161.
484
Lopatin’s friend, artist Gel’freikh, seconds Lopatin’s intuition about Anna Ivanovna’s inability to portray Corday,
“I understand you. This might turn out all right. Only it is Anna Ivanovna.” Ibid., 170.
245
good cause” (fanatik dobra).
485
Therefore, by refusing Anna Ivanovna’s conventionally righteous
looks for the portrait of a novel righteous heroine, Lopatin suggests a change in the artistic
perception on what constitutes positive and negative attributes of a modern female character.
Having dismissed Anna Ivanovna’s uninspiring face, Lopatin also complains about her
overall triteness and a lack of definition. Anna’s clichéd patronymic Ivanovna, as in “the
daughter of Ivan,” suggests her commonplace lineage, whereas Anna Ivanovna’s unknown
position in the hierarchy of traditional female tropes, a “model” (naturshchitsa), prevents her
from providing the novel image of the martyr-heroine with a much needed narrative tradition.
486
The fact that there is no information about Anna Ivanovna’s past further highlights her
decontextualized status, whereas Lopatin’s generalized references to Anna Ivanovna as “a
Russian girl” continue to emphasize her indistinctiveness and, hence, unsuitability for making
Lopatin’s martyr-heroine a substantiated character.
487
Unable to create a specific narrative of the
martyr-heroine from an abstraction, Lopatin, eventually, abandons Anna Ivanovna as incapable
of supplying the portrait of Corday with concrete features and a distinct narrative background, “I
could not transfer these nondescript features into that face. I wrestled with my Anna Ivanovna
three or four days, then finally left her alone.”
488
485
Ibid., 160.
486
The fact that Anna Ivanovna is a model has an implication of her posing nude, which may also be a possible step
towards the more transgressive role of a prostitute. On the other hand, the fact that Anna Ivanovna shows relief at
Lopatin’s request to paint her in a dress rather than naked suggests her modesty, making her unable to express
transgression and portray a female terrorist, “She had only been a model for two months, and could not as yet
accustom herself to sitting in the nude.” Ibid., 160.
487
Whereas for Turgenev’s narrator the epithet “Russian girl” is an acceptable definition of the martyr-heroine, for
Lopatin it lacks specificity and is, therefore, not suitable for the portrayal of Corday.
488
Ibid., 161.
246
Having disqualified the likes of Anna Ivanovna from becoming a martyr-heroine, Lopatin
attempts a different approach by painting Corday without any life model. Not surprisingly, the
lack of a distinct visual representation does not solve Lopatin’s dilemma, but instead leads to
another artistic failure:
I decided to do what should never under any circumstances be done, to paint the
face without a study – from “out of my head,” as they say. I decided on this
because I saw it as if living before me. But when work began, brushes went flying
into the corner. Instead of a living face, a sort of sketch resulted, which possessed
neither flesh nor blood.
489
In an obvious metaliterary reference to the creative process, Lopatin highlights the types of
challenges that face authors who are trying to invent a personage without a narrative background
and outside of literary conventions. By using his own example, Lopatin shows that an artist
needs not only an idea, but also its flesh-and-blood embodiment in order to incarnate his
internalized image into art. In what may be seen as an indirect comment on the earlier schematic
portrayals of the martyr-heroine by Polonsky’s, Turgenev’s, and Korolenko’s narrators, Lopatin
warns his readers that writing without any literary model results in creating a frame and an
abstraction rather than a complex living character.
Having reached an impasse in his work, Lopatin briefly considers one more woman for
his project, his cousin Sonia, who voluntarily offers herself as a potential model for Corday.
Unable to draw a parallel between Sonia and Corday, Lopatin eventually rejects Sonia’s
489
Ibid.
247
candidature because of her healing rather than transgressive qualities, “Sonia is not the least like
Charlotte. She is incapable of inflicting a wound. She loves, rather, to heal them, and wondrously
well she does it.”
490
By defining Sonia as an opposite of Corday, Lopatin makes another
important metaliterary observation about the unsuitability of Sonia-like female characters for the
portrayal of the martyr-heroine. In other words, what disqualifies the nurturing Sonia from
becoming the transgressive Corday is that she is an abstract embodiment of the strong sacrificial
woman of the traditional patriarchal narrative – and, as such, lacks the specificity and
subversiveness to personify a female assassin.
The main indication that Sonia’s origins lie in that narrative is her conventional familial
status. Notably, Sonia is not simply Lopatin’s cousin, but is also referred to as his bride, hinting
at her other potential roles as Lopatin’s wife and the mother of his children. Sonia’s motherly
capabilities are also directly mentioned in regards to Lopatin himself, when she comforts him as
a maternal figure, “‘[…] It will all pass by and be forgotten […] just as a mother comforts a little
child who has bumped and hurt his forehead.”
491
Portrayed as a symbolic repository of various
family-based female representations, Sonia, therefore, represents an ultimate familial female
trope, whose initial kinship with Lopatin is further reinforced by metaphors of marriage and
childbirth.
Because of Sonia’s fixed roots in the traditional patriarchal structure, she is unable to
succeed in a more experimental plot of “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” and, as a result, remains a
peripheral female character throughout the story. In fact, after refusing Sonia as his model for
Corday, Lopatin also turns her down as a potential marriage partner. Both rejections signify the
490
Ibid.
491
Ibid., 158.
248
larger failure of the literary type of the strong self-sacrificing woman to ensure narrative
development in a story about the modern concept of the feminine. The fact that in each case
Lopatin chooses the prostitute Nadezhda Nikolaevna over his cousin/sister/bride Sonia further
suggests that the reign of the familial female tropes is over and that the rule of the transgressive
feminine has begun.
In addition to undermining the narrative future of familial heroines, Lopatin’s preference
for Nadezhda Nikolaevna over Sonia also challenges Russia’s earlier literary tradition of
merging the prostitute and the saint in one character. Both Sonia’s first name and her nursing
qualities evoke an important parallel with another famous female protagonist with healing
properties, Dostoevsky’s Sonia Marmeladova. However, in contrast to Dostoevsky’s saintly
prostitute, Garshin’s saint-like Sonia is not a prostitute, whereas Garshin’s prostitute Nadezhda
Nikolaevna is not a saint. By splitting Dostoevsky’s heroine into two characters, Garshin
suggests that the earlier portrayal of the fallen woman as a saint can no longer be applied to the
changing concept of the feminine. Instead, Dostoevsky’s hybrid is to be fragmented – first, to
explore female sacrifice and transgressiveness as two separate concepts and, then, to accept the
latter as more conducive for depicting the revolutionary martyr-heroine.
492
Representing the sacrificial half of Dostoevsky’s crossbreed between a prostitute and a
saint, Garshin’s Sonia is expectedly devoid of any transgressive features. That is, she
continuously demonstrates the very traits that make her unfitting for the portrayal of Corday,
such as her willingness to sacrifice her own interests for Lopatin’s well-being. As a model of
492
The fact that Garshin does not outright reject Dostoevsky’s depiction but, instead, reworks it indicates Garshin’s
willingness to work within the exisiting tradition of female literary representation rather than to refuse it. For more
on Garshin’s complex relationship towards Dostoevsky’s heritage, see Parker, Vsevolod, 49-54; Henry, Hamlet, 20-
21; Evnin, “F. M. Dostoevsky,” 289-301; A. E. Iakunina, “Traditsii F. M. Dostoevskogo v tvorchestve V. M.
Garshina,” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta. Seriia 9. Filologiia 4 (1981): 17-24; and R. L. Jackson, Dostoevsky’s
Underground Man in Russian Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1958), 73-81.
249
understanding, Sonia is never upset with Lopatin, accepting of his love for another woman, and
caring for him during his final sickness. Likewise, Sonia’s letters emanate with Christian love
and support for everything Lopatin does or experiences, including his feelings for Nadezhda
Nikolaevna. For example, in one of these letters, Sonia voluntarily withdraws from her role of
Lopatin’s bride to that of his spiritual sister. This pronounced sacrificial move not only enables
Lopatin to pursue his happiness with Nadezhda Nikolaevna, but also effectively prevents Sonia
from becoming a major female character in Lopatin’s narrative.
493
Sonia’s willingness to transform a potentially sexual relationship into a platonic brotherly
and sisterly friendship allows her to transcend her sexuality in a way reminiscent of the virginal
martyr-heroines from Polonsky’s, Turgenev’s, and Korolenko’s narratives of the pre-Perovskaia
period. In view of Garshin’s fundamentally different approach to the revolutionary feminine, this
parallel makes Sonia an unsuitable model for a post-Perovskaia portrayal of a female terrorist.
Far from being a physical, flesh-and-blood character, Sonia comes across as a nonsexual
embodiment of virtues that fail to provide Lopatin’s idea of Corday with concrete, corporeal
features.
The fact that Sonia is never described in person, but is either portrayed through her letters
or mentioned as an unspecified “face” (litso) further suggests her physical invisibility and,
consequently, prevents her from becoming anything but a soothing feminine voice without a
493
Garshin’s Sonia is a likely descendant of Tolstoy’s Sonia from War and Peace (Voina i Mir), who is also
portrayed as supportive and self-abnigating, but unable to marry. For more on Tolstoy’s Sonia as a “sterile flower,”
see Bernard Gorin, “Feminine Types in Tolstoy’s Works,” vol. 16, The Sewanee Review Quarterly, ed. John
Henneman (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1908), 442-56; Svetlana Grenier, “Tolstoy on the Way Towards
Feminism and Polyphony: From War and Peace to Anna Karenina,” in Representing the Marginal Woman in
Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature: Personalism, Feminism, and Polyphony (Westport: Greenwood Press,
2001), 87-106; Anne Moss, “Tolstoy’s Politics of Love: ‘That Passionate and Tender Friendship That Exists Only
Among Women’,” The Slavic and East European Journal 53, no. 4 (2009): 571-78; Sémon, Les femmes, 151-57.
250
body. Sonia’s lack of a body cannot satisfy Lopatin’s artistic needs, given the precision of his
vision of Corday:
The hand which will deal the fatal blow at present hangs helplessly, and shows up
delicately in its whiteness against the dark blue cloth of her dress. A lace cape,
fastened crossways, tints the delicate neck, along which tomorrow a line of blood
will pass.
494
As opposed to Sonia, whose non-physical description prevents her from embodying
Lopatin’s image, Nadezhda Nikolaevna is consistently depicted as a physical being with
specific facial and bodily features, “Her eyes were a little bloodshot, her pale face was
worn, her dress was untidy and loud.”
495
This pronounced contrast between the two
female portrayals further disqualifies Sonia from becoming Lopatin’s muse and a stand-
in for the revolutionary feminine.
Notably, Sonia’s generalized portrayal evokes Lopatin’s first unsuccessful model Anna
Ivanovna, who, as we recall, is also rejected for her indistinctiveness. Together Sonia and Anna
Ivanovna provide a comprehensive and, at times, overlapping portrayal of what is not a part of
Lopatin’s concept of the martyr-heroine. Whereas the problem with Anna Ivanovna is her
imprecise facial features and an absence of a narrative tradition, the issue with Sonia is her
exaggerated spiritual perfection and non-existing physical presence. By rejecting these two
narrative possibilities as unsuitable for depicting Corday, Lopatin suggests that the crisis of
494
Garshin, “Nadejda,” 160.
495
Ibid., 175.
251
female representation is to be solved neither by an inexperienced and unverified trope, nor by the
familiar and idealized one. Instead, Lopatin finds an alternative, balanced solution in the
prostitute Nadezhda Nikolaevna, whose established, yet marginalized, position in the patriarchal
structure makes her an ideal combination of tradition and transgression needed to incarnate
Lopatin’s image of Corday in art.
Nadezhda Nikolaevna as Corday
Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s suitability for the role of Corday is confirmed by several
characters. The first personage who cautiously mentions her candidature to Lopatin is his friend
and rival – Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s lover Bessonov. Without disclosing her name or “fallen”
status, Bessonov cryptically describes Nadezhda Nikolaevna as “not a respectable person” (ne
vazhnaia osoba) who stands “at the lowest step of the human ladder” and is virtually balancing
on the verge of the abyss. Bessonov’s mention of the abyss in connection with Nadezhda
Nikolaevna not only frames her as a transgressive character, but also evokes the abyss motif
from Turgenev’s earlier narrative poem about the revolutionary feminine The Threshold. While
in both stories “the abyss” symbolizes female defiance, Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s transgression is
sexual rather than ideological. This is a far departure from Turgenev’s virginal martyr-heroine,
who is no longer suitable for portraying the female revolutionary in a post-Perovskaia literary
space.
Bessonov’s insight about Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s affinity with Corday is further
supported by Lopatin’s close friend, the artist Gel’freikh. The fact that both Bessonov and
Gel’freikh use the same linguistic and metaphorical references, “person” (osoba) and “Corday,”
in their description of Nadezhda Nikolaevna suggests their shared male perspective on the
252
similarities between the narratives of prostitution and revolutionary martyrdom. However, in
contrast to Bessonov, whose perception of Nadezhda Nikolaevna as Corday is guided by his
personal familiarity with her transgressive sexual capacity, Gel’freikh’s view is largely informed
by his artistic intuition, making him an ideal candidate to introduce Lopatin to his prospective
model, “Do you know who she is? Rejoice! That is your Charlotte Corday.”
496
Similar to Bessonov and Gel’freikh, Lopatin immediately recognizes Nadezhda
Nikolaevna’s kinship with Corday. A clear indication of his validation of Nadezhda
Nikolaevna’s candidature is that Lopatin asks Nadezhda Nikolaevna to be his model during their
first meeting. Later on, Lopatin’s initial impression turns into a conviction, which he happily
shares first with Bessonov and then with Nadezhda Nikolaevna, “Anyone better than Nadezhda
Nikolaevna I could not wish for.”
497
Further evidence for Lopatin’s excitement about his model
is found in the fact that he begins to work better and faster and experiences no more difficulties
with his project: “Never before or since have I worked so quickly and successfully.”
498
Thanks to
Nadezhda Nikolaevna, Lopatin’s artistic success soars, suggesting that for Garshin the secret to
any creative achievement lies in finding an appropriate model or, in Lopatin’s case, the
prostitute.
499
496
Garshin, “Nadejda,” 174.
497
Ibid., 179.
498
Ibid., 183.
499
According to Jackson, Garshin – akin to his male protagonist – also had particular images in mind “as a model
for Lopatin’s picture of Charlotte Corday.” Among the paintings in question, Jackson names a portrait by Repin
“Tsarevna Sofia on the Novodevichy Convent at the Time of the Execution of the Strel’tsy and the Torture of All
Her Servants in 1698” (1879) and, though less likely, a portrait by Iaroshenko “Female Student” (“Kursistka,”
1883). See Jackson, “Garshin and Repin,” 105.
253
The final confirmation of Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s suitability for the portrayal of Corday
comes from the heroine herself. The fact that Nadezhda Nikolaevna quickly agrees with
Lopatin’s proposition to serve as his model for Corday demonstrates her own recognition of their
similarities, including the “element of violence,” “All right […] I understand what you want. I
will make my face like that.”
500
Importantly, Nadezhda Nikolaevna not only understands her
role, but also intuitively knows how to enhance her resemblance to Corday, indicating her
perceptiveness of Lopatin’s quest, “And, do you know, even in this mess I see what it will be
[…] You have thought out a good picture, Andrei Nicolaievich.”
501
Indeed, when Nadezhda Nikolaevna does create a facial expression that, in her opinion,
expresses Corday’s essence, she becomes a true incarnation of Lopatin’s image: “She quickly
went to her place, raised her head, dropped her white hands, and on her face was reflected all that
I had dreamt of for my picture. Determination and longing, pride and fear, love and hate … all
were there.”
502
Therefore, while there is already a natural correspondence between Nadezhda
Nikolaevna and Lopatin’s vision of Corday, it is not until Nadezhda Nikolaevna provides her
own take on Corday that Lopatin notices the complete identification between the two.
Notably, Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s effortless ability to transform into Corday is based not
only on their shared transgressive capacity, but also on her familiarity with Corday’s story. When
discussing her study of Corday undertaken before her fall, Nadezhda Nikolaevna insists that even
her current existence cannot erase this story from her memory, “I have been to school. I have
forgotten much now, leading this kind of life; but, for all that, I remember some things, and such
500
Kramer, “Impressionist Tendencies,” 207 and Garshin, “Nadejda,” 177.
501
Garshin, “Nadejda,” 184.
502
Ibid.
254
things as the story of Charlotte Corday it is impossible to forget.”
503
The fact that Nadezhda
Nikolaevna still remembers the narrative of Corday enables her to partake in Lopatin’s project
more consciously, which, in turn, augments her ability to perform the French martyr-heroine to
the artist’s satisfaction.
Whereas Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s knowledge of Corday’s story is vital for her success as
Lopatin’s model, it is even more significant for improving Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s perception of
self. There are two main reasons why Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s identification with Corday has
positive effects on the heroine’s psyche. On the one hand, the account of Corday is one of the
few remaining memories from Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s past that is both relevant to and
justifiable of her transgressive present. Even though Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s transgression is of a
different kind, she intuitively senses the similarity between her and Corday’s subversive impulse
against the dominant male narrative – be it the men’s exploitation of female sexuality or the
men’s abuse of political power. Just as Corday’s demise is caused by her resolve and
determination, Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s “fall” is also triggered by her unwillingness to
compromise, “her ruin had come from her refusal to bend.”
504
Because of this sense of spiritual
kinship with the likes of Corday, Nadezhda Nikolaevna is given a chance to reevaluate her own
fall as a plausible expression of female resistance and her currently degrading position as a
variation of the rebellious martyr-heroine.
In addition to becoming an impetus for Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s emotional and physical
salvation, Corday also enables Nadezhda Nikolaevna to acquire agency by changing from a
503
Ibid., 182.
504
Ibid., 191-92. Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s stubbornness is also reminiscent of the way Korolenko describes his
female prisoner in The Strange One, when he compares Morozova’s revolutionary commitment with the religious
zeal of her ideological predecessor boiarynia Morozova.
255
passive vehicle of male pleasure to an active contributor to Lopatin’s project, “I will try to do all
to make it a success […] so far as it depends on me […] I will put on the expression. It will make
the work easier […].”
505
As a result of her performance as Corday, Nadezhda Nikolaevna is no
longer just a fallen woman or a submissive damsel-in-distress waiting for a male rescuer. Instead,
she transforms into a stand-in for and a co-creator of the martyr-heroine, “the creator of
Charlotte, its author,” with both roles elevating her from a low prostitute status and confirming
her ability to change.
506
This transformation takes place as Nadezhda Nikolaevna leaves her job as a prostitute,
moves out of her former apartment, and begins her new life as a copier, which is a telling
metaphor for the fallen woman’s capacity to rewrite her own narrative. The shift in Nadezhda
Nikolaevna’s disposition is so dramatic that it is even noticed by Bessonov, a cynical man who
does not believe in Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s conversion:
It is impossible to recognize this woman. I have known her for three years, and
have been accustomed to see her as she has been these three years. Now I see the
change which has taken place in her, and I do not understand her, and do not
know whether this change is genuine, or whether it is only a rôle being played by
[the contemptible being] accustomed to deceive herself and [others].
507
505
Ibid., 184.
506
See Fedorov, “Il’ia Muromets,” 38.
507
Garshin, “Nadejda,” 209. I have modified two words in the translation for a more accurate version.
256
Bessonov’s sincere surprise at Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s revolutionary makeover suggests that her
attempt to break out of a fallen woman trope is not only successful, but is also unusual. Given
that this attempt is largely prompted by Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s artistic impersonation of
Corday, it will not be an overstatement to suggest that Nadezhda Nikolaevna is finally able to
overcome her own transgressive narrative by sublimating it into that of the martyr-heroine.
The Male as an Artist – The Narrative of Success
While performing Corday plays a major role in Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s transformation,
her conversion is also facilitated by the male artist. Known for her defiant attitude to men,
Nadezhda Nikolaevna makes a telling exception for the artist Lopatin when she agrees to be
objectified and controlled by his demands. For example, upon becoming Lopatin’s model,
Nadezhda Nikolaevna is willing to be molded the way Lopatin envisions Corday and instantly
abandons her own vulgar demeanor upon his request. In another symbolic moment of her
initiation into Corday, Nadezhda Nikolaevna eagerly accepts the dress that Lopatin has deemed
appropriate for his painting, “Having got out of a cupboard the dark-blue dress long ago made by
me, the cap, and all the accessories of the costume of Charlotte Corday, I [asked] her to go into
the next room and change.”
508
Once outfitted, Nadezhda Nikolaevna voluntarily ceases her
typical brash disposition in order to enact Lopatin’s image, “Before me stood my picture!”
509
By
referring to the transformed Nadezhda Nikolaevna as his painting, Lopatin aptly demonstrates
the extent of his control over the model – namely, not only is Nadezhda Nikolaevna wearing his
508
Ibid., 183. I have modified one word in the translation for a more accurate version.
509
Ibid.
257
proposed outfit, but she also acquires the status of Lopatin’s inanimate object as “my picture”
(moia kartina).
Continuing to recast Nadezhda Nikolaevna into his vision of Corday, Lopatin rearranges
her posture and gestures for an even closer resemblance, “I [asked] her to stand, arranged the
folds of her dress, lightly touched her hands, giving to them that helpless position which I always
pictures to myself, and went to the easel.”
510
The result exceeds Lopatin’s expectations as it not
only merges the figures of Nadezhda Nikolaevna and Corday in one larger narrative of female
transgression, but also enables Lopatin to recreate his memory of Nadezhda Nikolaevna after her
death:
She stood before me… She stands before me now, there on the canvas… She is
looking at me as if alive. She has the same sorrowful and thoughtful expression,
the same tokens of death on her pale face as on that morning.
511
The fact that Lopatin’s painting becomes the only way to preserve the image of deceased
Nadezhda Nikolaevna “as if alive” (kak zhivaia) further attests to his power over her
representation and his ability to transform a fallen woman into an immortal work of art.
By allowing Lopatin to control her image and rewrite her story, Nadezhda Nikolaevna
emphasizes the fundamental difference between an artist and other men in her life. Whereas
previous male protagonists, the unfortunate Nikitin from “An Incident” and the egotistical
Bessonov from “Nadezhda Nikolaevna,” are either unable or unwilling to change Nadezhda
510
Ibid. I have modified one word in the translation for a more accurate version.
511
Ibid.
258
Nikolaevna’s prostitute status, Lopatin succeeds in transforming her narrative precisely because
of his artistic sensibilities.
512
As a winning alternative to both Nikitin and Bessonov, Lopatin not
only rectifies their loss of control over Nadezhda Nikolaevna through the redeeming power of
art, but also highlights the metaliterary function of Garshin’s sequel. In other words, by making
Lopatin’s artistic enterprise a success, Garshin suggests that it is not just any man but an artist,
who is meant to find an authentic, even if circumstantial, way to do both – transform the fallen
woman trope into a muse and harness the evasive martyr-heroine in a work of art.
The Male as a Savior – the Narrative of Failure
Given Lopatin’s privileged position in Garshin’s story, one may expect the same success
when his relationship with Nadezhda Nikolaevna switches from professional into romantic.
Notably, this is not the case. Contrary to one’s expectations, Lopatin’s decision to change
Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s status from his muse into his spouse results in a catastrophe, leading to
the violent murders of Nadezhda Nikolaevna and Bessonov and the near-death of Lopatin
himself. In other words, where Lopatin the artist triumphs, Lopatin the romantic hero runs into
problems, revealing Garshin’s growing skepticism about the return to the familial tropes in
contemporary Russian fiction. Considering that in his much earlier “An Incident” Garshin has
already expressed doubts about the patriarchal narrative in general, and the savior motif in
512
According to Ivanova, “Garshin’s hero-artist is able to reveal a truly wonderful spirit in a fallen woman. A person
who is far from the arts, ‘not an artist,” is not capable of anything like this. This is the thought that Garshin confirms
in ‘An Incident’ and develops in ‘Nadezhda Nikolaevna’” [Гаршинский герой-художник способен открыть
истинно прекрасный дух в падшей женщине. Человек, от искусства далекий, ‘не-художник’, ни на что
подобное не способен. Эту мысль Гаршин утверждает в ‘Происшествии’ и развивает в ‘Надежде
Николаевне’]. See G. Ivanova, “Iskusstvo i sud’by khudozhnikov v proizvedeniiakh N. V. Gogolia i V. M.
Garshina,” in vol. 3 of Vsevolod Garshin at the Turn of the Century: An International Symposium in Three Volumes,
ed. Peter Henry, Vladimir Porudominsky, and Mikhail Girshman (Oxford: Northgate Press, 2000), 42; my
translation.
259
particular, it is only natural that in “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” Lopatin’s plan to revive this pattern
also does not come to fruition.
Despite the eventual failure of Lopatin’s marriage intentions, his attempt to return
Nadezhda Nikolaevna to the familial narrative by winning her heart does progress further than
that of his unlucky predecessor Nikitin from “An Incident.” The first reason for Lopatin’s
stronger amorous appeal for Nadezhda Nikolaevna is that he is not a trailblazer. Rather, Lopatin
is Nikitin’s successor, who is familiar with his precursor’s disastrous precedent and is therefore
able to learn from Nikitin’s mistakes. For example, upon hearing about Nikitin’s demise from
Nadezhda Nikolaevna, Lopatin concludes that Nikitin’s problem is his weakness:
He had wished to save her, but could not. His weak hands were not strong enough
to restrain her from the brink of the abyss, and, unable to restrain her, he had
hurled himself instead into the pit. He shot himself.
513
By demonstrating his awareness of the reasons behind Nikitin’s mental breakdown, Lopatin
positions himself as a superior alternative to Nikitin – ready to correct Nikitin’s blunders and
possibly rewrite “An Incident” with a happy conclusion.
In addition to a chronological advantage over Nikitin, Lopatin also excels in his ability to
articulate his plans for Nadezhda Nikolaevna. In contrast to Nikitin, who does not explicitly
identify Nadezhda Nikolaevna as his future wife, Lopatin openly verbalizes his intentions to
marry Nadezhda Nikolaevna: “I told her I would love her for love, that she must be my
513
Garshin, “Nadejda,” 212.
260
wife…”
514
When compared to Nikitin’s lack of a term for his love interest, Lopatin’s reference to
Nadezhda Nikolaevna as “his wife” is particularly important because it conveys a closer
correspondence between Lopatin’s goals and those of the traditional saving narrative, making
Lopatin a better candidate than Nikitin for rescuing Nadezhda Nikolaevna from her marginalized
position.
Indeed, Lopatin’s ability to express his intentions enables him to establish a strong
spiritual connection with Nadezhda Nikolaevna, which is absent in her relationship with Nikitin,
“I spoke a thousand senseless words – words of delirious happiness for the most part, having no
outward sense – but she understood them.”
515
The fact that Nadezhda Nikolaevna responds to
Lopatin’s declaration of love with a similar confession of her own confirms the change in her
beliefs about the value of the familial narrative:
She spoke of her good fortune, and how she had loved me from the very first
meeting, and had run away from me frightened at this love. She declared she was
not worthy of me, that it terrified her that I should link my fate with hers, and she
again embraced me, and again shed tears of joy and happiness.
516
Notably, this romantic scene is a far departure from Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s awkward
meetings with Nikitin in “An Incident,” in which she does not reciprocate Nikitin’s love and
expresses nothing but a forced pity for his suffering. In contrast to feeling indifferent and
514
Ibid., 225.
515
Ibid.
516
Ibid.
261
resentful towards Nikitin, Nadezhda Nikolaevna is happy about her potential role as Lopatin’s
wife:
I saw her dear face, radiant with happiness, resting close to me heart. It was an
entirely new, somewhat different face – not the face with a secret suffering writ
on its features that I had been accustomed to see.
Given Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s happy disposition, Lopatin is clearly a more
successful romantic hero than his suicidal predecessor. The main reason for that is
Lopatin’s artistic background, which enables him to transform Nadezhda Nikolaevna first
from a fallen woman into a muse and then from a muse into his beloved. Because of his
artistic sensibilities, Lopatin has a more intuitive understanding of narrative clichés and is
able to act his part of an ideal savior, who is understanding, gentle, and straightforward in
his attitude towards the victimized female. In fact, Lopatin’s behavior towards Nadezhda
Nikolaevna seems to be modelled after Nekrasov’s seminal poem “When from the
Darkness of Delusion,” which also features the prostitute’s tearful, emotional confession
about her tragic experiences and offers the man’s unselfish, forgiving, supportive
response.
In addition to Lopatin’s artistic ability to recognize and reuse established narrative
patterns, another reason for his romantic triumph over the non-artist Nikitin is that Lopatin first
approaches Nadezhda Nikolaevna with a creative artistic proposal rather than with marriage
intentions. For Nikitin, Nadezhda Nikolaevna always remains a prostitute to be saved, which
only reinforces her subjugation by the patriarchal narrative and provokes her resentment.
262
Lopatin, on the other hand, gives Nadezhda Nikolaevna a role beyond the family-based female
trope – that of a stand-in for the martyr-heroine and a muse.
517
By enabling Nadezhda
Nikolaevna to amend her transgressive narrative without becoming somebody’s love interest,
Lopatin not only shows her an alternative way to function in a patriarchal narrative, but also
temporarily emancipates Nadezhda Nikolaevna from the traditional saving plot.
A telling indicator of this emancipation is Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s brief escape from all
conventional female tropes – be it the prostitute, the beloved, or the fiancé – during her modeling
experience as Corday. Not only does Nadezhda Nikolaevna abandon her fallen woman status
after becoming Lopatin’s muse, but she also becomes less narratively accessible because of her
frequent disappearances from the story. To illustrate, throughout this short period of Nadezhda
Nikolaevna’s narrative freedom, none of the male characters, including Bessonov, Lopatin, and
Gel’freikh, meets with her outside modeling sessions or knows where she lives. More than that,
it is no longer the male protagonists but Nadezhda Nikolaevna who controls her presence in
Lopatin’s story by only appearing in his life to model for Corday and then dissipating into the
void of the text until her next sitting. The fact that neither Lopatin nor Gel’freikh is yet familiar
with Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s last name or her past further conveys her narrative elusiveness as a
muse. By becoming a character who is difficult to locate in the space of the text, Nadezhda
Nikolaevna moves beyond the family-based classification of women and, as a result, outside of
the traditional forms of male control.
Not surprisingly, the longer Nadezhda Nikolaevna acts as a muse, the harder it becomes
for Lopatin, Bessonov, and Gel’freikh to track her down. Towards the end of her modelling
517
As such, Lopatin departs from the traditional saving narrative because he “transforms the prostitute in his own
mind from a sex object” not “to a moral object” but to an artistic one. Borenstein, “Selling Russia,” 177.
263
experience, Nadezhda Nikolaevna actually vanishes for six days, with both Lopatin and
Gel’freikh frantically looking for her all over the city, “I was in despair but [Semen] Ivanovich
promised me to hunt her out ‘even if she were at the bottom of the sea’.”
518
This search becomes
a turning point in Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s “muse” narrative, after which she ceases to be a model
for Corday and is officially introduced to the reader as Lopatin’s romantic interest. In fact,
everything that happens in the six days between Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s sudden departure from
Lopatin’s narrative and her comeback contributes to her reverse transformation from an
emancipated muse back into a fallen woman in need of a male rescuer.
The first indication of Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s impending return to a traditional prostitute
trope is the near-completion of Lopatin’s painting, which Nadezhda Nikolaevna rightly perceives
as the end of their artist-muse connection. Whereas Nadezhda Nikolaevna has fully trusted
Lopatin as an artist during their creative collaboration, she doubts Lopatin as a man upon its
conclusion, “Do you know why I left you? I thought (forgive me for thinking it) – I thought that
you were like the rest.”
519
Aware of her expiration date as a muse, Nadezhda Nikolaevna runs
away from Lopatin, fearing changes in their relationship from a professional partnership into a
male-controlled abuse:
The picture was coming to an end; you had been polite and delicate with me… I
did not trust you and waited with terror for the moment when you would look
518
Gasrhin, “Nadejda,” 200. I have changed the name in the translation from “Simon” to “Semen.”
519
Ibid., 208.
264
upon me in the way to which I have become too accustomed during the last three
years.
520
The fact that Nadezhda Nikolaevna associates the end of her muse function with the return of her
prostitute role highlights the lack of options for female characters stuck in a patriarchal plot. By
choosing to leave Lopatin rather than denigrate her muse role, Nadezhda Nikolaevna suggests
that besides becoming a muse, the only other way for a fallen woman to rewrite her story is to
escape the narrative altogether.
For that reason, the day when Nadezhda Nikolaevna finally returns to Lopatin’s
apartment after her prolonged absence is also the day of her return to the redemption plot in a
traditional damsel-in-distress role. The fact that Nadezhda Nikolaevna does not come back on
her own terms but is found and taken to Lopatin by Gel’freikh further indicates the reassertion of
male control over her narrative.
521
In line with the shifting gender-power dynamics, Nadezhda
Nikolaevna also exhibits signs of a changing perception of self when she begins to express
anxiety about her role as a muse and her similarity with Corday:
It has come into my mind that many will recognize me – too many […] I am
thinking of how many stories, questions, you will have to hear […] Who is she?
Where did he [take her from]? And even people who know will ask who I am,
where did [you take me from]…
522
520
Ibid.
521
The language of Gel’freikh excited screams, “Andrei, I have brought her, have brought her, brought her! …”
suggests that at this point Nadezhda Nikolaevna is ready to surrender her fate into the other men’s hands. Ibid., 206.
522
Ibid., 208. I have modified two phrases in the translation for a more accurate version.
265
By questioning Lopatin’s decision to use her as a model because of her fallen past, Nadezhda
Nikolaevna shows that in her mind her earlier prostitute background has already eclipsed her
current role of a muse. Likewise, the fact that Nadezhda Nikolaevna marks her return by finally
telling Lopatin and Gel’freikh the story of her fall serves as yet another sign of Nadezhda
Nikolaevna’s reversal from the status of a mysterious indefinable muse to that of a victimized
fallen woman.
Whereas Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s six-day absence becomes a turning point for her
transformation, it is also the defining moment for Lopatin, who begins to view Nadezhda
Nikolaevna in amorous rather than artistic terms. The impetus for Lopatin’s realization of his
love for Nadezhda Nikolaevna comes from his cousin Sonia, whose letter helps Lopatin to
understand the romantic nature of his interest in Nadezhda Nikolaevna, “You love her, Andrei.
God grant you happiness.…”
523
Given that Sonia is a traditional, family-based female character,
it is only logical that she is the one who prompts Lopatin to re-examine his working relationship
with Nadezhda Nikolaevna through a familial narrative and, as a result, reveals a man in an
artist:
…but Sonia was right. I loved her with the distraction and passion of the first love
of a man who has reached twenty-five years of age without knowing love. I
longed to snatch her from the horrors which were tormenting her, to take her in
my arms somewhere far, far away, to fondle and press her to my heart, so that she
523
Ibid., 204.
266
might forget, so as to bring a smile on her suffering face…. And Sonia had said
all this in one line of her letter.
524
While Sonia’s letter enables Lopatin to replace his and Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s creative
artist-muse connection with a more traditional savior-victim relationship, it also facilitates the
eventual demise of both characters, neither of whom manages to realize one’s role in a familial
narrative. As if to emphasize the banality of this plot development, Garshin uses another
traditional character, Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s jealous lover Bessonov, to cut Lopatin’s romantic
story short. By ending “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” with a bloody finale, in which Bessonov kills
Nadezhda Nikolaevna, wounds Lopatin, and himself dies at Lopatin’s hand, Garshin exposes the
saving motif as narratively unproductive and the familial solution as conceptually flawed.
525
The
fact that Bessonov resorts to deadly violence only after Lopatin and Nadezhda Nikolaevna
transform their artist-muse relationship into a mutual romance serves as yet another evidence of
the narrative impasse created by Lopatin’s turn to the redeeming paradigm and resolved by
Bessonov’s murderous outburst.
The Jealous Lover vs. the Male Artist: The Battle for Narrative Control
Besides assuring a dramatic dénouement, the character of Bessonov also has another
important function – that of a foil to Lopatin. In contrast to Lopatin’s more understanding and
empathetic perception of women, Bessonov’s patriarchal view is rooted in ultimate
524
Ibid., 205.
525
Notably, neither of Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s male suitors – be it Nikitin from “An Incident” or Bessonov and
Lopatin from “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” – manages to save her, suggesting Garshin’s disappointment in and eventual
rejection of the saving narrative.
267
objectification, control, and violence. Neither an artist nor a savior, Bessonov represents a
conservative male tradition that does not believe in rescuing the fallen woman:
He is a man whose brain is nothing but compartments and drawers. He will open
one, take out a ticket, read what is on it, and act in accordance. This is the way in
which he saw this case. He sees a fallen woman, and immediately he refers to his
brain (the compartments are alphabetically arranged), open the drawer, and reads:
“They never return.”
526
Even though Bessonov has been around Nadezhda Nikolaevna for three years, he has never
attempted to become her savior or to alter her fallen woman status the way both Nikitin and
Lopatin have. Since Bessonov only perceives Nadezhda Nikolaevna as a prostitute, he cannot
imagine her in any other female trope, such as a muse or a wife, which suggests his lack of a
creative vision and reluctance to change.
Similar to his one-dimensional perception of Nadezhda Nikolaevna, Bessonov is also
unable to understand Lopatin’s interest in the unfamiliar phenomenon of Corday:
You are mad people, you Russian painters. Have you so little of your own about
which to paint? Charlotte Corday! What have you got to do with Charlotte? Can
you really transfer yourself to that time and those surroundings?
527
526
Garshin, “Nadejda,” 187-88.
527
Ibid., 159.
268
Besides revealing his own paucity of imagination, Bessonov’s comment also sounds important
metaliterary concerns about the dearth of literary models for portraying the revolutionary
feminine in Russian fiction. In what appears to be an echo of the issues facing the Russian
writers of the time, Bessonov perceptively names the absence of the native “martyr-heroine”
tradition one of the main factors that can prevent Lopatin from transposing the foreign Corday
onto the Russian soil.
While Bessonov’s reservations about Lopatin’s project are not without ground, they also
make him resistant to any artistic experiments with female tropes, be it the fallen woman
Nadezhda Nikolaevna or the martyr-heroine Corday. A telling example of Bessonov’s
stubborness occurs when he refuses to introduce Nadezhda Nikolaevna to Lopatin, rightfully
fearing her subsequent abandonment of the fallen woman status. When, despite Bessonov’s
warning, Lopatin does cast Nadezhda Nikolaevna as his model, Bessonov resorts to an act of
verbal aggression, prefiguring his later fit of deadly violence, “I shall not allow you to paint her.
I will not allow her to be with you every day, to spend whole hours with you…. I will not allow
her.”
528
In response to Bessonov’s frantic assertion of control over the fallen woman trope,
Lopatin defies him by throwing a spear – an important phallic symbol of male rivalry over the
right to define the parameters of female representation and a symbolic foresight of Bessonov’s
death at the end of the story.
Unhappy about Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s new function as Lopatin’s model, Bessonov
becomes even more distraught when Nadezhda Nikolaevna fully drifts away from her prostitute
role, “She has changed marvelously. Her pale face has taken on a certain impression of dignity
not at all in keeping with her ‘calling.’ She is modest and at the same time apparently proud. Of
528
Ibid., 179.
269
what is she proud?”
529
The more Nadezhda Nikolaevna changes, the stronger is Bessonov’s
anxiety about her escaping his realm of influence and undermining his hierarchy of female
tropes. Feeling disoriented and abandoned, Bessonov regularly experiences fits of possessive
rage towards Nadezhda Nikolaevna, which intensify with her impending transformation from
Lopatin’s model into his romantic interest, “I love her. Give her to me […] I cannot live without
her.”
530
Even though Bessonov does finally articulate his love for Nadezhda Nikolaevna, the
controlling language of his plea suggests that he is still unable to view her as a subject with a will
of her own. Instead, he treats Nadezhda Nikolaevna as an object of exchange between him and
Lopatin, which makes Bessonov a failure in Garshin’s poetic universe and precludes him from
winning Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s heart.
Having lost his power over Nadezhda Nikolaevna, the once proud Bessonov can no
longer maintain his previous sense of self and composure, “Nothing can hold me back. I have no
control over myself….”
531
Precipitating his dissolution into a state of madness, Bessonov goes as
far as to debase himself in front of Nadezhda Nikolaevna, “He threw himself at my feet, this
proud man.”
532
After Nadezhda Nikolaevna yet again rejects him in favor of Lopatin, Bessonov
has no other choice but to follow the literary conventions of his character and commit a crime of
passion. Not only does this offense lead to his own death from Lopatin’s proverbial spear, but it
also becomes a fitting ending for a male character whose inflexible and retrograde nature is
destructive to the narrative itself.
529
Ibid., 199.
530
Ibid., 227.
531
Ibid., 223.
532
Ibid., 226.
270
While Bessonov’s demise suggests the disintegration of the patriarchal perception of the
feminine, Lopatin’s survival, on the other hand, implies the victory of the artist. In contrast to
Bessonov, whose futile attempts to keep Nadezhda Nikolaevna under his control lead to her
physical ruin, Lopatin does succeed in preserving her image in his art. Immortalized by Lopatin’s
portrait of Corday, Nadezhda Nikolaevna not only transcends her physical death, but also finally
escapes her traditional roles of a fallen woman and a damsel-in-distress. Instead, she remains in
the narrative as a stand-in for the martyr-heroine and a muse, haunting Lopatin imagination with
her after-death appearance as Corday in his painting, “Oh, Charlotte, Charlotte! Ought I to bless
or curse the hour when the thought first entered my head to paint you?”
533
Lopatin’s misgivings about his fateful decision to narrate Corday are not surprising. On
the one hand, Nadezhda Nikolaevna shares Corday’s tragic fate in that she is also punished by
death for transgressing the patriarchal narrative. On the other hand, while the loss of Nadezhda
Nikolaevna is a definite factor in Lopatin’s despair, there is also another reason for Lopatin’s
anguish about the unfortunate series of events started by his obsession with the martyr-heroine.
That is, Lopatin himself has become a murderer. As if dispersing Bessonov’s earlier doubts
about the Russian artist’s inability to portray the lethal Corday, Lopatin not only produces a great
painting, but also performs an act of deadly violence. In so doing, Lopatin subverts Bessonov’s
interpretation of an artist as “a weak intellectual,” once again exposing the bureaucrat’s beliefs as
rigid and old-fashioned:
One must have it in one’s blood. One must be a descendant of those people who
lived with Marat and Charlotte Corday, and those times. But what are you? – the
533
Ibid., 159.
271
mildest of well-educated Russians, lethargic and weak. One must be capable of
doing such a deed oneself. But you! Could if, if necessary, throw away your
brushes and – speaking figuratively – take up a dagger? For you this would be
about as possible as a trip to the moon….
534
The fact that Lopatin almost verbatim acts out Bessonov’s “impossible” scenario marks an artist
as a member of the new generation of revolutionary-minded heroes. By making Lopatin “take up
a dagger,” Garshin subtly reminds his readers that the rebellious spirit is now flowing through
the veins of even the most unlikely candidates for murderous transgression, such as artists and
the “mildest” (miagchaishie) Russian intellectuals.
Besides establishing a spiritual kinship between Russian intelligentsia and the likes of
Corday, Lopatin’s realization of his own transgressive ability also enables him to reevaluate his
earlier idealistic opinion of female revolutionary violence. Even though Lopatin kills Bessonov
in self-defense, in his mind there is no justification for this type of transgression, “They did not
try me. The case was quashed… But for the human conscience there are no written laws, no
doctrine of irresponsibility, and I am suffering punishment for my crime.”
535
The use of the word
“punishment” (kazn’) in this context is important because Lopatin employs the same word to
describe the bloody scene instigated by Bessonov, “Then the slaughter began” (togda nachalas’
kazn’).
536
By drawing a parallel between execution as crime and execution as punishment,
Lopatin no longer validates the use of violence for a noble cause. In contrast to Lopatin’s initial
534
Ibid., 164.
535
Ibid., 229.
536
Ibid., 227.
272
euphoric perception of the assassin Corday as “a fanatic for the good cause,” Lopatin’s own
deadly violence in the end of the story upsets him, suggesting that his final opinion on
revolutionary violence in general, and female terrorism in particular is far from settled.
537
Garshin’s Modern Russian Feminine: Transgression and Sacrifice
With Nadezhda Nikolaevna dead and Lopatin emotionally and physically wounded, the
return of the non-violent and non-transgressive Sonia to Lopatin’s bedside as his nurse in the end
of the story indicates the renewed importance of the sacrificial, saint-like Russian woman for
Garshin’s perception of the modern concept of the feminine.
538
Acting as a foil to Nadezhda
Nikolaevna and an epitome of all the positive traits from familial female tropes, Sonia’s
character presents a comfortable, safe, and asexual alternative to the transgressive, dangerous,
and erotically charged portrayal of Nadezhda Nikolaevna. While Sonia is not a suitable stand-in
for the revolutionary feminine, she is the one left with Lopatin after the death of a much desired
but precarious Nadezhda Nikolaevna. This continuous presence implies the endurance of Sonia’s
sacrificial narrative model as opposed to the fleeting nature of Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s
subversive depiction.
537
Lopatin’s reassessment of the ethical value of violence reflects Garshin’s own uneasy preoccupation with
revolutionary violence as a means of social change. As a canvas for Garshin’s contemplation on the nature of
violence, “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” includes several allusions to violence for a cause: Lopatin’s interest in the
assassin Corday, Lopatin’s and Bessonov’s deadly fight over Nadezhda Nikolaevna, and, finally, Gelfreikh’s
painting about the Russian hero-savior Il’ia Muromets who rejects the Gospels’ message about the non-resistance to
violence. For more on the similarities between Corday and Il’ia Muromets, see Henry, Hamlet, 199-200; Bialyi, V.
M. Garshin, 125-126; Fetzer, “Art and Assassination,” 62-63; and Fedorov, “Il’ia Muromets.”
538
Bialyi voices a similar opinion about the significance of Sonia in Garshin’s narrative, “it is not accidental that he
[Garshin] contraposed his terrible, restless, struggling heroies with an image of the meek and kind Sonia, who is an
embodiment of love and reconciliation” [Недаром он [Гаршин] противопоставил своим страстным, мятущимся
и борющимся героям образ кроткой и незлобливой Сони, являющейся воплощением любви и примирения].
See Bialyi, V. M. Garshin, 126.
273
Given that Nadezhda Nikolaevna and Sonia represent contrasting female narratives, their
co-existence in “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” marks Garshin’s post-Perovskaia view of the feminine
as fundamentally dichotomous and, for that reason, essentially modernist.
539
In contrast to
Garshin’s holistic portrayal of the fallen woman in “An Incident,” which focuses on the duality
within a single female personage, in “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” Garshin amends the one-character
approach as incapable of accommodating the two aspects of the revolutionary feminine –
violence and martyrdom. To fix this predicament, Garshin introduces sacrificial Sonia to balance
out transgressive Nadezhda Nikolaevna. This narrative adjustment that not only separates female
body and spirit into two autonomous characters, but also correlates the depictions of violence
with the corporeal personage and of martyrdom with the spiritual one.
As both Sonia and Nadezhda Nikolaevna fulfill their diverse roles towards the male
narrator, neither oversteps the other’s narrative boundaries: with Sonia comforting Lopatin’s
sorrows and Nadezhda Nikolaevna awakening Lopatin’s creativity and dangerous passions. This
separation of narrative responsibilities enables Garshin to provide the reader with a new
classification for female heroines based on a character’s purpose rather than on its familial
relations. Whereas the realist perception of the feminine is predicated on the family-based female
tropes, Garshin’s approach to the feminine in “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” is functional – that is,
grounded in the character’s ability to accomplish a particular task in the plot. By replacing the
familial female categories with the task-based criteria of female transgression or sacrifice,
Garshin suggests that the way to narrate the changing concept of the feminine is to fragment the
earlier multifaceted holistic female portrayals of the patriarchal narrative into less ambiguous,
539
Scholars generally view modernism as grounded in binary patterns of thinking. For example, a women’s studies
scholar Elizabeth Grosz discusses dualism in modernism as “two mutually exclusive types of things, physical and
mental, body and mind, that compose the universe in general and subjectivity in particular.” See Elizabeth Grosz,
Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 7.
274
one-dimensional female types. In so doing, the revolutionary heroines and the more traditional
female characters are safely separated into separate groups without contaminating each other
with features that run contrary to their generic literary make-up.
A valuable insight for his contemporaries, Garshin’s two-dimensional perception of the
modern feminine has created an important precedent for the subsequent contrasting portrayals of
the Femme Fatale and the Eternal Feminine in the Russian literature of the Silver Age. Whereas
“Nadezhda Nikolaevna” is by no means an exclusive literary example of female duality, its clear
separation between female characters based on their transgressive or sacrificial nature is an
important departure from the saintly prostitute of Dostoevsky or the asexual transgressor of
Polonsky, Turgenev, and Korolenko. By using a prostitute to portray the revolutionary feminine
and a saint-like heroine to encapsulate the family-based female tropes of the patriarchal
narrative, Garshin offers a synthesizing vision of innovation and tradition to accommodate the
multifaceted nature of the modern woman. This vision not only provides an immediate solution
to the contemporary crisis of female representation, but also repeatedly resonates in the binary
literary approach to the female characters of the fin-de-siècle Russian fiction.
Conclusion
While critics have long named Garshin as a precursor of Modernism and a forerunner of
Symbolism, his portrayals of the feminine in “An Incident” and “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” are not
typically examined as another expression of Garshin’s modernist and symbolist sensibilities.
540
540
See Valentina Silantyeva, “Metaphor, Symbol and the Prometheus Legend in the “Red Flower”,” in vol. 1 of
Vsevolod Garshin at the Turn of the Century: An International Symposium in Three Volumes, ed. Peter Henry,
Vladimir Porudominsky, and Mikhail Girshman (Oxford: Northgate Press, 2000), 147. Also, see Valkenier, “The
Writer as Artist's Model,” 210. For more on Garshin’s mediating position in Russian literature, see Henry, Hamlet,
237-284.
275
Even though “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” has been identified by Garshin’s scholar Rev as “a fresh
start, which reflects the complexity and duality of one’s spiritual quests,” Rev’s study still
focuses more on the originality of the plot and less on the novelty of the female personage.
541
By
adding Nadezhda Nikolaevna to the roster of characters that have given Garshin the reputation of
“a daring innovator” and a “literary pioneer,” this chapter has attempted to demonstrate that
Garshin’s experimental style also extends onto his female heroines – in particular, the figure of
the fallen woman.
542
What makes the character of Nadezhda Nikolaevna an especially important landmark in
Russia’s literary transition from realist to modernist female tropes is her own evolution from a
rebellious fallen woman in “An Incident” to a stand-in for the martyr-heroine in “Nadezhda
Nikolaevna.” This transformation is motivated by two different objectives – whereas in “An
Incident” Garshin aims to rewrite the traditional prostitute trope as a rebel against the redemption
narrative, in “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” Garshin capitalizes on his heroine’s earlier subversive
portrayal to experiment with new narrative means – such as the addition of the sacrificial Sonia
as Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s double and the introduction of an artist-muse relationship. By
choosing the same fallen woman as his main female character in “An Incident” and “Nadezhda
Nikolaevna,” Garshin reveals a larger metaliterary purpose behind both stories, which are not so
much about the prostitute trope as they are about the applicability of the prostitute trope for
accommodating the changing concept of the feminine in late nineteenth-century Russian fiction.
541
M. Rev, “Garshin i russkie khudozhniki,” in vol. 2 of Vsevolod Garshin at the Turn of the Century: An
International Symposium in Three Volumes, ed. Peter Henry, Vladimir Porudominsky, and Mikhail Girshman
(Oxford: Northgate Press, 2000), 99; my translation.
542
See Henry, “Imagery,” 142, and Dmitrii Merezhkovsky, “O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniiakh
sovremennoi russkoi literatury,” in vol. 15 of Polnoe sobranie sochinenii D. S. Merezhkovskogo (Saint-Petersburg-
Moscow: M.O. Vol’f, 1912), 282.
276
More evidence of the experimental nature of Garshin’s heroine is found in Nadezhda
Nikolaevna’s problematic relationship with the patriarchal narrative. Whether shown as a
socially conscious prostitute with an agency in “An Incident” or depicted as a stand-in for the
martyr-heroine in “Nadezhda Nikolaevna,” Nadezhda Nikolaevna consistently challenges the
patriarchal structure. She does so by showing the discrepancy between the outdated familial form
and the revolutionary content of the modern feminine. Based on her ability to subvert the familial
orientation of the traditional “saving narrative,” the character of Nadezhda Nikolaevna functions
as both an instrument and a product of Garshin’s search for a new narrative style and original
forms.
543
This assertion is also supported by Garshin’s six-year creative struggle with “Nadezhda
Nikolaevna,” whose experimental portrayal of the fallen woman as Corday might have been at
the core of Garshin’s efforts to break out of the realist mold. Another indication of the story’s
subversive function is that Garshin openly proclaims his separation from the realist conventions
in his response to the criticism of “Nadezhda Nikolaevna.” The timing of Garshin’s
announcement further suggests that the study of the writer’s literary revolt against the realist
tradition is incomplete without considering his innovative portrayal of the fallen woman.
544
543
Garshin’s general tendency to deviate from the realist tradition is aptly noticed by Karl Kramer who argues that
Garshin “often violates the conventions of the typical realistic story of the 1870s and ‘80s.” See Karl Kramer,
“Impressionist Tendencies,” 197.
544
Right after the story’s publication, Garshin explains his desire to break away from specific literary movements,
“That the piece turned out ‘not real’ is not a concern for me. To hell with this realism, naturalism, protocolism, and
the like. This is now flourishing or, more precisely, at its maturity and the fruit inside is already beginning to rot.
Under no circumstances, do I want to keep chewing the cud of the last fifty-forty years, and I’d rather break my
forehead trying to create something new for me than walk at the tail of the school, which from all the schools, in my
opinion, had the least probability to gain a foothold in the years to come” [Что вещь вышла не ‘реальная’, о том я
не забочусь. Бог с ним, с этим реализмом, натурализмом, протоколизмом и прочим. Это теперь в расцвете
или вернее в зрелости и плод внутри уже начинает гнить. Я ни в каком случае не хочу дожевывать жвачку
последних пятидесяти-сорока лет, и пусть лучше разобью себе лоб в попытках создать себе что-нибудь
новое, чем идти в хвосте школы, которая из всех школ, по моему мнению, имела меньше всего вероятия
утвердиться на долгие годы]. See Garshin, Pis’ma, 356-357.
277
While this portrayal enables Garshin to express his dissatisfaction with the realist canon,
his recurrent interpretation of the prostitute trope as conducive to violence also indicates an
awareness of historical changes in the perception of the feminine triggered by revolutionary
martyr-heroines. By using Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s character in response to different stages of
female martyrdom, Garshin not only validates the conceptual link between the acts of sexual and
political transgression, but also creates an important literary precedent for eroticizing female
revolutionary violence. In doing so, Garshin highlights the fundamentally modern essence of the
prostitute trope, emphasizing its applicability for portraying the modern concept of the Russian
feminine and its most subversive trope, the revolutionary martyr-heroine.
The fact that Garshin expands the traditional portrayal of the prostitute to narrate all types
of female transgression, including revolutionary violence, may have also contributed to the
popularity of the fallen woman trope among the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
Russian writers. Given that one of the most famous literary accounts of prostitution from this
period, Tolstoy’s last major novel Resurrection, has been considered “a descendant of both ‘An
Incident’ and ‘Nadezhda Nikolaevna’,” it will not be an overstatement to suggest that Garshin’s
narrative experiment with the fallen woman provides an important milestone towards resolving
Tolstoy’s and, by extension, Russia’s literary predicament with ways to portray the modern
concept of the feminine.
545
545
Kaidash-Lakshina, “Obraz,” 114. For more on Garshin and Tolstoy, see Henry, Hamlet, 190-218; Parker,
Vsevolod, 55-70; and V. M. Porudominskii, “Tolstoy i Garshin: Neizbezhnost’ Arzamasskogo uzhasa,” in vol. 2 of
Vsevolod Garshin at the Turn of the Century: An International Symposium in Three Volumes, ed. Peter Henry,
Vladimir Porudominsky, and Mikhail Girshman (Oxford: Northgate Press, 2000), 3-19.
278
Chapter 5
Embracing the Modern Concept of the Feminine:
Martyrs and Prostitutes in Tolstoy’s Resurrection
Section I
In Resurrection I tried to portray various forms of love: exalted love, sensual love,
and love of a still loftier kind, the love that ennobles man, and in this form of love
lies resurrection.
546
—Lev Tolstoy
The form of the novel is not only noneternal, but it passes.
547
—Lev Tolstoy
Rewriting the Heroine’s Text
The late nineteenth-century search for an appropriate narrative to accommodate the
changing perception of the feminine continues in Tolstoy’s final full-scale novel Resurrection.
Considered to be one of his most didactic works, Resurrection is often examined as a novelized
reflection of Tolstoy’s post-conversion ideas on art, religion, politics, gender, and sexuality – an
approach suggested by the writer’s own pronouncement on the educational meaning of his later
fiction:
Like a clown at a country fair grimacing in front of the ticket-booth in order to
lure the public inside the tent where the real play is being performed, so my
546
Cited in Rosemary Edmonds, introduction to Resurrection, by Leo Tolstoy (London: Penguin, 2004), 16.
547
“Форма романа не только не вечна, но она проходит.” See Lev Tolstoy, Dnevniki 1847-1894 gg., vol. 19 of
Sobranie sochinenii v dvadtsati tomakh, ed. N. N. Akopova et al. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennaia
literatura, 1965), 19: 487; my translation. Unless mentioned otherwise, all subsequent Tolstoy references are to L. N.
Tolstoy, Sobranie sochinenii v dvadtsati tomakh, 20 vols., ed. N. N. Akopova et al. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo
khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1960-65). Later references are cited as (volume: page) in the text or in the footnotes.
279
imaginative work must serve to attract the attention of the public to my
philosophic teaching.
548
In line with Tolstoy’s own view of his oeuvre as an expression of and a decoy for his
philosophical self, the renowned critic Mikhail Bakhtin famously names Resurrection a “socio-
ideological novel,” defining it as a distinct genre that features “an ideological thesis” and
produces “a critique of all existing social relations and forms.”
549
Whereas Bakhtin’s statement has since become a springboard for investigating
Resurrection as a platform for Tolstoy’s attacks on Russia’s social, political, judicial, economic,
and religious structures, this chapter will use it as a catalyst to focus on Tolstoy’s criticism of
another example of “social relations and forms”– namely, the portrayal of the feminine in a
Russian realist novel. How does Resurrection react to the crisis of familial female tropes in
Russian fiction? In which ways does Tolstoy account for the changes in the literary depictions of
woman, such as the appearance of the martyr-heroine character in the late 1870s-early 1880s and
the resurging popularity of the fallen woman trope in the late 1880s? And, most importantly,
what does Tolstoy’s main heroine, Katiusha Maslova, tell us about the writer’s own shifting
perception on the modern concept of the feminine?
Before examining Resurrection as Tolstoy’s response to the disintegration of the
patriarchal narrative, we shall briefly discuss the function of the feminine in Tolstoy’s oeuvres
with a particular emphasis on the work that coincides with the beginning of Tolstoy’s spiritual
548
Cited in Edmonds, introduction, 8.
549
“[…] роман социально-идеологический […]. В основе такого романа лежит идеологический тезис […]
дается принципиальная критика всех существующих общественных отношений и форм.” See Mikhail
Bakhtin, “Ideologicheskii roman L. N. Tolstogo. Predislovie,” vol 2 of Sobranie sochinenii, ed. S. G. Bocharov and
L. S. Melikhova (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 2000), 190-91; my translation.
280
crisis – his most tragic novel Anna Karenina. By using Karenina as a cut-off between Tolstoy’s
pre- and post-conversion depictions of women, I intend to demonstrate that Tolstoy’s changing
approach to narrating the feminine in Resurrection is deeply tied to his religious and artistic
transformation of the late 1870s-early 1880s – a transformation that begins with Tolstoy’s
denunciation of his earlier works and his previous female characters to culminate in the
novelist’s resurrection of the feminine in the character of Maslova. In view of the recognized
importance of women in Tolstoy’s narrative, I will also argue that Tolstoy’s return to the
novelistic genre in Resurrection is, in fact, informed by his resolution of his own crisis of the
feminine, evidence of which is found in his changing treatment of the heroines that appear in the
period between Anna Karenina and Resurrection.
The Role of the Feminine in Tolstoy
As a writer deeply concerned with the function of women in his narrative and life,
Tolstoy is no stranger to examining social and cultural issues through his female characters.
According to Edwina Cruise, “In Tolstoy’s artistic pursuit of the meaning of human life,
femaleness plays a crucial, if not always enviable role.”
550
Indeed, Tolstoy’s major heroines,
such as Natasha Rostova, Maria Bolkonskaia, Kitty Shcherbatskaia, Dolly Oblonskaia, Anna
Karenina, and Katiusha Maslova, are more than just memorable creations that reflect Tolstoy’s
artistic genius. Instead, these heroines frequently provide solutions to Tolstoy’s narrative
challenges by alleviating or accentuating the struggles of his male heroes – the assertion shared
by Richard Gustafson who argues that in Tolstoy, “the female figures are all emblematic
550
Edwina Cruise, “Women, Sexuality, and the Family in Tolstoy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, ed.
Donna Orwin (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 191.
281
residents who embody and reveal the way to divine love.”
551
Given that for Gustafson “in
Tolstoy’s fiction there is only one plot event: all works embody and reveal the way to love,” one
may conclude that female characters in Tolstoy are instrumental not only for developing his
story, but also for delivering its philosophical content and moral message.
552
Further evidence for this conclusion is found in the critical acclaim received by Tolstoy’s
major heroines from contemporary and later scholars, who frequently examine the writer’s
portrayals of the feminine as an expression of larger societal issues. For example, Laura Olson
views Natasha Rostova as a symbolic stand-in for Russia and a vital component of Tolstoy’s
spiritual solution of the 1860s, “By identifying Russianness with femininity through Natasha,
Tolstoy is doing more than providing an antidote to the pessimism of the 1860s – he is
prescribing a way out of Russia’s current crisis of values, educating a generation.”
553
Likewise, Gary Saul Morson interprets Dolly Oblonskaia as “Tolstoy’s moral compass”
and the “hero” of Anna Karenina, “if by hero of a book, we mean the character who best
exemplifies its governing values.”
554
In a similar vein, Amy Mandelker demonstrates a greater
philosophical significance of Dolly’s antipode – Anna Karenina – by arguing that for Tolstoy
Karenina represents a heroic “quest for the development of autonomous self” amidst social
restrictions.
555
By the same token, Rebecca Stanton approaches Tolstoy’s final major female
551
Richard Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 203.
552
Ibid., 205.
553
See Laura Olson, “Russianness, Femininity, and Romantic Aesthetics in War and Peace,” Russian Review 56, no.
4 (1997): 530.
554
Gary Saul Morson, “Prosaics: An Approach to the Humanities,” The American Scholar 57, no. 4 (1988): 523 and
Gary Saul Morson, “Prosaics and Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy Studies Journal 1 (1988): 4. For more on the importance
of Dolly in the novel, see Marina Ledkovsky, “Dolly Oblonskaia as a Structural Device in Anna Karenina,”
Canadian-American Slavic Studies 12, no. 4 (1978): 543-548.
555
Amy Mandelker, Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel (Columbus:
Ohio University Press, 1993), 162.
282
character – Katiusha Maslova – as an expression of “the very experience of salvation” and a
heroine who “play[s] a crucial role in the novel she inhabits, ultimately embodying the
philosophical and artistic concerns that lie at its very heart.”
556
If one is to agree that Tolstoy’s female personages perform vital structural and contextual
tasks in his fiction, it is only natural that changes in the public perception of the feminine – as
well as the appearance of revolutionary martyr-heroines in the 1870s – may have in turn affected
Tolstoy’s narrative and contributed to his subsequent artistic crisis. Given that women also play a
central role in Tolstoy’s philosophical preoccupation with the ideas of sexuality, body, and
family, the late nineteenth-century reassessment of these ideas in Russian society could have
likewise jeopardized the writer’s earlier “worldview based on procreative family and organic
nature” and, by extension, destabilized the privileged position of women in his moral
framework.
557
Since Tolstoy the philosopher is in many ways the foundation for Tolstoy the artist, the
disintegration of his familial perception of women is likely to have also undermined the problem-
solving and restorative functions of his female characters. With the loss of these functions,
Tolstoy may, in fact, have been left without a clear vision of what Barbara Heldt considers to be
one of his chief preoccupations as an artist – namely, “the role women play in men’s lives.”
558
In
this respect, Heldt’s similar claim that “Tolstoy’s attitude to women forms the core of his very
writing” serves as yet another indication that any modifications to this attitude would have, in
556
Rebecca Stanton, “Feminine Resurrections: Gendering Redemption in the Last Novels of Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky,” in Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference, ed. Hilde Hoogenboom,
Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, and Irina Reyfman (Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2008), 88.
557
Matich, Erotic, 30.
558
Heldt, Terrible, 38.
283
turn, altered the moral tonality of Tolstoy’s work and generated spiritual and narrative
anxieties.
559
Therefore, by establishing a connection between the changing concept of the
feminine and Tolstoy’s rejection of his earlier fiction in the late 1870s-early 1880s, this chapter
not only confirms the importance of female characters for the writer’s moral quest, but also
reveals their influence on his creative process – specifically, on his production of fictional
narratives.
559
Ibid., 48.
284
Section II
Still, Anna is a marvelous creation. […] She is a good wife and above all a
passionately dedicated mother.
560
—Allan Bloom
So in Anna Karenina, say, I love the idea of family.
561
—Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina: The Death of the Feminine
The work that both reflects Tolstoy’s awareness of women’s transformation and,
incidentally, constitutes his last pre-conversion piece of fiction is his novel Anna Karenina.
Aptly defined by Cruise as, “in many respects an encyclopedia of changing attitudes toward
women in Russian society of the 1870s,” Anna Karenina is also “a monument to the historical
danger, threating Tolstoy […] to lose all stimuli not only for writing, but also for life.”
562
While
Tolstoy’s critic Eikhenbaum argues that “Anna Karenina stands on the very boundary of the
dividing line” between Tolstoy’s pre- and post-conversion periods, I suggest that one of the
reasons for the novel’s precarious position is the writer’s similarly disintegrated portrayal of his
main heroine Anna, who – just like Tolstoy – appears to be struggling with the novelistic
clichés.
563
Indeed, when viewed as a meditation on the woman question, the construction of
Karenina’s character presents Tolstoy with a major narrative and cultural concern, namely – how
560
Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 238.
561
“Так в ‘Анне Карениной’ я люблю мысль семейную.” Cited in Sofia Tolstaia, The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy, ed.
O. A. Golinenko et al., trans. Cathy Porter (New York: Random House, 1985), 849. Also see Sofia Tolstaia,
Dnevniki, vol. 1, ed. S. I. Mashinskii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978), 502.
562
Cruise, “Women, Sexuality,” 199. “[…] памятник грозившей Толстому исторической опасности […]
потерять всякие стимулы не только к творчеству, но и к жизни.” See Boris Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoy:
Semidesiatye gody (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1960), 205; my translation.
563
“‘Анна Каренина’ стоит на самом рубеже этой пограничной полосы.” See Eikhenbaum, Lev, 205.
285
to accommodate the modern autonomous female subject in a traditional realist novel?
564
While it
is true that there is nothing “traditional” about Tolstoy’s fiction, which does not conform to but,
instead, “challenge[s] the genre of the novel,” the fact that later Tolstoy views his attempt “to
rewrite the Victorian realist, domestic novel” in Anna Karenina as a failure is a telling sign of a
creative impasse.
565
Indeed, Tolstoy consistently express his disappointment with Anna Karenina
in multiple letters and diaries, in which he calls the novel “terribly disgusting, repulsive, vulgar,
[…], nasty, […], a useless thing;” names Anna “boring, vulgar Karenina;” voices his desire “to
redo, abandon, and reject everything;” and complains about his lack of “foundation.”
566
Accordingly, after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy shows nothing but contempt for his
novel, “Concerning Karenina, I assure you that for me that abomination does not exist and that I
am only annoyed that there people who want this for some reason” (emphasis mine).
567
Whereas Tolstoy’s intense dislike of Anna Karenina is generally seen by critics as a
symptom of his impending religious conversion, there may be another reason behind Tolstoy’s
eventual rejection of his novel – that is, Tolstoy’s struggle to rewrite the Victorian trope of
adulteress in the character of Anna. Indeed, the fact that Tolstoy’s main heroine finds no other
way to resolve her predicament – but to escape the narrative through suicide – suggests that
564
For more on the modern individual as an autonomous subject “free of communal and family ties,” see Felski, The
Gender, 2. For more on Tolstoy’s perception of the women question, see Mandelker, Framing, 21-30; Ambrose, The
Woman Question, 183-213; and Jeanna Marie Whiting, “Tolstoy and the Woman Question” (master’s thesis,
University of South Florida, 2006), http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/2755.
565
Gary Saul Morson, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potential in “War and Peace” (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1987), 1 and Mandelker, Framing, 11.
566
“Ужасно противный, гадкий, пошлый, […] скверный, […], пустое дело,” “скучная, пошлая Каренина,” “и
все перемарать и все бросить, и отречься,” “без подмосток.” Cited in Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoy, 163-167.
567
“Уверяю вас, что этой мерзости для меня не существует и что мне только досадно, что есть люди,
которым это на что-нибудь нужно.” Cited in Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoy, 226.
286
Tolstoy may have been unable to reshape Anna’s story beyond the traditional adultery plot and,
as a result, faced his own crisis of female representation.
568
Further support for this assertion is found in Tolstoy’s ironic reduction of Anna
Karenina’s multifaceted plot to a trivial love story, “how one lady fell in love with an officer”
(kak dama odna poliubila ofitsera), in his letter from 1881 (19: 294). With no other aspects of
the novel evoked by Tolstoy’s critical remark, the intricate “labyrinths of linkages” in Anna
Karenina, previously described by Tolstoy as a complex architectural construction, are now
exclusively limited to Anna’s love affair, suggesting that the main cause of Tolstoy’s
dissatisfaction with Anna Karenina may, in fact, lie in his handling of its romantic theme (17:
467). In other words, by choosing this very theme as the only basis for his later judgment of the
whole novel, Tolstoy not so much describes its triviality as laments his artistic failure to
transform the clichés of the conventional love narrative and its main heroine into something
other than a portrayal of a married woman in love with another man.
Tolstoy’s creative stalemate with the romantic plot of Anna Karenina is aptly
summarized by Nikolai Nekrasov in his witty epigram on Tolstoy’s novel:
Tolstoy, you have proven with patience and talent,
That the woman should not ‘sleep around’
Either with the Kammerjunker, or with the Adjutant,
568
For more on marriage and death as the only endings for the heroine allowed in a traditional novel, see Nancy
Miller, The Heroine’s Text (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
287
When she is a wife and a mother.
569
According to Nekrasov, the issue with Tolstoy’s novel is his lack of originality in handling his
female character. By mocking Tolstoy for what he considers the clichéd moral undertones,
Nekrasov, unbeknownst to himself, identifies what is to become the main problem of female
representation in late nineteenth-century Russian literature, namely – how to describe the
multifaceted concept of the modern feminine without reducing it to the roles of a mother, wife,
or a fallen woman?
570
Or, to be more precise, it is a question of how to portray a woman as a
subject rather than a sexual object, when the only way for a heroine to protest the patriarchal
economy of female characters is “to sleep around” (guliat’) and the only other role for women
outside the mother and wife tropes are that of “the fallen woman” (guliashchaia zhenschina). By
challenging Tolstoy to find a creative way out of this narrative dilemma, Nekrasov thereby not
only satirizes Tolstoy’s plot as simplistic, but, in fact, raises an important question of the
family/adultery novel’s resistance to change.
Tolstoy’s struggle to overcome this resistance in Anna Karenina is well documented by
Eikhenbaum, who notices that “the history of creating Anna Karenina is the history of an intense
fight with the tradition of the romantic novel – of the search for a way out from it into a broader
context of human relations.”
571
Eikhenbaum’s observation about the subversive purpose of
569
“Tолстой, ты доказал с терпеньем и талантом, / Что женщине не следует ‘гулять’/ Ни с камер-юнкером,
ни с флигель-адъютантом, / Когда она жена и мать.” Cited in Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoy, 189.
570
Notably, Nekrasov’s oversimplification of Anna Karenina’s plot is very similar to the aforementioned ironic
summary of Anna Karenina by Tolstoy – with both writers excluding the Levin-Kitty part from their comments.
571
“История создания ‘Анны Карениной’ есть история напряженной борьбы с традицией любовного романа
— поисков выхода из него в широкую область человеческих отношений.” See Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoy, 152.
For more on Tolstoy’s experimentation with different genres in Anna Karenina, see Svetlana Evdokimova, “The
Wedding Bell, the Death Knell, and Philosophy’s Spell: Tolstoy’s Sense of an Ending,” in Approaches to Teaching
288
Tolstoy’s novel transposes well onto this chapter’s argument about the equally subversive
purpose of the character of Karenina, who, like the novel itself, is also meant to destabilize the
patriarchal perception of women.
What is particularly important about this two-way connection between Anna Karenina,
the experimental heroine, and Anna Karenina, the experimental novel, is that it offers an
alternative reading of the figure of Anna – the one predicated on her subversive function in
Tolstoy’s narrative rather than her relationship to the other characters in the story. In this
interpretation, Anna is “not just a splendid specimen of womanhood” or “a woman with a full,
compact, important moral nature,” but a gauge of Tolstoy’s ability to challenge the genre of the
romantic novel in general, and the familial female tropes of the novel in particular.
572
In other
words, what makes Anna’s portrayal a likely source of Tolstoy’s frustration with his novel is that
it reveals the incongruity between the rebellious content of the modern feminine, expressed
through Anna’s revolt against the marital structure, and the conventional forms of female
descriptions offered by the realist novel.
Indeed, while Tolstoy successfully demonstrates Anna’s subversive potential by her
escape from a traditional family narrative, he cannot provide his heroine with an outlet beyond
the conventional depictions of women through their relationship to men. Despite the fact that
Anna effectively discards her status of a lawful wife and a mother to flee the familial plot, her
new status - that of Vronsky’s lover – does not allow her to create her own narrative outside the
male-controlled discourse.
573
In fact, Anna’s protest against the familial classification of women
Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” ed. Liza Knapp and Amy Mandelker (New York: The Modern Language Association
of America, 2003), 137-43.
572
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 1981), 144.
573
Heldt, Terrible, 38.
289
relegates her to yet another patriarchal trope – that of a fallen societal woman – which in turn
brands her as an embodiment of rampant female sexuality and provides her with even fewer
options to redefine herself.
Anna’s entrapment by “the literary conventions of realism and the social conventions of
romantic love and marriage” receives an extensive treatment in the study by Amy Mandelker,
who argues that for Tolstoy “Anna Karenina problematizes the theme of visual representation to
critique the aesthetic category of the beautiful, the framed, the embodied, and the feminine.”
574
According to Mandelker, the framing of Anna is not limited to the story, but is also prevalent in
the critical tradition “that condemns her [Anna] and also frames Tolstoy as a misogynist.”
575
While Mandelker’s feminist approach successfully “de-frames” both Anna and Tolstoy from
traditional criticisms grounded in “ideologies and gender biases,” it does not liberate Anna from
a traditional victimizer/victim binary, in which Anna’s death is either viewed as a punishment or,
in Mandelker’s opinion, – a liberation.
That is, there is one more frame in Anna’s narrative that needs to be subverted – that of
approaching Anna as a bifurcated character rather than a holistic personage. This challenge –
posed by the traditional binary depictions of women in realist fiction – is exposed by Tolstoy as
problematic through his purposeful doubling of everything dealing with Anna. By describing
Anna’s nature as twofold, Tolstoy not so much perpetuates the bifurcated portrayal of female
personages as brings attention to the lack of other than binary means to depict a modern woman
in a realist novel. If one is to agree with Justin Weir’s apt observation that for Tolstoy “what has
happened in the novel is not as important as what has not happened,” then the absence of unity in
574
Mandelker, Framing, 4.
575
Ibid.
290
Anna’s portrayal may, in fact, be Tolstoy’s way to raise the reader’s awareness of the limited
literary options available to those writers who wish to describe the acts of female rebellion
outside the victim/victimizer binary (emphasis mine).
576
What makes this dual perception problematic is its use of Anna’s sexual transgression as
the main parameter to determine the larger meaning of her life and death. As shown by
Eikhenbaum, most scholarly interpretations of Anna face the same dichotomy of female
classification, in which the question of Anna’s sexual guilt becomes the decisive criteria of
Anna’s spiritual essence, “Anna seems to be not a criminal but a victim. […] Anna turned out to
be in the same group with Katerina from ‘The Storm’ by Ostrovsky – as a victim not of sin or
crime, but of protest.”
577
Whether examined as a criminal or a victim, Anna is still trapped by her
sexuality within the patriarchal hierarchy of women – the very hierarchy that Tolstoy is trying to
rewrite in order to respond to the changing concept of the feminine and to subvert the traditional
love narrative.
Further evidence for the tendency to place Anna in the criminal/victim female binary can
be found in the scholarly interpretations of Tolstoy’s ambivalent epigraph, “Vengeance is mine; I
will repay” (Mne otmshchenie, i az vozdam).
578
The epigraph has long puzzled Tolstoy’s
contemporaries and later critics, whose various explanations inevitably come down to the
question of authority, namely, who can and will be the judge of Anna Karenina – Tolstoy, the
reader, God, society, or some metaphysical force? Notably, Tolstoy’s own interpretation of the
576
Justin Weir, Leo Tolstoy and the Alibi of Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 13. For more on
the twofold descriptions of women in the so-called “heroine’s texts,” see Miller, The Heroine’s, 156-157.
577
“Анна кажется не преступницей, а жертвой. […] Анна оказалась в одном ряду с Катериной из ‘Грозы’
Островского - как жертва не греха или преступления, а протеста.” See Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoy, 192-193.
578
For a discussion of the narrative tensions created by the epigraph, see Kate Holland, “The Opening of Anna
Karenina,” in Approaches to Teaching Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” ed. Liza Knapp and Amy Mandelker (New
York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2003), 144-49.
291
epigraph redirects the question of judgement to an issue of personal responsibility, “Everything
bad that the person does leads to everything bitter that comes not from people but from God and
that was experienced by Anna Karenina.”
579
By locating the reason for Anna’s suffering not
within other people but within herself, Tolstoy provides Anna with agency to make her own
decision in life as in death and makes Anna rather than anyone else a final judge of her own
behavior according to the God’s law.
A similar conclusion is reached by Gary Saul Morson who argues:
Anna dies not because she is somehow punished by society, God, or the author for
infidelity. The main cause is her own way of thinking, her belief in romance, her
extremism, and above all, her cultivated habits of contrived misperception. […]
Now the epigraph acquires a fourth meaning: it is as if Anna were pronouncing
retribution upon herself.
580
While I agree with Morson’s focus on Anna’s personal responsibility, I do not think Tolstoy
necessarily views her impulse to make her own decisions, no matter how misguided, as negative.
By portraying Tolstoy’s “view of Anna as critical” because of “her self-deception,” Morson not
only returns Anna to Eikhenbaum’s female binary in the role of the victimizer, but also discounts
her instrumental role in ‘defamiliarizing’ the family, the romantic novel, and standard female
579
“[…] то дурное, что совершает человек, имеет своим последствием все то горькое, что идет не от людей, а
от Бoга, и что испытала на себе и Анна Каренина.” Cited in Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoy, 197. For the original
quote, see Vikentii Veresaev, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury,
1936), 440-441. For more on the scholarly interpretations of the epigraph, see Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoy, 189-204.
580
Gary Saul Morson, Anna Karenina in Our Time: Seeing More Wisely (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007),
139.
292
tropes in Tolstoy’s narrative. In fact, it is not “because of” but thanks to Anna’s self-deception
and her subsequent realization of its falseness that Tolstoy is able to remind his reader of the
fundamentally autonomous nature of his heroine as well as of the larger iconoclastic purpose of
his novel. In this interpretation, Anna is no longer just a heroine, but a subversive narrative
mechanism that deconstructs “the economics of pardoning” of the nineteenth-century bourgeois
morality that “in response to adultery, strongly favors men and disfavors women.”
581
Tolstoy further undermines the judgment bias against women in general and adulteresses
in particular by revealing the deleterious effects of sexual transgression on Anna’s assessment of
self. By viewing herself as a commodity for male pleasure rather than a subject of her own plot,
Anna can neither transcend her sexuality, nor subvert the others’ sexualized perception of her,
which prevents her from becoming an agent of moral and narrative regeneration in Tolstoy’s
fictional universe. While Morson argues that the reason for Anna’s tragic end is her self-
fashioning as “the heroine of a romantic novel,” I suggest that Anna not so much traps herself as
is trapped in the conventions of a traditional patriarchal plot as Vronsky’s lover and a sex
object.
582
In this case, what is generally seen as the reasons that contribute to Anna’s demise –
“the falseness … [her] self-enclosure … separation from others” – is also the evidence of a faulty
narrative frame that reduces any woman’s unique personality to an object of exchange between
men.
583
Therefore, while I agree with Gustafson that Anna’s flaw is neither “her self-indulgence”
nor “her sexual fulfilment,” I suggest that the origins of this flaw lie in the narrative’s inability to
provide Anna with any other but patriarchal female tropes.
584
581
Dragan Kujundžić, “Pardoning Woman in Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy Studies Journal 6 (1993): 66.
582
Morson, Anna, 67.
583
Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy, 132.
584
Ibid.
293
Indeed, after her initial escape from the original familial plot with Karenin, Anna once
again tries to rewrite her affair with Vronsky in familial terms, which in turn confines her to the
margins of the patriarchal narrative and denies her an independent narrative future. When Anna’s
pseudo-familial union with Vronsky results in a birth of their daughter Annie, their matching
names only reinforce the similarities between the marginalized statutes of the illegitimate Annie
and her mother.
585
The fact that Anna never experiences the same motherly feelings towards
Annie as she does towards her legitimate son Serezha serves as another indication of Anna’s
awareness of the parodic nature of her family life with Vronsky and her emotional withdrawal
from this semblance of a familial plot. Anna’s lack of authenticity is also felt by Dolly, who
perceives a false note in her friend’s performances as the mistress of Vronsky’s household and
Annie’s mother. When, by the end of the novel, Anna finally senses that the last male-defined
role available to her, that of Vronsky’s lover, may also be in jeopardy, she sees no other choice
but to disappear from the narrative altogether, which is one more sign of the lack of options
offered by the realist novel to subversive female characters.
Indeed, Anna’s substitution of her official functions as Karenin’s wife and Serezha’s
mother for that of Vronsky’s mistress not only leads to her fallout from the familial storyline, but
also causes her alienation from the whole social structure of Petersburg and, eventually, from
Tolstoy’s narrative. Given that this narrative is very much based on the familial and societal
plots, Anna’s quest for personal autonomy from these plots automatically makes her a stranger to
the genre of the patriarchal novel – an assertion supported by “an oft-told story that during the
writing of Anna Karenina he [Tolstoy] emerged from his study shaking his head at bewilderment
585
For more on understanding Anna’s entrapment through the doubling of her name in “her servant Annushka, her
daughter, Annie, and her adopted daughter, Hannah,” see Mandelker, Framing, 158 and Liza Knapp, “The Names,”
in Approaches to Teaching Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” ed. Liza Knapp and Amy Mandelker (New York: The
Modern Language Association of America, 2003), 18-22.
294
at what Anna had done that day.”
586
Taking on a life of her own, the character of Anna no longer
fits into traditional female tropes, as a result, has to be set free – first, from Karenin’s and
Serezha’s lives as a failed wife and mother; then, from her social functions as an inappropriate
society member; and, finally, from Tolstoy’s own narrative as an unsolvable personage.
587
Whereas Anna’s suicide has been interpreted as “an example of the victimization of
woman,” “a decisive reassertion of self-control over her life,” and a fitting end for someone who
“lives by falsehood,” this chapter has argued that Anna dies because of Tolstoy’s inability to
resolve the conflict between her fundamentally modern essence and the traditional patriarchal
structure of the realist novel.
588
In this respect, Richard Gregg’s observation appears to be
particularly pertinent in that it stresses the inevitability of a tragic outcome for a subversive
female character like Anna, “it is no accident that the only Tolstoyan heroine who sins openly,
deserts her family and remains defiantly unrepentant – who fails, in other words, to follow her
‘natural’ female calling – pays for her transgression with her life.”
589
With Anna’s rebellious core eventually condensed to her being a sexualized object of a
male gaze, there is no other way for Tolstoy to accommodate his heroine, but to release her from
the main culprit of her entrapment by the patriarchal narrative, the female body, through another
586
Cruise, “Women, Sexuality,” 192-93.
587
For more on Anna as “the hero of her own novel,” who defies “the conventions of the western European novel of
adultery,” see Judith Armstrong, “Anna Karenina and the Novel of Adultery,” in Approaches to Teaching Tolstoy’s
“Anna Karenina,” ed. Liza Knapp and Amy Mandelker (New York: The Modern Language Association of
America, 2003), 122-23.
588
Mandelker, Framing, 9; Cruise, “Women, Sexuality,” 203; Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy, 147.
589
Richard Gregg, “Psyche Betrayed: The Doll’s House of Leo Tolstoy,” The Slavic and East European Journal 46,
no. 2 (2002): 279. Whereas Gregg interprets this outcome as an indication of Tolstoy’s preference for domestic roles
for women, it is above all a symptom of the larger crisis of the patriarchal female tropes in late nineteenth-century
Russian literature.
295
telling symbol of modernity – the train.
590
In this case, Anna’s suicide is a sign of Tolstoy’s
awareness of the need to create other than the familial and erotic frameworks for narrating the
modern concept of the feminine. More than that, Anna’s violent death also suggests Tolstoy’s
admission of the impending failure of his own novel to resolve the act of female rebellion in a
way other than through the heroine’s mutilation of her physical self.
Tolstoy’s narrative predicament in Anna Karenina finds a striking parallel in the writings
of the twentieth-century feminist literary critic Nancy Miller, who observes that “until the culture
invents new plots for women, we will continue to read the heroine’s text. Or we could stop
reading novels.”
591
Whereas Anna Karenina is no more a typical “heroine’s text” than Tolstoy is
a typical novelist, the fact that “Anna Karenina equivocates, destabilizes, and denies sense of
security or certainty” suggests the novel’s transitionary and, hence, unresolved position between
the patriarchal and the modern perceptions of women.
592
Unable to amend Anna’s in-between
status, Tolstoy not only disposes of his heroine as the novel’s main “objet d’art,” but when left
without this object condemns all his earlier art as false to the point of abandoning the genre of
the novel altogether.
593
In so doing, Tolstoy provides an alternative to Miller’s radical solution to
590
For more on the aestheticized perception of Anna, see Amy Mandelker, “A Painted Lady: Ekphrasis in Anna
Karenina,” Comparative Literature 43, no. 1 (1991): 1-19. For more on Tolstoy’s dislike of trains, see Thomas
Gaiton Marullo and Vladimir Khmelkov, notes to The Liberation of Tolstoy: A Tale of Two Writers, by Ivan Bunin
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 245; Nathan Haskell Dole, The Life of Count Tolstoi (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 212-213; and Ernest Joseph Simmons, Leo Tolstoy, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage
Books, 1960), 331. Also, see Stephen Baehr, “The Troika and the Train: Dialogues between Tradition and
Technology in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature,” in Issues in Russian Literature Before 1917: Selected
Papers of the Third World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, ed. Douglas Clayton and R. C. Elwood
(Columbus: Slavica, 1989), 85-106; Gary R. Jahn, “The Image of the Railroad in Anna Karenina,” Slavic and East
European Journal 25 (1981): 8-12; Robert Louis Jackson, “Chance and Design in Anna Karenina,” in The
Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and History, ed. Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene
and Lowry Nelson Jr. (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1968), 315-29; and David Bethea, The Shape of
Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 77-79.
591
Miller, The Heroine’s, 158.
592
Cruise, “Women, Sexuality,” 203.
593
For more on Karenina’s “status as objet d’art” in Tolstoy’s text, see Mandelker, Framing, 58-82 and 101-124.
296
the problem of the heroine’s text as he stops not the reading but the writing of the novels until
finally inventing a new plot for his last major female character in Resurrection.
297
Section III
As Anna Karenina begins by destroying the happy families left at the end
of War and Peace, so in the 1880s and 1890s Tolstoy seems to begin with the end
of Anna Karenina.
594
—John Kopper
The Kreutzer Sonata is a blowup of the post-coital scene in Anna Karenina.
595
—Olga Matich
The Heroine Sexualized: Between Anna Karenina and Resurrection
Tolstoy’s journey from Anna Karenina to Katiusha Maslova is neither easy nor fast. In
fact, it takes Tolstoy almost twenty years to resurrect his perception of the feminine in Maslova’s
spiritual rebirth after its disintegration in Karenina’s suicide. The intermediary phase between
these two poles of female characterization, otherwise known as the moment of Tolstoy’s
religious and spiritual conversion, is also the period of Tolstoy’s intense struggle against the
realist aesthetics of female representation. During this time, which Matich defines as “Tolstoy’s
passage from an ideology defined by family, genealogy, and nature to one espousing an
‘unnatural’ ascetic ideal,” the writer initiates a full-blown attack on familial female tropes,
leaving no character unscathed.
596
As a result of Tolstoy’s attempt to purge the familial plot from
his fiction, brides, wives, and even mothers are no longer the source of happiness and harmony,
but are instead the cause of anxiety for the writer’s heroes and the main contributors to their
spiritual crisis.
597
594
John Kopper, “Tolstoy and the Narrative of Sex: A Reading of Father Sergius, The Devil, and The Kreutzer
Sonata,” in The Shade of the Giant, ed. Hugh McLean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 169.
595
Olga Matich, “Sexual Continence,” in Tolstoy’s Short Fiction, ed. Michael Katz (New York: W. W. Norton and
Company, 2008), 432.
596
Ibid., 436.
597
A telling example of Tolstoy’s disappointment with the familial and erotic functions of women is his angry
diatribe against his wife Sofia, written in 1884, “She got up, and I told her everything, told her that she stopped
being a wife. A husband’s helper? She has not helped for a while, just interferes. The mother of children? She does
298
Among the familial heroines who are unable to provide Tolstoy’s male protagonists with
a sense of belonging are the sickly mother and devout but helpless wife Liza from “The Devil”
(“D’iavol,” 1889); the potentially adulterous Pozdnyshev’s wife from The Kreutzer Sonata
(Kreitserova sonata, 1889); the seductive Makovkina, the voluptuous Mar’ia, and the unfaithful
bride and the wife manqué from “Father Sergius” (“Otets Sergii,” 1898). In view of these
heroines’ failure to create a familial idyll, several questions arise: in what specific ways do
female characters contribute to the narrative tensions in Tolstoy’s works of this period? How
does their portrayal depart from Tolstoy’s depictions of women in his pre-conversion period?
And, most importantly, what do these heroines reflect about the changes in Tolstoy’s perception
of the concept of the feminine and its representation in art in the aftermath of Anna Karenina?
Building upon Mandelker’s assertion that “in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy conflates the
aesthetic question with the woman question,” I suggest that Tolstoy’s uncertainty about resolving
the woman question in Anna Karenina in the 1870s contributes to a radical reassessment of his
aesthetic framework in the 1880s-1890s – specifically, as it applies to the portrayals of women in
art. Tolstoy’s most articulated attack on female representations is found in his famous theoretical
treatise What is Art? (Chto takoe iskusstvo?, 1897-98), in which he rejects contemporary art in
part because of its aestheticization of female sexuality. In Tolstoy’s opinion, the sexualized
depictions of women are a product of the modern art’s focus on “lust” (polovaia pokhot’) and
“desire” (chuvstvennost’), both of which limit the art’s thematic diversity to “sexual love”
(polovaia liubov’) and, as such, ruin its moral purpose:
not want to be that. A nurse? She does not want that. A lover? And even that she turns into a lure and a game” [Она
встала, я всё ей высказал, высказал, что она перестала быть женой. Помощница мужу? Она уже давно не
помогает, а мешает. Мать детей? Она не хочет ей быть. Кормилица? Она не хочет. Подруга ночей. И из
этого она делает заманку и игрушку] (19: 334).
299
From Boccaccio to Marcel Prévost, all the novels, poems, and verses invariably transmit
the feeling of sexual love in its different forms. Adultery is not only the favorite, but
almost the only theme of all the novels. A performance is not a performance unless,
under some pretense, women appear with naked busts and limbs. Songs and romances –
all are expressions of lust, idealized in various degrees. A majority of the pictures by
French artists represent female nakedness in various forms.
598
Tolstoy’s disparaging references to the portrayals of naked women in modern art suggest
not so much an attack on female sexuality as his distress at artists’ and possibly his own inability
to depict women in other than sexualized terms. Because of what Mandelker calls Tolstoy’s
“rejection of all sexuality and sexual politics, not just female sexuality,” it is not surprising that
the bulk of Tolstoy’s criticism is directed at the artists’ attempts to glorify female sexual beauty
and, in so doing, promote the commodification of women.
599
In one such instance, Tolstoy
specifically attacks the artist J. C. Dolman for painting a naked female character in the picture
with a revealing title, “The Temptation of St. Anthony:”
The Saint is on his knees praying. Behind him stands a naked woman and animals of
some kind. It is apparent that the naked woman pleased the artist very much, but that
598
Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, trans. Aylmer Maude, 4th ed. (Toronto: George N. Morang and Company, 1899), 77-
78; emphases mine).
599
Mandelker, Framing, 29.
300
Anthony did not concern him at all; and that, so far from the temptation being terrible to
him (the artist) it is highly agreeable. And therefore if there be any art in this picture, it is
very nasty and false.
600
What is particularly interesting about this comment is that Tolstoy not simply complains
about the naked woman as a subject matter of Dolman’s painting, but, in fact, attacks Dolman for
choosing and enjoying such a subject in the first place. Given that for Tolstoy “the greatest sin is
to regard a woman as a sex object,” his insight about another artist receiving aesthetic pleasure
from drawing a naked woman is a telling sign of Tolstoy’s similar concerns with his own
approach to and motivation for portraying women in his fiction.
601
The fact that in his description
of Dolman’s painting as “nasty” (skvernoe) and “false” (fal’shivoe) Tolstoy uses the very same
terms that he has applied in his earlier attack on Anna Karenina serves an yet another indication
of the writer’s philosophical and narrative preoccupation with ways to subvert the patriarchal
definition of women as sexual objects.
In his attempt to overcome this definition in the period after Anna Karenina and before
Resurrection, Tolstoy undergoes several stages of what I call the “de-sexualization” of his
female characters. These stages range from destroying the woman’s body and/or removing the
female character from the story – as is the case with Stepanida from “The Devil” and
Pozdnyshev’s wife from The Kreutzer Sonata – to exclusively focusing on the woman’s spiritual
qualities – as is the case with Pashen’ka in “Father Sergius.” Neither approach provides Tolstoy
with a final solution in the sense that the theme of “sexual love” is still very much the focus of
600
Tolstoy, What, 149.
601
Lev Tolstoy, Brak i polovaia liubov’, s predisloviem Chertkova (Rabochee knigoizdatel’stvo, 1919), 30.
301
every story and each female character – with a noticeable exception of the much older Pashen’ka
– is still treated as an object of male “passion” (pokhot’). Indeed, the “old, dried-up, wrinkled”
Pashen’ka with her “dried-up breasts” and her “thin, dried-up neck” is the only woman who is
spared the provocative depiction through its unattractive alternative and, as a result, granted the
role of Father Sergius’s spiritual guide (emphasis mine). The rest of the heroines, on the other
hand, are portrayed as vessels of rampant sexuality, which disturbs Tolstoy’s male characters and
contributes to their moral fall.
The separation of Tolstoy’s female personages into embodiments of spiritual or physical
features is not absolute, as can be seen from a somewhat amalgamated portrayal of Evgenii
Irtenev’s devoted wife Liza in “The Devil.” Whereas Liza’s depiction is mostly focused on her
eyes, providing a spiritual foil to a more corporeal portrait of Irtenev’s lover Stepanida, she is
still viewed through a prism of her sexual role in Irtenev’s life as the future mother of his
children. By narrating Liza’s story as a history of her two difficult pregnancies and a birth of her
and Irtenev’s daughter, Tolstoy does not deprive Liza of a sexual function or a body, but instead
places her in the sexual economy of the patriarchal marriage, in which her character is reduced to
the tropes of a wife and a mother and, as such, lacks a stronger sexual attraction of the trope of
the lover. Even though Liza’s portrayal is desexualized, the fact that her position in the story,
akin to that of Stepandia’s, is also predicated on a sexual relationship with Irtenev reveals a
surprising similarity and even equivalence between the two women in Irtenev’s eyes, “Yes, that
is how men come to poison or kill their wives or lovers. There are only two ways out: to kill my
wife, or to kill her [Stepanida]. For it is impossible to live like this.”
602
By perceiving his wife
602
Leo Tolstoy, “The Devil,” in Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (New York:
Harper Perennial, 2004), 374.
302
Liza as the double of his lover Stepanida, Irtenev highlights the sexual function of both,
suggesting that his only way out of the patriarchal adulterous plot is to destroy either female
character or, as shown in an alternative ending, kill himself.
Irtenev’s perception of a woman’s murder as a way to resolve his narrative dilemma
raises a valid question: is the physical destruction of a female body a necessary prerequisite for
changing one’s sexualized perception of women in Tolstoy’s fiction of the 1880s-1890s?
603
The
shortest answer is yes. Indeed, starting with his depiction of Anna’s “blood-covered body,”
which was “sprawled shamelessly among strangers” (besstydno rastianutoe posredi chuzhikh
okrovavlennoe telo), Tolstoy continues to experiment with different ways to dispose of a
woman’s body.
604
For example, in Tolstoy’s second ending to “The Devil” Irtenev kills his lover
Stepanida with a gun, whereas in The Kreutzer Sonata Pozdnyshev murders his wife with a
knife. Even the “drying-up” of the aged Pashen’ka, which is undoubtedly a less violent way to do
away with a woman’s sexuality, is still very much in line with the late Tolstoy’s objective to
desexualize female body. In this particular case, Tolstoy achieves his objective by excluding the
description of Pashen’ka in her sexual prime from the story as he skips from the heroine’s picture
as a “thin little girl” to that of an old wrinkled woman.
While Tolstoy’s narrative assault on a woman’s body is generally seen as a symptom of
his rejection of female sexuality, I suggest that by showing the devastating effects of one’s
obsession with a woman’s body, Tolstoy also warns his readers against using “sexual love” as
the main criteria for narrating women. As opposed to condemning his female characters as
promiscuous, Tolstoy, in fact, accuses his male protagonists and narrators of a skewed narrative
603
For more on the use of woman’s corpse in Tolstoy, see Matich, Erotic, 43-44.
604
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Penguin, 2003), 780.
303
frame towards women, who are only seen in a sexual light. The redirection of blame is also
noticed by Kopper who suggests that in “The Devil,” The Kreutzer Sonata, and “Father Sergius,”
“sexual passion, a potential source of criminality hitherto assigned to female heroines – Natasha
Rostova and Anna Karenina – now spreads to the male world.”
605
Whereas Kopper focuses on these stories’ experimental narrative, in which “Tolstoy
inspects the sexual component of male identity as if it were something new,” in my reading
Tolstoy’s objective is not so much to explore male sexuality as to condemn it as detrimental for
the portrayal of women.
606
A similar opinion is expressed by Heldt, who asserts that “Tolstoy
comes to blame men for creating women in the image that suited them, in life as in art.”
607
Likewise, Tolstoy’s character Pozdnyshev also voices a comparable concern by urging for “a
change in men’s outlook on women and women’s way of regarding themselves.”
608
Indeed, the failures of Irtenev, Pozdnyshev, and Father Sergius stem from their inability
to perceive their female counterparts as anything but sexual objects, which explains the frantic
nature and the guilty consciousness of their narratives whose only theme is their own sexual
fixation. By magnifying this theme to the point of it subsuming and destroying his characters’
lives, Tolstoy defamiliarizes the romantic and procreative views of female sexuality held by his
male protagonists as both dangerous and faulty. The fact that all three stories are either about a
male point of view (“The Devil” and “Father Sergius”) or told from the male point of view (The
Kreutzer Sonata) further implicates their male characters in perpetuating the sexualized portrayal
605
Kopper, “Tolstoy,” 169.
606
Ibid.
607
Heldt, Terrible, 48.
608
For more on Tolstoy’s attack on male and not just female sexuality, see Mandelker, Framing, 29.
304
of women. In that, Irtenev, Pozdnyshev, and Father Sergius are similar to the aforementioned J.
C. Dolman because they all commit what Tolstoy believes to be a grave error of contemporary
life and art by choosing a female body and their own sexual passion as the focus of their stories
and the source of their enjoyment.
The consequences of such a choice are dire not only for the narrative future of male and
female protagonists, but also for the originality of their portrayals. In what has become a clichéd
refrain in these three stories, all the male heroes who view a woman as a sexual object
experience a spiritual collapse, commit murders, and/or kill themselves. The female characters
suffer even more in that they are not only physically and spiritually damaged, but are also
prevented from transcending the patriarchal narrative and becoming the subjects of their own
plots. A far departure from the multifaceted and well-developed major heroines of Tolstoy’s
earlier fiction, the women from his later stories perform the roles of minor characters in order to
facilitate a male-controlled plot. Lacking agency and unable to provide their own version of the
events, they are viewed as “instruments of enjoyment” and, as mentioned earlier, characterized
by over- or under-sexualized, biased, and openly one-sided portrayals. The generalized nature of
these portrayals is aptly summarized by Cruise, who observes that “female characters after Anna
are most often reduced to emblematic vessels of desire and their journeys become increasingly
schematic.”
609
Far from suggesting a decline of Tolstoy’s artistic prowess, these changes reveal one of
the larger ethical goals of Tolstoy’s evolving aesthetics, which is to subvert the patriarchal
perception of women by emphasizing the narrative shortcomings of male sexualization of
women. In what reflects the didactic intention of his stories, Tolstoy teaches his readers a moral
609
Cruise, “Women, Sexuality,” 204.
305
and narrative lesson that when the “sexual love” theme is taken to its extremes, the physical and
mental destruction of the characters is accompanied by the mediocrity of female portrayals.
Indeed, what is known about Stepanida other than Irtenev’s view of her as a devilish temptress?
Does Mar’ia feature any other than “sensual and feeble-minded” (chuvstvennaia and
slaboumniaia) traits given to her by Father Sergius?
610
And, finally, does not Pozdnyshev’s wife
deserve her own name, much less her own version of Pozdyshev’s unreliable account of her
presumed moral fall?
By denying these female characters complexity and voice, Tolstoy is neither expressing
his fear of women nor trying to place them under control. On the contrary, he gives an instructive
illustration of why narrating women from a sexual point of view fails to create a complex female
character and produces narrative clichés rather than versatile heroines. Not incidentally, the story
that features Tolstoy’s most radical attack on the sexualized perception of women, The Kreutzer
Sonata, also contains his most depersonalized female personage, Pozdnyshev’s wife. While the
anonymity and exclusive familial affiliation of Pozdnyshev’s wife suggest her generic narrative
function as the epitome of the trope of the wife and mother, her violent death implies the collapse
of these very tropes in Tolstoy’s late narratives. By putting a proverbial nail in the coffin of his
earlier multifaceted familial depictions of women, Tolstoy’s sketchy portrayal of Pozdnyshev’s
wife deems them unproductive for his new moral art.
611
More than that, it also indicates the
limitations of the family plot, which no longer ensures either male or female happiness, but
instead traps both in a cycle of mistrust and violence and leaves the woman character dead.
610
Leo Tolstoy, “Father Sergius,” in Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, trans. Louise and Aylmer
Maude (New York: Harper Perennial 2004), 536.
611
For more on sexuality, morality, and the function of art in The Kreutzer Sonata, see Peter Møller, Postlude to
“The Kreutzer Sonata”: Tolstoj and the Debate on Sexual Morality in Russian Literature in the 1890s, trans. John
Kendal (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988).
306
Section IV
Only with a woman can one lose his chastity, and only with her can one keep it.
612
—Lev Tolstoy
I began re-reading Resurrection and, having gotten to his decision to marry,
dropped it with disgust. All is wrong, invented, weak.
613
—Lev Tolstoy
Resurrection – Shedding the Familial Woman and the Familial Plot
Tolstoy’s attack on the patriarchal perception of women as familial tropes and sexual
objects reaches its apogee in his depiction of the reformed prostitute Katiusha Maslova in
Resurrection. In many ways, Maslova is both a culmination and a resolution of Tolstoy’s earlier
attempts to amplify the theme of “sexual love” in “The Devil,” The Kreutzer Sonata, and “Father
Sergius.” Like the heroines in these stories, Maslova is initially defined almost solely by her
sexuality and, as such, reduced to being an object of male sexual pleasure. However, in contrast
to Stepanida, Pozdnyshev’s wife, Makovkina, and Mar’ia, Maslova is not only a sexualized
female character in one’s man’s mind, but an ultimate expression of the male commodification
and objectification of women in a larger patriarchal social structure – that is, a prostitute.
By adding a prostitute to the roster of his main female characters, Tolstoy not only raises
the stakes of his earlier argument again the fictional sexualization of women, but also completely
subverts his earlier family-based portrayals of women, who – even when sexualized – are still
placed within the patriarchal hierarchy as some man’s wife, daughter, or mother. No matter how
transgressive, Tolstoy’s promiscuous heroines before Maslova – such as Hélène Kuragina, Anna
Karenina, Stepanida, Mar’ia, and allegedly Pozdnyshev’s wife – are all defined by their familial
612
“Только с женщиной можно потерять целомудрие, только с нею и можно соблюсти его” (19: 425).
613
“Начал перечитывать ‘Воскресенье’ и, дойдя до его решения жениться, с отвращением бросил. Все
неверно, выдумано, слабо” (20: 69).
307
relationship with man. Hélène is Bezukhov’s wife, Anna is Karenin’s estranged wife and
Serezha’s mother, Stepanida is another peasant’s wife and also a mother, Mar’ia is the
merchant’s daughter, and even the nameless heroine from The Kreutzer Sonata is, in fact,
Pozdnyshev’s wife and the mother of his children.
As opposed to the familial definition of these female characters, the portrayal of Maslova
denies any familial ties. The first familial trope that Maslova subverts is that of a daughter. Her
father, whom she never meets, is a traveling gypsy, and her peasant mother, who initially wants
to starve the newborn Maslova to death, passes away when her daughter is three years old. The
fact that Maslova is first meant to die in infancy and is then left an orphan with no living siblings
makes her a stranger to the familial plot, foreshadowing her future marginalization as a prostitute
and her overall transitory position in the patriarchal narrative.
This position is further reinforced by the mixed upbringing that Maslova receives from
her mother’s aristocratic masters, who treat her neither as a foster child, nor as a domestic but as
a crossbreed between the two, “half servant, half young lady (polugornichnaia,
poluvospitannitsa).
614
Maslova’s hybrid identity is also underscored by her amalgamated name,
Katiusha, “which sounds less refined than Katinka, but is not quite so common as Katka.”
615
This
hybridity not only makes Maslova an outsider to rigid familial and social structures, but also
emphasizes her ability to move between them. Because of her narrative flexibility, Maslova
cannot be permanently stuck in any female trope, which in turn prefigures her subsequent escape
from the prostitute role and places her future beyond any familial or erotic definition.
614
Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection, trans. Louise Maude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 9. The fact that both of
these masters are childless sisters with no family of their own once again demonstrates the sterility of the familial
narrative for later Tolstoy.
615
Ibid.
308
Indeed, Maslova’s grown-up life prior to becoming a prostitute is an accumulated
rejection of every family-based female trope available to adult women of the patriarchal
narrative. Despite her romantic involvement with prince Nekhliudov, Maslova never becomes
his bride or his wife. While she does give birth to Nekhliudov’s child, her son dies in infancy,
making it impossible for her to fully experience motherhood. Likewise, Maslova’s later
encounters with other men do not lead to marriage or motherhood. With all the familial female
tropes unavailable to Maslova, it is only natural that she is inevitably pushed to the margins of
the patriarchal hierarchy of women, where the only female role accessible to her is that of a
prostitute.
Notably, Maslova’s evolution from an unwanted child to orphan to prostitute is referred
to as a “quite commonplace story” (ochen’ obyknovennaia istoriia), indicating that familial and
adulterous plots are no longer of interest to Tolstoy and, therefore, cannot constitute the subject
matter of his new novel. To highlight his focus on undermining rather than sustaining the
standard narrative, Tolstoy also limits his description of Maslova’s failed familial plot to one
small chapter and several short flashbacks throughout the novel. In so doing, Tolstoy further
demonstrates that his resurrection of the feminine and, incidentally, his return to the genre of the
novel are not predicated on the revival of the family, but, on the contrary, on one’s ability to
subvert it.
This realization is best expressed by Tolstoy’s own pronouncement on the need to change
the familial orientation of the novels, “Novels end with the hero and heroine married. Instead,
they should begin with marriage and end with the couple liberating themselves from it” (19:
508).
616
Written in 1894, this statement aptly summarizes Tolstoy’s search for ways to liberate
616
“Романы кончаются тем, что герой и героиня женились. Надо начинать с этого, а кончать тем, что они
разженились, то есть освободились.”
309
his fiction from what Ian Watt considers to be the “basic pattern [of] the great majority of novels
written since Pamela” – that is, a plot about “a courtship leading to marriage.”
617
By the time
Tolstoy finishes Resurrection in 1899, his earlier views evolve to an even more radical position,
according to which the novel no longer needs family as a metaphor for his hero’s and heroine’s
entrapment, but instead begins with his characters’ literal imprisonment. Maslova is shown as an
actual prisoner accused of murder, while Nekhliudov continues the motif on a metaphoric level
as a symbolic prisoner of his aristocratic ways and his rich entitled life. Correspondingly, their
first meeting at the courthouse, which features Maslova as the defendant and Nekhliudov as the
jury member, breaks the reader’s expectations of a traditional romantic rendezvous and becomes
yet another earlier sign of the non-familial direction of the novel.
Tolstoy’s switch from a narrow romantic plot to a broader one of prison and prostitution
is in line with what Maimin calls the late writer’s move from a specific conflict to general
issues.
618
This move is particularly evident in the way Tolstoy changes his focus in Resurrection
from a tragic love story told to him by a famous lawyer A.F. Koni to a greater assault on all
aspects of Russian society. The original plot of the “Koni story” is, in fact, limited to a very
personal affair, in which a noble man recognizes in an imprisoned prostitute a woman that he has
seduced and abandoned in his youth and decides to marry her. Despite the man’s firm intention
and the girl’s agreement, the marriage never happens because of her untimely death in prison.
619
617
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, 2nd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2001), 149.
618
E. A. Maimin, “Nekotorye osobennosti kompozitsii romana ‘Voskresenie’,” in Tvorchesto L. N. Tolstogo, ed. D.
D. Blagoi et al. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1959), 259.
619
See Hugh McLean, “Resurrection,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, ed. Donna Orwin (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 96-97. For more about the origins of the “Koni story,” see A. F. Koni,
Vospominaniia o pisateliakh (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Pravda, 1989), 376-382.
310
Tolstoy’s initial assessment of the story in 1889 showed much enthusiasm for its
romantic plot, “the thoughts about the Koni story come to my mind with much better clarity.
Actually, I have been in a state of inspiration for two days” (19: 404-405).
620
In February of
1890, Tolstoy was still interested in the sexual aspect of the story, “It is all clear and wonderful.
[…] He [Nekhliudov] did not want to possess her [Maslova], but did it because it had to happen
– as it seemed to him. […] her sensuality is awoken” (19: 413).
621
By June of 1890 Tolstoy
already began to infuse the “Koni story” with a social perspective, “One should start with the
trial. And here is also the judicial lie and the need for his honesty” (19: 425).
622
Despite this
change of focus, in 1895 Tolstoy appeared dissatisfied with the direction of his work and
complained that “fiction is unpleasant. Everything is invented and untrue” (18: 175).
623
According to Hugh McLean, it was at this very moment that “the novel began to branch out from
its original sexual core into larger social questions, becoming more and more an outlet for the
author’s outrage against Russian society and indeed all “civilized” societies.”
624
By expanding his accusatory stance in Resurrection from sexuality to Russia’s social
structure, Tolstoy effectively transcends his literary reputation as a writer of happy and unhappy
families to become a prophet of a new moral art – the one based not on sexualizing women, but
on bringing “people closer to God and each other” (edinenie liudei s Bogom i mezhdu soboi) (15:
620
“Мысли о коневском рассказе все ярче и ярче приходят в голову. Вообще нахожусь в состоянии
вдохновения второй день.”
621
“Ясно все и прекрасно. […] Он не хотел обладать ею, но сделал это потому, что так надо — ему кажется.
[…] в ней разбужена чувственность.”
622
“Надо начать с заседания. И тут же юридическая ложь и потребность его правдивости.”
623
“Fiction - неприятно. Все выдумка, неправда.”
624
Hugh McLean, “Resurrection,” 98.
311
189).
625
In order to accommodate this new social and religious content, Tolstoy uses different
strategies to destabilize the very structure of the realist novel, which, to return to the writer’s
earlier criticism of the novel’s form, is largely predicated on a marriage plot as the ultimate
system of male control over women.
One of the ways in which Tolstoy prevents marriage from becoming a central topic in
Resurrection is the shift to much larger and more problematic narratives of prison and
prostitution, against which the discussion of marriage and romance loses its prominence. Since
these two narratives represent an unfamiliar territory for Tolstoy, they are particularly successful
in subverting the familial background of his previous novels – an assertion supported by
Gustafson who argues that “as he [Tolstoy] strove to represent new types of people on his
fiction, his method of representation seemed to change.”
626
The experimental nature of
Resurrection is also noticed by T. G. Cain who writes, “it was all strange to Tolstoy, not merely
in the sense that he had no direct experience, as Dostoevsky did, of being in prison, but that he
had no real personal experience of the classes who were directly connected with the
prisons…”
627
The fact that the ultimate synthesis of these classes is found in Resurrection’s main
625
Notably, several Tolstoy’s contemporaries notice that the larger social theme of the novel overtakes the romantic
plot. For example, Stasov argues that “In front of such a gigantic picture of the new generation that is walking
towards a new life and along the new roads […] in front of such a picture and art, in front of this most grandiose of
plots, the private and separate life of Nekhliudovs and Katiusha – modestly fades away into the background” [Перед
такою громадною картиною нового поколения, идущего к новой жизни и на новые дороги, […] перед такою
картиною и живописью, перед таким грандиознейшим из сюжетов, частная и отдельная жизнь Нехлюдовых
и Катюшей -- отходит скромно на второй план]. See V. D. Komarova and B. L. Modzalevskii, ed. Lev Tolstoy i
V. V. Stasov: Perepiska, 1878-1906 (Leningrad: Priboi, 1929), 236. Similarly, Chekhov shows a clear preference for
the non-romantic aspect of the novel, “The most uninteresting part is everything that is told about Nekhliudov’s
relationship with Katiusha, and the most interesting – princes, generals, aunties, peasants, inmates, guards” [Самое
неинтересное -- это все, что говорится об отношениях Нехлюдова к Катюше, и самое интересное – князья,
генералы, тетушки, мужики, арестанты, смотрители]. See A. P. Chekhov, Pis’ma, vol. 9 of Polnoe sobranie
sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, ed. A. I. Reviakin (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), 30.
626
Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy, 162.
627
T. G. Cain, Tolstoy (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, Inc., 1977), 168.
312
female protagonist, the anti-familial prostitute/prisoner/peasant Maslova, further indicates that
Tolstoy is no longer interested in “harness[ing]” his heroine’s “sexual horse to a nuptial carriage”
in his later fiction.
628
As opposed to a more balanced portrayal of marriage in Tolstoy’s earlier works, the
depiction of marriage in Resurrection is fragmentary and predominantly negative. Neither of the
two main characters gets married. Even when Nekhliudov’s or Maslova’s marriage is mentioned
or predicted, it still does not occur in the novel. In the case of Maslova, the impending marriage
to the revolutionary Simonson is purposefully moved beyond the boundaries of the text as a
possibility rather than a finalized event. As for Nekhliudov, his initial plans to get married to
Missi Korchagina end abruptly after meeting Maslova at the courthouse never to resume, “And
yet today he felt with his whole being that he could not marry her. ‘Shameful and horrid, horrid
and shameful!’”
629
Nekhliudov’s perception of marriage as something appalling and depraved is also
exemplified by his earlier affair with a nobleman’s wife, Maria Vasil’evna, and his later near-fall
for another married woman, Mariette, “Nekhlyudov recalled his affair with the wife of the
Marshal, and shameful memories rose before him… Many a time afterwards Nekhlyudov
remembered with shame his talk with her [Mariette]. He remembered her words, which were not
so much lies as imitations of his own…” (emphasis mine).
630
Even when the marriage is not
depicted as adulterous, as is the case with Nekhliudov’s sister Natasha, it is still viewed as
628
Cruise, “Women, Sexuality,” 197.
629
Tolstoy, Resurrection, 108.
630
Ibid., 330, 314.
313
repulsive, “He felt that the Nataly who had once been so near to him no longer existed, and in
her place was only the slave of a strange, unpleasant, dark, hairy man.”
631
Tolstoy’s negation of marriage as a valuable ethical and narrative solution is further
reinforced by Maslova’s refusal to accept Nekhliudov’s marriage proposal, “That you mean to
marry me? It will never be! I’d rather hang myself. So there!”
632
By questioning the sincerity of
Nekhliudov’s intentions, Maslova accuses him of using her again, this time through marriage as
another form of male dominance, in order to expiate his guilt, “You want to save yourself
through me…You’ve got pleasure out of me in this life, and you want to save yourself through
me in the life to come.”
633
The fact that Maslova views Nekhliudov’s earlier sexual advances and
his present offer of marriage in the same negative light indicates that for Tolstoy both are of
equally promiscuous nature and, as such, have no place in his new ethical narrative.
This suggestion is further supported by Nekhliudov’s later realization of the surprising
similarities between the married woman Mariette and the prostitute:
The other one [Mariette] gave me just such a smile when I entered the theater …
and the meaning of both smiles was the same. The only difference is, that this one
[the prostitute] said plainly and openly, “If you want me, take me; if not, go your
way”, and the other one pretended that she was not thinking of this, but living in
some high and refined state – while the same thing was really at the root. This one
was at least truthful, but that one lied.
634
631
Ibid., 379.
632
Ibid., 180.
633
Ibid.
634
Ibid., 330.
314
Not only does Nekhliudov suddenly recognize a parallel between societal and street women, but
he also identifies the first one as more dangerous, precisely because of her ability to camouflage
her sexual intentions under the pretense of lofty statements. This conclusion later enables
Nekhliudov to reevaluate his attitude toward Maslova, whose fall is no longer seen as a result of
her promiscuity, but as an outcome of his own flawed perception of women as sexual objects,
“he could not remember what came first; did pity for her first enter his heart, or did he first
remember his own sins – his own repulsive actions, the very same for which he was condemning
her? Anyhow, he both felt himself guilty and pitied her.”
635
By linking the narrative of marriage with that of prostitution, Resurrection successfully
“outgrows the original dimensions of the ‘Koni story’” in that it first undermines the traditional
view of marriage as a safe and moral alternative to prostitution and then indicts patriarchy for its
endorsement of both as socially accepted forms of sexual exploitation.
636
In a telling passage that
defines prostitution as a phenomenon born and nurtured by patriarchy, Tolstoy writes:
From that day a life of chronic sin against human and divine laws commenced for
Katusha Maslova, a life which is led by hundreds of thousands of women, and
which is not merely tolerated but sanctioned by the Government, anxious for the
welfare of its subjects; a life which for nine women out of ten ends in painful
disease, premature decrepitude, and death.
637
635
Ibid., 335.
636
Hugh McLean, In Quest of Tolstoy (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2008), 75.
637
Tolstoy, Resurrection, 12-13.
315
Having accused the top echelon of power, the government, of promoting and sustaining
prostitution, Tolstoy then turns his reproving gaze against all men, implicating every age,
nationality, status, and personality in a sexual abuse of fallen women:
then the arrival of visitors, music, dancing, sexual connection with old and young
and middle-aged, with lads and decrepit old men, bachelors, married men,
merchants, clerks, Armenians, Jews, Tartars; rich and poor, sick and healthy, tipsy
and sober, rough and tender, military men and civilians, students and mere
schoolboys— of all classes, ages, and characters.
638
Leaving no man outside of his condemnatory list, Tolstoy underscores the extent and the depth
of the problem of prostitution, whose core – akin to that of contemporary art – is found in men’s
twisted sexual economy of women as objects of exchange.
As shown by Tolstoy’s subsequent examination of Maslova’s worldview, this faulty male
perception also communicates to women who begin to view themselves through a similarly
sexualized prism and, in some instances, as is the case with Maslova, make it the base for their
whole existence:
According to this conception the highest good for all men— old, young,
schoolboys, generals, educated and uneducated— was sexual intercourse with
attractive women; therefore, all men, even when they pretended to be occupied
638
Ibid., 13.
316
with other things, in reality desired nothing else. She was an attractive woman,
and it lay in her power to satisfy, or not to satisfy, this desire, and she was
therefore an important and necessary person. The whole of her former and present
life was a confirmation of the correctness of this conception.
639
The fact that Maslova’s only criteria of her worth for others is her sexual attractiveness to men is
precisely what is wrong with the patriarchal view of the feminine, which, in Tolstoy’s opinion,
not only degrades women, but also creates “a distorted understanding of life” (izvrashchennoe
poniatie o zhizni). Indeed, in Maslova’s perverted world, everything is driven by sexual lust,
leaving no place for a woman’s voice or individuality but instead substituting both with her
sexual function, “Therefore all the world seemed to her a collection of people agitated by lust,
who were trying to get possession of her by all possible means— deception, violence, purchase,
or cunning.”
640
Maslova’s one-sided perception of the world and her place in it sounds eerily familiar to
that of another fallen woman – Nadezhda Nikolaevna from Garshin’s “An Incident.” Similar to
Nadezhda Nikolaevna, who, albeit ironically, refers to herself as “the safety-valves of social
passions” (klapan dlia obshchestvennykh strastei), Maslova also perceives herself as “an
important and necessary person” (vazhnyi i nuzhnyi chelovek).
641
More affinities between
Nadezhda Nikolaevna and Maslova are found in that they both drown their sorrows in wine to
cope and expose a wide array of men who come to use their services. Akin to Nadezhda
639
Ibid., 165.
640
Ibid.
641
Garshin, “An Incident,” 38 and Tolstoy, Resurrection, 165.
317
Nikolaevna, Maslova also complains about the male hypocrisy of dividing women into familial
and fallen and refuses to be saved through marriage – all these similarities being signs of a larger
disintegration of familial values and family-based female tropes in late nineteenth-century
Russian literature.
Further evidence for this disintegration is found in Garshin’s and Tolstoy’s analogous
blurring of the boundaries between different female types, as a result of which women of
otherwise diverse social and cultural backgrounds, such as the noble Nadezhda Nikolaevna and
the peasant Maslova, can both end up as prostitutes. For Garshin as well as for Tolstoy, no
female is safe from the fallen woman narrative, including wives and mothers, who may not
technically be prostitutes but are similar in that they also sell themselves to men. This thought is
first expressed by Nadezhda Nikolaevna in “An Incident” and then elaborated on by Pozdnyshev
in The Kreutzer Sonata and Nekhliudov in Resurrection – with all three characters attacking
marriage as another form of prostitution. Given the demonstrated affinity between Garshin’s and
Tolstoy’s contempt for these types of female commodification, it is not surprising that they both
choose the more repulsive of the two – the narrative of prostitution – as an ultimate expression of
and reproach to the male-controlled social structure in order to attack this very structure from
within.
In the case of Tolstoy, this attack achieves gigantic proportions in that Maslova’s plight
as a prostitute is intensified by her imprisonment on murder charges and a subsequent sentence
of hard labor in Siberia. Even though Maslova is not guilty of murder, she mistakenly receives a
guilty verdict – an error that is yet another sign of how the patriarchal system fails women by
first corrupting them and then judging them for being corrupted. A case in point is Nekhliudov,
who is placed in the position of judging Maslova, whereas he is the one who should be judged
318
because of dishonoring her in the first place. This moral incongruity is aptly noticed by
Gustafson who observes, “‘Love’ [Maslova’s alias as a prostitute and a Russian word for love] is
on trial. Nekhliudov is… to be found guilty.”
642
Resurrection: Desexualizing Nekhliudov
What Nekhliudov is found guilty of is not simply his seduction and abandonment of
Maslova, but his entire immoral life, a key part of which is his sexualized perception of women,
“Yet all the while, in the depths of his soul, he felt the cruelty, cowardice, and baseness, not only
of this particular action of his but of his whole self-willed, depraved, cruel, idle life…” (emphasis
mine).
643
Whereas there are other facets of Nekhliudov’s life that he is not proud of – such as his
economic and social privileges, it is his sexual promiscuity that lies at the core of his spiritual
failures. The roots of this promiscuity are found in the young Nekhliudov’s changed attitude to
women who are no longer perceived as mysterious and lovely beings, but are seen as “the best
means towards an already experienced enjoyment” (odnim iz luchshikh orudii ispytannogo uzhe
naslazhdeniia).
644
Because of his misguided quest for sexual gratification, Nekhliudov silences
his spiritual self in favor of his animal side, succumbing to the later as a guiding principle to his
relationship with women in general, and Maslova in particular, “Then he had looked on his spirit
as his I; now it was his healthy strong animal I that he looked upon as himself.”
645
642
Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy, 48.
643
Tolstoy, Resurrection, 85.
644
Ibid., 53.
645
Ibid.
319
Since this animal side is what encourages Nekhliudov to commit a sexual crime against
Maslova in his youth, it is only by discarding this part of him that he can finally achieve a
spiritual renewal in later years. A similar view is expressed by Donna Orwin, who notices that in
Resurrection, there is a “change from happiness to duty as the goal of human life,” as a result of
which “Tolstoj lays the man of passion, Irtenev, to rest, and resurrects Nexljudov, the proper
representative of rational consciousness.”
646
In my opinion, what enables Tolstoy to enact the
shift from personal passion to rational obligation in Resurrection is his instructive portrayal of
how Nekhliudov transforms his attitude to women from treating them as sexual objects to
viewing them as his spiritual equals. In other words, to modify Andrew Kaufman’s assertion that
in order to “to reconnect with life’s wonder, Nekhliudov need only free himself from his
attachment to things and false symbols and external authorities,” I suggest that another important
attachment that Nekhliudov needs to free himself from is that of women as providers of sexual
pleasure.
647
The desexualization of Nekhliudov’s perception of women undergoes several stages - all
of them inspired by his first meeting with Maslova at court, during which she makes a strong
impression on all the men in the room precisely because of her powerful sexuality.
As soon as she appeared, the eyes of all the men in the Court turned her way, and
remained fixed on her white face, her sparklingly brilliant black eyes, and the
swelling bosom under the prison cloak. Even the gendarme whom she passed on
her way to her seat looked at her fixedly until she sat down, and then, as if feeling
646
Donna Orwin, “The Riddle of Prince Nexljudov,” The Slavic and East European Journal 30, no. 4 (1986): 478.
647
Andrew D. Kaufman, Understanding Tolstoy (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2011), 214.
320
guilty, hurriedly turned away, shook himself, and began staring at the window in
front of him.
648
This paradoxical pattern of desexualizating a woman only after an intense sexualization of her
body continues throughout the novel as a variation of Tolstoy’s famous “estrangement”
technique (ostranenie), which allows to view regular things, in this case a voluptuous female
body, in a new light – with disdain.
649
Indeed, Maslova’s sexuality does not excite but disturbs
Nekhliudov as a reminder of what he has done to her as an innocent girl. Instead of feeling
seduced by the sexualized prostitute Liubka, Nekhliudov actually looks past her voluptuous
figure for the signs of the other spiritual Katiusha that he has once known:
Yes, in spite of the prison cloak, in spite of the developed figure, the fullness of the
bosom, and of the lower part of the face, in spite of a few wrinkles on the forehead and
temples, and the swollen eyes, this was certainly the same Katusha who, on that Easter
night, had so innocently looked up to him whom she loved, her fond, laughing eyes full
of joy and life.
650
By recognizing traits of innocent Katiusha in promiscuous Liubka, Nekhliudov not only
experiences regret for ruining Maslova’s life, but also develops awareness of his overall faulty
648
Tolstoy, Resurrection, 30-31.
649
For more on the use of defamiliarization in Resurrection, see Ani Kokobobo, “Estranged and Degraded Worlds:
The Grotesque Aesthetics of Tolstoy’s Resurrection,” Tolstoy Studies Journal 24 (2012): 3-4. For more on the use
of defamiliarization in Tolstoy, see Viktor Shklovsky, “Iskusstvo kak priem,” in Poetika. Sborniki po teorii
poeticheskogo yazyka (Petrograd: 18-ia Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1919), 101-14.
650
Tolstoy, Resurrection, 85.
321
perception of all women. In what becomes a series of eye-opening moments, Nekhliudov begins
to notice everything wrong about his relationship with women in his life, showing a particular
contempt for their body and sexuality. The fact that this process constitutes a large part of what
Nekhliudov refers to as “a cleansing of the soul” (chistka dushi) marks it as a key moment for his
spiritual awakening, offering further proof that for Tolstoy the man’s moral rebirth arises not so
much from the rejection of the social and economic benefits of his class, as from his ability to
shed the sexualized view of women and see them for who they really are as spiritual beings.
651
This shedding begins immediately after Nekhliudov’s fateful encounter with Maslova, as
a result of which he successfully eliminates all the familial female characters, such as a bride, a
wife, a mother, a lover, and a sister from his narrative.
652
The first woman who loses her sexual
appeal and her place in Nekhliudov’s life is his presumed fiancé Missi Korchagina: “Today he
saw all the wrinkles of her face, saw the way her hair was crimped, the sharpness of her elbows,
and, especially, how large her thumb-nail was and how like her father’s.”
653
In a typically
Tolstoian manner of experiencing a sudden insight, Nekhliudov finally notices everything wrong
with Korchagina’s body, which in turn negatively affects his perception of her mind. The
similarity between Korchagina and her father, a cruel and despicable man, further seals
Korchagina’s fate as not marriage material for Nekhliudov.
654
This adverse impression is also
651
Ibid., 111.
652
This process of elimination is especially important for Nekhliudov’s resurrection because the “fallen”
Nekhliudov is perceived by Tolstoy as surrounded by women, “[…] I thought about the atmosphere, in which
Nekhliudov lives: the nanny, almost a bride, and the mother, who just died. This really enlivened him and the whole
beginning” [обдумал среду, в которой живет Нехлюдов: нянюшка, почти невеста и мать, только что умершая.
Очень это оживило его и все начало] (20: 28).
653
Ibid., 100-101.
654
This motif receives a more extensive treatment in Tolstoy’s short story “After the Ball” (“Posle bala,” 1903). For
more on the story’s intertextual parallels, see Alexander Zholkovsky, “Before and After ‘After the Ball’: Variations
on the Theme of Courtship, Corpses, and Culture,” in Tolstoy’s Short Fiction, ed. Michael Katz (New York: W. W.
Norton and Company, 2008), 495-500.
322
reinforced by Korchagina’s all too obvious flirting attempts that only make Nekhliudov more
resolute in his decision not to marry her. As Nekhliudov’s sexual and intellectual interest in
Korchagina decrease, so do Korchagina’s chances to become his wife, which is a telling example
of how Tolstoy denies the marriage plot by liberating a male character from a sexualized, and in
that erroneous, perception of his beloved.
655
Having desexualized and rejected Korchagina, Nekhliudov moves on to the next female
character and trope, Korchagina’s mother, whose body similarly revolts him, “In the same dim
way the limbs of Sophia Vasilyevna, now covered with silks and velvets, rose up in his mind as
they must be in reality; but this mental picture was too horrid and he tried to drive it away.”
656
While disturbed by Korchagina’s mother and her decaying flesh, Nekhliudov is even more
bothered by the revealing portrait of his own deceased mother at a much younger age. As
Nekhliudov contrasts the memories of his mother’s mummified and badly smelling old body
with the painting’s depiction of her barely covered voluptuous shoulders and breasts, he feels
disdain for the fundamentally sexual basis of the supposedly virtuous mother trope, “There was
something very revolting and blasphemous in this representation of his mother as a half-nude
beauty.”
657
Nekhliudov’s criticism of his mother illustrates an ongoing shift in Tolstoy’s own
perception of maternity that has changed from glorifying motherhood as the most revered female
task to attacking it as another example of the patriarchy’s preoccupation with female sexuality.
655
Tolstoy uses a similar “stalling” device in “Father Sergius,” when the groom calls the marriage off after realizing
that his bride has had a sexual encounter with the tsar in her past.
656
Tolstoy, Resurrection, 106.
657
Ibid., 109.
323
Indeed, as shown by Cruise, in Tolstoy’s pre-conversion fiction “virtuous women are privileged
in their profoundly satisfying role as mothers and in their secure and uniquely female way of
knowing things.”
658
A case in point is Tolstoy’s positive portrayal of motherhood in his early
novella Family Happiness (Semeinoe schast’e, 1859), in which the main heroine and the narrator
Masha is saved from her sexual desires through her maternal experience:
That day ended the romance of our marriage; the old feeling became a precious
irrecoverable remembrance; but a new feeling of love for my children and the father of
my children laid the foundation of a new life and a quite different happiness; and that life
and happiness have lasted to the present time.
659
Following in Masha’s footsteps, Tolstoy’s other famous heroine, Natasha Rostova, also finds her
destiny in motherhood. Her transformation from a vivacious charming girl into a proud obsessive
mother aptly illustrates the early Tolstoy’s solution to the problem of female sexuality, over
which, to quote Merezhkovsky, Tolstoy “raises this cynical banner – of the diaper with the
yellow stain – as the guiding banner of humanity.”
660
The salvation through motherhood is not the case for later Tolstoy, who no longer sees
maternity as a defining experience for a modern woman – be it Anna Karenina, Pozdnyshev’s
wife, or an ultimate female allegory of modernity – the fallen woman Katiusha Maslova. Not
658
Cruise, “Women, Sexuality,” 196.
659
Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness, in Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (New
York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 81.
660
“[…] водружает это циничное знамя – ‘пеленки с желтым пятном’ – как путеводное знамя человечества.”
See Dmitrii Merezhkovsky, Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo L. Tolstogo i Dostoevskogo, 3rd ed. (Saint-Petersburg: Izdanie M.B.
Pirozhkova, 1903), 233; my translation.
324
only does Tolstoy choose the prostitute over the mother as his main character in Resurrection,
but he, as noticed by Cruise, also portrays her with more consideration, “the two mothers in the
novel, Nekhliudov’s sister, Natalia, and the general’s daughter, seem less virtuous than the
prostitute Katiusha.”
661
This radical change in Tolstoy’s stance on motherhood suits
Resurrection’s overall subversive purpose in that it enables him to sabotage the patriarchal
hierarchy of women, in which the mother is traditionally placed at the top and the prostitute – at
the bottom. More than that, by shifting his sympathy from motherhood to prostitution, Tolstoy
also demonstrates his awareness of the changes in the modern concept of the Russian feminine
and its distinctly anti-familial orientation.
Having rejected the foundation of all the familial female tropes – the mother, Nekhliudov
continues his anti-patriarchal crusade by ending relations with his lover, the married woman
Maria Vasil’evna. This break-up is an earlier sign of the non-adulterous direction of the novel
and another indication of Tolstoy’s decision to purge his post-conversion writing of the much
despised “sexual theme.” While in the second chapter of Resurrection Nekhliudov does
experience a short-lived attraction to Mariette, the fact that he quickly recognizes the sexual
implications of his interest and overcomes his weakness further reinforces Tolstoy’s rejection of
adultery as a valid topic for a truly moral art. In other words, whereas, according to Justin Weir,
“in an earlier novel Nekhliudov and Mariette might have been happy together,” in Resurrection
this type of a relationship is no longer possible precisely because of the novel’s larger goal to
repeal the very narrative that allows for such a relationship to happen.
662
661
Edwina Cruise, “The Ideal Woman in Tolstoi: Resurrection,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 11, no. 2
(1977): 282. For more on Tolstoy’s attack on the mother’s body in Resurrection, see Kaufman, Understanding, 224
and Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, Tolstoy on the Couch: Misogyny, Masochism and the Absent Mother (New York:
New York University Press, 1998), 87, 104, 153.
662
Weir, Leo Tolstoy, 155.
325
With the trope of the lover and the adultery plot safely eliminated from his narrative, the
last familial character from whom Nekhliudov disconnects is his sister Natasha. Similar to
Nekhliudov’s earlier dislike of his mother’s presumed sexual experience, what bothers
Nekhliudov about his sister is her sexual interactions with her husband. As a result of these
interactions, not only does Nekhliudov perceive Natasha’s virtue as ruined, but he also has a
strong sense of contempt for her children:
It always hurt Nekhlyudov to think of Nataly as the wife of that hairy, self-assured man
with a shiny bald patch on his head. He could not even master a feeling of revulsion
towards their children, and when he heard that she was again going to have a baby, he felt
a kind of sorrow that she had once more been infected with something bad by this man
who was so foreign to him.
663
Given that Natasha’s marriage is neither adulterous nor unhappy, Nekhliudov’s criticism of her
is not directed at a failed marriage plot, but at the institution of marriage per se. This makes
Nekhliudov’s attack even stronger in the sense that it demonstrates how any marriage – good or
bad – inevitably destroys even the loftiest and the most moral of women because of its sexual
foundation, “she [was depraved] by marrying a man whom she loved with a sensual love.”
664
Indeed, Natasha’s transformation from Nekhliudov’s virtuous sister into somebody’s wife
and a mother damages her relationship with Nekhliudov because she is no longer Nekhliudov’s
soulmate and equal but another man’s sexual object, “Nekhlyudov, too, though he had nothing
663
Tolstoy, Resurrection, 342.
664
Ibid.
326
but the kindest feelings for his sister, and had hidden nothing from her, now felt depressed and
uncomfortable with her, and was glad to part.”
665
Since for Nekhliudov Natasha’s move from a
resident into a stranger is marked by her awoken sexuality and marriage, it is only by rejecting
her familial roles of a mother and a wife that she can return to Nekhliudov’s life and Tolstoy’s
narrative. Furthermore, given that even such a moral woman as Natasha is still ruined by
marriage, her fall serves as yet another justification for Tolstoy’s call for “radical chastity” in
that it demonstrates the detrimental effects of the patriarchal sexual economy on any woman’s
spirituality, individuality, and independence.
666
Having refuted this economy as flawed, Nekhliudov continues the dismantling of the
familial narrative started by his conceptual precursor Pozdnyshev. Indeed, what Kate Holland
refers to as Tolstoy’s attempt to curb the narrative desire in The Kreutzer Sonata, also applies to
Resurrection, in which Tolstoy likewise “banishe[s] the erotic potentiality from the sphere of
narrative” by “channel[ing] [the energies the text arouse] into a morally acceptable form” – that
of complete sexual abstinence.
667
Whereas Holland claims that Tolstoy’s fear of the narrative
desire prompts his move from the harbinger of the erotic desire – a novel – to a shorter narrative
form – a novella, I suggest that by making his main character Nekhliudov systematically reject
“sexual desire” as the basis for his narrative, Tolstoy also creates a new model for the novel – the
one based on an asexual perception of women and “the family of mankind” rather than the
biological family.
668
665
Ibid., 379.
666
For more on late Tolstoy as an advocate of “radical chastity,” see Mandelker, Framing, 31-32; Cruise, “The Ideal
Woman,” 281-286; Anne Moss, “Tolstoy’s,” 583; Kate Holland, “Genre and The Temptations of Narrative Desire in
Kreutzer Sonata,” Tolstoy Studies Journal 25 (2013): 11; Matich, Erotic, 55-56.
667
Kate Holland, “Genre,” 2, 9.
668
Cruise, “The Ideal Woman,” 286.
327
In fact, what makes Resurrection Tolstoy’s most effective attempt at changing the
familial trajectory of his narrative is Nekhliudov’s own estranged position from his family. As
opposed to Pozdnyshev, who is an insider and a direct beneficiary of the family plot, which
makes him unreliable at best and delusional at worst, Nekhliudov is an outsider with no family of
his own. In his isolationism, Nekhliudov departs not only from the deranged Pozdnyshev, but
also from Tolstoy’s more balanced male characters, such as “Pierre, Andrei, Nikolai, and Levin,
who eventually find a measure of personal fulfilment in family life on their estates…” whereas
“Nekhliudov does not.”
669
Andrew Kaufman further argues that Nekhliudov’s “lonely journey
proceeds without the support of the family or a nurturing community.”
670
Similarly, Kokobobo
observes that Nekhliudov “is left a pilgrim on the open road: someone who has seen the
grotesquery of his world and who chooses to abandon it for a new path.” In the same vein, Cain
also notices that “Nekhliudov does not belong with the prisoners or with his society,” which
further highlights his alienation from any social or familial group.
671
A telling example of Nekliudov’s observer rather than participant status in the patriarchal
economy is his encounter with the family of the governor’s daughter at the end of the novel. The
view of clean, beautiful, sleeping children makes Nekhliudov realize that he no longer has this
option: “Nekhlyudov recalled to his mind chains, shaven heads, fighting and debauchery, the
dying Kriltsov, Katusha and the whole of her past; and he began to feel envious, and to wish for
what he saw here, which now seemed to him pure, refined happiness.”
672
Even though
669
Kaufman, Understanding, 214.
670
Ibid.
671
Kokobobo, “Estranged,” 13 and Cain, Tolstoy, 182-83.
672
Tolstoy, Resurrection, 469.
328
Nekhliudov does briefly contemplate his desire to return to a familial narrative as a resident, “I
want to live, I want a family, children, I want a human life,” he is not meant to become a
husband or a father but instead remains a stranger to the biological family.
673
In that, Nekhliudov
is somewhat similar to Maslova, whose alienation from the familial narrative likewise prevents
her from realizing the traditional female roles of a wife and a mother.
Having undermined the familial orientation of the novel by refusing to start a family,
Nekhliudov is finally able to overcome his own sexualized approach to women, “I must tell you
frankly that though I was myself very different at one time, I now hate that kind of relation to
women.”
674
As a result of cleansing his perception of women as sexual objects, Nekhliudov not
only becomes aware of his sin against Maslova, but also recognizes the emptiness of Korchagina
and Mariette, the impropriety of Korchagina’s and his mothers, and the fall of his sister. With all
the familial female personages promptly removed from Nekhliudov’s new nonsexual life and
Tolstoy’s new Christian art, the last and by far the most challenging task left for Tolstoy is to
transform the most erotic trope of the patriarchal narrative, the prostitute, into a spiritual being
without resorting to this narrative’s most popular solution of marriage.
Resurrection: Shedding the Prostitute Trope and the Redemption Plot
Tolstoy’s rescue of Maslova is both conceptual and textual in that it not only aims to
liberate Maslova’s body and spirit, but also attempts to free the readers’ mind from the
sexualized perception of women. Similar to Nekhliudov, who desexualizes his view of women
after becoming conscious of their sexuality, Tolstoy also desexualizes his depiction of Maslova
673
Ibid., 471.
674
Ibid., 418.
329
after her sexual fall. That Maslova’s loss of virginity becomes a turning point in her portrayal is
noticed by Cain who argues that “once the early pages describing her girlhood love for
Nekhlyudov are past, Tolstoy never allows her that physical understanding and sympathy
through which he gives vitality – or excess of vitality – to Anna, Kitty or Natasha.”
675
Indeed,
prior to her seduction by Nekhliudov, Maslova is given a detailed physical description precisely
because of her overall corporeal innocence.
This description, which includes references to Maslova’s small dry hands, medium
figure, pink cheeks, squinted eyes, and fast legs, is intermingled with symbolic allusions to the
whiteness of Maslova’s apron and dress as well as to her overall purity and intactness, “The
unused soap with the stamped inscription, the towels, and her own self— all were equally clean,
fresh, undefiled, and pleasant.”
676
Likewise, the mention of Maslova’s “maidenly form” and “as-
yet underdeveloped breasts” (nevysokaia grud’) is interspersed with Tolstoy’s depiction of the
Easter Sunday spirit and of Maslova’s “whole being stamped with those two marked
characteristics, purity and chaste love.”
677
Such a balanced portrayal of Maslova’s physical and
spiritual chastity makes it safe for Tolstoy to describe her body without violating what he
considers to be his new artistic criteria, i.e. a non-sexual approach to depicting women in art.
As opposed to Tolstoy’s detailed portrayal of Maslova’s body and mind before her fall,
his subsequent depiction of Maslova’s experience as a fallen woman is both fragmentary and
generalized. Indeed, the reader only learns the basics about Maslova’s existence after that fateful
night with Nekhliudov – an important indication that even though Tolstoy’s main character is a
675
Cain, Tolstoy, 177.
676
Tolstoy, Resurrection, 57.
677
Ibid., 63.
330
prostitute, her sexual life is not a subject of Tolstoy’s narrative. By refusing a more
comprehensive description of Maslova’s sexual escapades, Tolstoy provides an instructive
example of how to avoid sexualized depictions of women in order not to promote the much
feared lust. In the few cases when Tolstoy does justify using these depictions, they are serving a
larger moral purpose – namely, to show how the sexual perception of the woman’s body
inevitably results in her and the man’s fall.
The first negative portrayal of such a perception is the infamous scene of Maslova’s
seduction by Nekhliudov. Everything about this scene is sexually motivated and, in that, morally
wrong – from Nekhliudov’s predatory wait outside of Maslova’s window and disregard for
Maslova’s feeble protests to the symbolic noise of breaking ice on the river and the waning
moon. The presumed immorality of this episode was noticed by Tolstoy’s wife Sofia Tolstaia
who complained, “I am also tormented by the fact that Lev Nikolaevich, a seventy-year old man,
describes the scene of the servant’s seduction by the officer with a particular fondness, as if he
were a gourmet, relishing tasty food.”
678
Given that Tolstoy’s aim in Resurrection is not to
glorify sexual pleasure but to condemn it, the fact that Tolstaia feels revulsion for the scene is in
line the writer’s objective to infect his readers with his anti-sexual message, “I was writing this
book, hating lust with all my heart, and to express this disgust was one of the main goals of this
book.”
679
678
“Я мучаюсь и тем, что Лев Николаевич, семидесятилетний старик, с особенным вкусом смакуя, как
гастроном, вкусную еду, описывает сцены прелюбодеяния горничной с офицером.” Cited in Viktor
Shklovsky, Lev Tolstoy (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo TsK VLKSM “Molodaia gvardiia,” 1967), 518; my translation.
679
“[…] писал эту книгу, всем сердцем ненавидя похоть, и что выразить это отвращение было одной из
главных целей этой книги.” Ibid., 524.
331
Another instance, in which Tolstoy uses brief sexual imagery for a didactic purpose is the
moment of Maslova’s final fall when she is seduced into prostitution by her own desire to show
off her body in provocative, low-cut dresses:
One of the things that tempted her and influenced her decision, was the procuress
telling her she might order her own dresses: velvet, silk, satin, low-necked ball-
dresses – anything she liked. A mental picture of herself in bright yellow silk
trimmed with black velvet, with low neck and short sleeves, conquered her, and
she handed over her passport.
680
Tolstoy’s contempt for women’s outfits that incite male sexuality is well-known, judging from
his negative depictions of the bare shoulders of Hélène Kuragina from War and Piece and the
tight jerseys of society women from The Kreutzer Sonata. The fact that in Resurrection Tolstoy
directly connects the desire to have sexual clothes with prostitution not only reinforces his earlier
disdain for sexualized clothing, but also provides a narrative shortcut from décolleté tops to
bodily promiscuity. Because of this shortcut, Tolstoy can make his point about the evils of
prostitution with one mention of an open dress without resorting to the otherwise provocative
depictions of Maslova’s body parts and violating his commitment to aesthetic chastity.
Indeed, Tolstoy only mentions Maslova’s décolleté area after it is enveloped with her
prison outfit and a white sweater and, as such, not fully exposed to the reader. While Tolstoy’s
repeated references to Maslova’s covered “full breasts” (polnaia grud’) may seem somewhat
provocative, they are emblematic of her fallen woman status and are used to remind the reader of
680
Tolstoy, Resurrection, 12.
332
Maslova’s moral fall from a pure maiden with “as-yet undeveloped bosom” during an Easter
celebration into a prostitute with “a swelling bosom” tried for murder.
681
By purposefully hiding
that last image “under the prison cloak,” Tolstoy finds an acceptable compromise between his
need to indicate Maslova’s sexual appeal and his attempt to avoid an openly sexualized female
portrayal.
682
In fact, when compared to the earlier depictions of Hélène Kuragina and Anna
Karenina, whose low-cut dresses reveal their bare shoulders, breasts, and plump white arms, the
mention of Maslova’s covered torso appears to be the lesser evil.
Paradoxically, what also makes the image of Maslova’s bosom compatible with Tolstoy’s
interest in a non-sexual female portrayal is its repetitive nature. By employing this same image
several times, Tolstoy successfully contains Maslova’s sexuality in one controlled representation
as opposed to arousing the reader’s imagination with various sensual descriptions of her body.
This type of repetition is not unusual for Tolstoy, whose tendency to represent a character
through a reiteration of its singular bodily part has received an extensive coverage in the works
of Merezhkovsky and Matich.
683
Whether it is the shoulders of Hélène Kuragina, the mustached
upper lip of Liza Bolkonsky, the little hands of Anna Karenina, or the bosom of Maslova, all
these parts are metonymic shortcuts to characters that can be effectively used in place of more
elaborate descriptions. In the case of Maslova, this bodily shortcut is particular helpful because it
enables Tolstoy to evade an extensive depiction of the prostitute’s sexualized figure by focusing
on one particular feature instead.
681
Ibid., 63, 30.
682
Ibid., 30.
683
Dmitrii Merezhkovsky, Zhizn’, 175-189 and Matich, Erotic, 33-41.
333
The lack of a wholesome presentation of Maslova’s body after her fall is also indicative
of what Matich refers as Tolstoy’s attempt to perform “bodily renunciation” by “severing parts
of the body” with an ultimate goal “to eradicate sexual desire.”
684
In a similar vein, Cain argues
that in his description of Maslova, “Tolstoy cannot risk giving her a real body, a real physical
presence, since to do so would at once raise the possibility of sexual as well as spiritual attraction
on Nekhliudov’s part, and such complexities have no part in the scheme of the latter’s
resurrection.”
685
A somewhat different opinion is voiced by Harriet Murav, who does not view
Maslova’s body as missing, but considers it exorbitant “not only because it provokes and repels
desire in Tolstoy’s hero, but because it sets in motion a process whereby boundaries collapse.”
686
While these last two interpretations may seem contradictory, the ways in which Tolstoy
handles Maslova’s body through its fragmentation, absence, and exorbitance, are, in fact, all
important components of the writer’s attempt to find a non-sexual manner to portray a sexual
female character. A telling example of how Tolstoy interchangeably employs these three
techniques, i.e. dissects a body, avoids a depiction of Maslova’s physicality, and overwhelms the
readers with an excessive description of bodily parts, is his use of a merchant’s corpse as a
narrative substitute to Maslova’s equally repellent sexuality:
Katusha’s life, the serous liquid oozing from the nostrils of the corpse, the eyes
protruding from their sockets, and his own treatment of Katusha, all seemed to
684
Matich, Erotic, 30.
685
Cain, Tolstoy, 177.
686
Harriet Murav, “Maslova’s Exorbitant Body,” Tolstoy Studies Journal 14 (2002): 36.
334
belong to the same order of things, and he felt surrounded and wholly engulfed by
things of a like nature.
687
As the detailed autopsy report of the merchant’s body is meant to repel and shock the
reader, so is the parallel between its sickening description and Maslova’s career as a prostitute.
By using the male corpse as a symbolic stand-in for a sexualized female body, Tolstoy thereby
links sexuality with death – a connection that Nekhliudov voices in his later, albeit misguided,
negative assessment of Maslova’s flirtatious behavior towards him:
“This woman is dead”, Nekhlyudov thought, looking at the once sweet face, now
defiled and puffy and lit up by an evil glitter in the black, squinting eyes, which
were now glancing at the hand in which he held the note, now following the
inspector’s movements…
688
The fact that the merchant’s exorbitant dissected corpse infects Nekhliudov and the
reader with a perception of sexuality as decay suggests that the dead male body is, indeed,
another non-sexual alternative to depicting Maslova’s figure. Whereas this alternative is similar
to the previously discussed metonymic shortcuts via clothing or bodily parts, it is even better in
the sense that it allows Tolstoy to skip the prostitute’s body altogether, while still making a
strong moral point about its disgusting physicality. With the merchant’s corpse used as
687
Tolstoy, Resurrection, 76.
688
Ibid., 162.
335
Maslova’s proxy, all Tolstoy’s subsequent references to her body are, therefore, tainted with
physical deterioration, as is the case with Maslova’s own morbid rhetoric used to describe her
plump physique as an object for sale, “Only I must not get think or else I am lost.”
689
By
referring to her body as the only means of survival in the world where all men are susceptible to
her sexuality, “aren’t they all given that way?,” Maslova inadvertently reminds the reader of the
gruesome fate of her final male client, whose decomposing body now serves as a warning of her
own imminent disintegration.
690
If the involuntary manslaughter of the merchant represents the lowest point of Maslova’s
life as a prostitute, it is only logical that her withdrawal from this life begins with the help of the
very first man who has corrupted her sexually, i.e. Nekhliudov. Just as Maslova’s sexual lifespan
has made a full circle from innocence through a fall to a chance of being reborn, so has
Nekhliudov’s, whose changing perception of women parallels Maslova’s desexualization of self
after the trial. Given that Maslova’s purification quest is mostly witnessed through Nekhliudov’s
eyes, the extent of its success is measured not only by the actual changes in Maslova’s behavior,
but also by Nekhliudov’s ability to desexualize his subsequent view of Maslova.
This assertion is further supported by Ani Kokobobo, who argues that during the reading
of the autopsy report, “Nekhliudov mentally equates this body to his own treatment of
Maslova.”
691
Kokobobo’s statement indicates that the description of the corpse not only enables
Nekhliudov to connect the concepts of sexuality and death, but also allows him to realize the
immorality of his lustful perception of Maslova during their last meeting. As this perception
689
Ibid., 140.
690
Ibid.
691
Kokobobo, “Estranged,” 6.
336
changes from sexualized to non-sexual, so does Nekhliudov’s portrayal of Maslova’s body,
which transforms from its maximum sexualization in the beginning of the novel to its minimum
physicality by its end.
Indeed, as both Maslova and Nekhliudov continue their journey towards Tolstoy’s ideal
of radical chastity, Maslova’s sexually provocative physical traits either change into their
spiritual equivalents or altogether vanish from the narrative. Such is the fate of the
aforementioned most corporeal feature of Maslova’s body – her signature bosom – which
completely disappears from her description towards the final pages of the novel. In its place,
Tolstoy returns to another trademark of Maslova’s portrayal – her black squinting eyes, whose
less pronounced erotic nature suggests the symbolic death of Maslova’s sexual side and the
rebirth of her spiritual self.
Whereas Maslova’s glistening eyes are considered by Wilson to be an important part of
her sexual appeal, the fact that by the end of the novel they completely lose their “evil glitter”
(nekhoroshii blesk) implies their larger non-sexual function.
692
More support for this assertion is
found in Tolstoy’s decision to keep the description of Maslova’s eyes as the only indication of
her bodily presence during her final meeting with Nekhliudov. By redefining Maslova through
her famous squinted gaze, Tolstoy not only removes the rest of her corporeal body from the
narrative, but also suggests the affinity between the later reborn Maslova and her earlier virginal
self. Given that in both cases the descriptions of Maslova’s eyes are of a non-sexual nature, it is
not surprising that in the end Tolstoy chooses this particular physical marker to maintain what
692
A. N. Wilson, Tolstoy (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988), 447 and Tolstoy, Resurrection, 162.
337
Harriet Murav describes as the novel’s focus on “disciplining [the ‘exorbitant’ female body] and
containing its dangers.”
693
Notably, the dangers of Maslova’s body are not limited to the alluring glisten of her gaze
or her swelling bosom, but include several other provocative features, such as the unnaturally
white color of her face, her curly black hair, and a full neck. Whereas all of these body parts are
used to describe Maslova during her first appearance at the court, this is not the case after her
two-month walk to Siberia, as a result of which Maslova sheds much of her voluptuousness,
coquetry, and youthful sexuality:
After two months’ march with the gang the change that had taken place within her
became apparent in her appearance. She grew sunburnt and thinner, and seemed older;
wrinkles appeared on her temples and round her mouth. She had no ringlets on her
forehead now, and her hair was covered by her kerchief. In the way it was arranged, as
well as in her dress and manner, there was no trace of coquetry left. And this change
which had taken place and was still unceasingly going on in her made Nekhlyudov very
happy.
694
Nekhliudov’s excitement about Maslova’s chaste appearance and behavior suggests that Maslova
no longer “exudes sex” and can finally “escape” her body as the main criteria of her self-
worth.
695
693
Murav, “Maslova’s,” 36.
694
Tolstoy, Resurrection, 404-405.
695
Wilson, Tolstoy, 447.
338
What makes Maslova’s escape from her prostitute mentality particularly important is that
it does not entail her marrying Nekhliudov. This is a definite departure from Tolstoy’s initial
plans to wed the two and have them flee from Siberia to England.
696
By eventually rejecting
Maslova’s marriage to Nekhliudov as a faulty solution to her predicament and his plot, Tolstoy
demonstrates an evolution in his perception of the man’s role in a fallen woman’s narrative,
which is neither absolute nor essential. Instead, as Wasiolek suggests, “Maslova will be
redeemed when she ‘repossesses’ herself, which happens when she begins to believe in herself
and realizes that she is not the captive of the society she lives in, nor of past Maslovas and not
the captive of Nekhliudov’s magnanimity.”
697
A similar opinion is expressed by Mandelker, who argues that Maslova “works her own
spiritual resurrection without Nekhliudov’s help.”
698
Likewise, Shklovsky also suggests that
“Katiusha is higher than Nekhliudov and she does not need him.”
699
In the same vein, Kaufman
notes that “Nekhliudov’s task is neither to save Katiusha nor to redeem society but to renounce
all judgments, all claims to moral superiority.”
700
Indeed, whereas it is true that Nekhliudov does
help Maslova in that he argues her cause and provides her with legal and financial support, the
fact that Maslova first refuses his offer of marriage and then altogether excludes him from her
life indicates that she is “not his to ruin or to save” and that “she belongs to no one but
696
For more on Tolstoy’s original drafts, see Shklovsky, Lev, 521 and McLean, In Quest, 85.
697
Edward Wasiolek, “Resurrection,” in Modern Critical Views: Leo Tolstoy, ed. Harold Bloom (New York:
Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), 197.
698
Mandelker, Framing, 179.
699
“Катюша выше Нехлюдова и он ей не нужен.” See Shklovsky, Lev, 521.
700
Kaufman, Understanding, 232.
339
herself.”
701
By enabling Maslova to realize her spiritual revival without the male savior, Tolstoy
provides her with agency to make her own decisions, which in turn shows his trust in a modern
woman’s capability to regenerate.
A telling example of Tolstoy’s belief in the autonomy of Maslova’s character is his
decision to shift focus from Nekhliudov to Maslova in the beginning of Resurrection. The need
for this shift is aptly summed by Tolstoy’s diary entry, in which he expresses his dissatisfaction
with the novel’s emphasis on the upper-class issues:
“My writing [of Resurrection] has become terribly complicated and I’m sick of it,
- it is insignificant, vulgar, and the main thing is that I hate writing for this good-
for-nothing, parasitic intelligentsia, from which there has never been anything but
futility and never will be (18: 160).
702
When several weeks later Tolstoy realizes that Maslova is indeed “a subject” (predmet) and
“positive” (polozhitel’noe), whereas Nekhliudov is “a shadow” (ten’) and “negative”
(otritsatel’noe), he resolves to start the novel with her, “I was going for a walk now and clearly
understood, why ‘Resurrection’ is not working out. It is started falsely…One needs to begin with
her” (20: 40).
703
By opening his narrative with Maslova, Tolstoy highlights the importance of her
character not only for the structure of the whole novel, but also for its message of ethical and
701
Wasiolek, “Resurrection,” 197.
702
“Писание мое ужасно усложнилось и надоело мне, ничтожно, пошло, главное, противно писать для этой
никуда ни на что не годной паразитной интеллигенции, от которой никогда ничего, кроме суеты, не было и
не будет.”
703
“Сейчас ходил гулять и ясно понял, отчего у меня не идет ‘Воскресение’. Ложно начато. […] Надо начать
с нее.”
340
aesthetic rebirth. In so doing, Tolstoy recognizes the self-reliance and authenticity of Maslova
who, as opposed to the spiritually alienated and rationally divided Nekhliudov, “requires little
rehabilitation before beginning to practice spiritual love, for she is not confronted by the obstacle
of reason that a Tolstoian hero would find in himself.”
704
The difficulty of Nekhliudov’s spiritual revival is further illustrated by Shklovsky, who
argues that by the end of the novel Maslova is the one resurrected, whereas Nekhliudov is unable
to undergo a full rebirth, “Lev Nikolaevich could not invent a resurrection for Nekhliudov… The
one resurrected is not the religiously-minded Nekhliudov, but the purely loving Katiusha.”
705
Indeed, the extent of Nekhliudov’s resurrection, in particular his final revelation through the
reading of the Gospels, has been questioned by several reviewers, including Anton Chekhov,
who complains that “the novel has no ending… To write so much and then suddenly make a
Gospel text responsible for it all smacks a bit too much of the seminary.”
706
Donna Orwin
likewise argues that this scene represents “an improbable solution to intractable problems.”
707
Similarly, Shklovsky interprets the ending as another indication of Maslova’s moral superiority
over Nekhliudov, “the fate of Katiusha has already been decided by herself: she rejects the
marriage with Nekhliudov, rejects it on her own, without the reading of the Gospels.”
708
Given
704
Cruise, “The Ideal Woman,” 285.
705
“Лев Николаевич не смог придумать воскресения для Нехлюдова … воскресает не религиозно
настроенный Нехлюдов, а просто любящая Катюша.” See Shklovsky, Lev, 521, 518. Whereas I agree with
Shlovsky’s argument, there is an important caveat about its authenticity that needs to be mentioned. Given the fact
that Shklovsky writes during the Soviet period, one cannot say with certainty whether his rejection of Nekhliudov’s
resurrection is his own assessment or a product of the Soviet line of criticism that condemns religion and the
aristocracy, while expressing sympathy with the peasants.
706
Cited in McLean, In Quest, 86.
707
Orwin, “The Riddle,” 481.
708
“…судьба Катюши уже решена ею самой: она отказалась от брака с Нехлюдовым, отказалась сама, без
чтения Евангелия.” See Shklovsky, Lev, 525.
341
the critics’ doubt in Nekhliudov’s ability to guide anyone including himself, what or who then
shows Maslova how to transform from a sexual object of male desire into a spiritual subject of
her own story?
Resurrection: The Impact of the Martyr-Heroine and the Rebirth of the Novel
The path to Maslova’s spiritual rescue lies through a revolutionary commune. Indeed,
major changes in Maslova’s behavioral and bodily disposition occur after her transfer to the
political prisoners, who “exercised a decided and most beneficial influence on her character.”
709
The importance of this influence is aptly summarized by McLean who argues that while
Nekhliudov’s “appearance and support are the catalyst that initiates the revival,” Maslova’s
resurrection is “assisted not only by Nekhliudov, but by a series of fellow prisoners, especially
the upper-class revolutionaries with whom she is allowed to associate on the journey to
Siberia.”
710
Taking McLean’s assessment further, I suggest that the revolutionaries not only
contribute to Maslova’s moral revival, but also offer Tolstoy an alternative solution to the crisis
of the patriarchal perception of the feminine and its most problematic trope – that of a prostitute.
According to Kokobobo, the revolutionaries are “the only individuals immune to Tolstoy’s
poetics of the grotesque,” which in turn makes them resistant to the objectified view of female
body as an instrument of pleasure.
711
Likewise, if one is to agree with Kokobobo that “by virtue
of their emotional investment in the cause, political prisoners… have managed to preserve their
709
Tolstoy, Resurrection, 395.
710
McLean, In Quest, 81.
711
Kokobobo, “Estranged,” 12.
342
spiritual identities,” it is only logical that Tolstoy chooses these socially subversive yet morally
resilient characters to provide Maslova with a new ethical foundation.
712
Finally, because of their
relative fictional novelty, the revolutionaries also offer Tolstoy an opportunity to rewrite the
traditional redemption plot by ending it neither with death nor with marriage, but with the
heroine’s conversion from a sexualized prostitute of the patriarchal plot into a chaste martyr-
heroine of the modern narrative.
713
What makes this transformation particularly important is that it satisfies Tolstoy’s
requirements for the non-sexual female portrayal in art because it “releases women from the
burden of male-definition.”
714
Indeed, throughout her communication with the revolutionaries,
Maslova escapes her status of a prostitute and establishes her own narrative space outside the
patriarchal hierarchy of women. Not only do the revolutionaries treat Maslova with respect,
preventing her from being sexually harassed by other criminals, but they also help her to acquire
new goals in life and develop her mind, “the fellowship with her new companions opened out a
life full of interests such as she had never dreamt of.”
715
By showing how Maslova’s mental
growth is motivated by the revolutionaries’ treatment of her as a spiritual being rather than an
712
Ibid.
713
Tolstoy’s relationship to revolutionaries is far from uniform. While Tolstoy rejects revolutionary violence as
destructive and unethical, he does show appreciation for those who practice non-violent resistance and demonstrate
high moral values. A similar ambiguity is seen in Tolstoy’s diverse assessment of different revolutionaries from
Resurrection: whereas Simonson and Shchetinina are viewed as positive characters, Novodvorov is seen as negative,
and Kryl’tsov – as sympathetic but misguided. For more on Tolstoy’s ambivalent perception of the revolutionary
cause, see Inessa Medzhibovskaya, “Terror Un-sublimated: Militant Monks, Revolution, and Tolstoy’s Final Master
Plots,” Tolstoy Studies Journal 22 (2010): 17-38; Inessa Medzhibovskaya, “Tolstoi’s Response to Terror and
Revolutionary Violence,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 9, no. 3 (2008): 505-31; Alexandre
J. M. E. Christoyannopoulos, “Turning the Other Cheek to Terrorism: Reflections on the Contemporary Significance
of Leo Tolstoy’s Exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount,” Politics and Religion 1 (2008): 27-54; E. Heier, “Tolstoi
and Nihilism,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 11, no. 4 (1969): 454-65; and Donna Oliver, “Fool,” 73-96.
714
Heldt, Terrible, 38.
715
Tolstoy, Resurrection, 399.
343
instrument of pleasure, Tolstoy further confirms that a woman’s moral rebirth begins with
changing one’s sexualized perception of her body.
A telling example of Maslova’s newly found happiness is her expression of gratitude for
her new acquaintances, “And I cried when I was sentenced. Why, I must thank God for it all the
days of my life. I have learnt to know what I never should have found out otherwise.”
716
In
addition to gratitude, Maslova also shows an acute understanding of the revolutionaries’ beliefs,
which suggests their emotional and spiritual compatibility:
She understood easily and without effort the motives that guided these people,
and being of the people herself fully sympathized with them. She understood that
they were for the people and against the upper classes, and, though themselves
belonging to the upper classes, had sacrificed their privileges, their liberty, and
their lives for the people. This especially made her value and admire them.
717
Maslova’s admiration for the political prisoners is further conveyed by her description of them as
“people so wonderful” (chudesnye liudi), indicating that she is both aware and appreciative of
their contribution to her moral rebirth.
718
Two of these “wonderful people,” the political prisoners Simonson and Maria Pavlovna
Shchetinina, make an especially strong impression on Maslova because of their genuine love for
716
Ibid.
717
Ibid.
718
Ibid.
344
her and commitment to chastity. Given that for Tolstoy “revealing the way to love” and
maintaining sexual purity are important prerequisites for one’s moral awakening, it is not
surprising he chooses these very characters to show Maslova an example of an honorable male
and female behaviors.
719
The fact that Simonson and Shchetinina also advocate the other two key
principles of Tolstoy’s ethics, i.e. non-violent conduct and service to others, makes them even
more suitable candidates for reforming Maslova’s body and spirit.
720
The two’s suitability is
further supported by Simonson’s theory of world phagocytes, in which he admits his affinity
with Shchetinina in terms of their service-oriented mentality, rejection of violence, and sexual
abstinence, “Celibates, according to his opinion, were like phagocytes, whose mission it is to
help the weak and sick parts of the organism… he considered himself, and Mary Pavlovna as
well, to be human phagocytes.”
721
Simonson’s and Shchetnina’s messages of desexualization and service are precisely what
Maslova needs in order to reconfigure her perception of self and others as fundamentally good.
This mental rehabilitation is crucial for restoring Maslova’s faith in people that has been lost
ever since her manqué rendezvous with Nekhliudov at the train station, “Beginning from that
dreadful night she ceased to believe in God and in goodness.”
722
During her subsequent life as a
prostitute, Maslova becomes even stronger in her resolve that all women and men view her
through the prism of profit and pleasure, “And of all those she met, the women used her as a
719
Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy, 205.
720
Simonson’s and Shchetinina’s non-violent revolutionary behaviors are especially important for their positive
characterization because of Tolstoy’s own strong belief in non-resistance to violence. Instead of violence, Tolstoy
advocates love, which is what Simonson and Shchetinina preach as well.
721
Tolstoy, Resurrection, 402.
722
Ibid., 143.
345
means of getting money, and the men, from the old police officer down to the warders of the
prison, considered her as an object for pleasure.”
723
In order to offset these traumatic encounters
with men and women from Maslova’s past, Tolstoy introduces Simonson and Shchetinina as the
best representatives of their respective genders to show Maslova a new kind of a relationship
with both sexes – the one not based on exploitation and personal interest but on love and
goodwill.
In the case of Simonson, Maslova is taught a model of a different type of male love that
appreciates her “high moral qualities” (vysokie nravstvennye svoistva) as opposed to her sexual
appeal.
724
Indeed, being around Simonson teaches Maslova how to feel valued as a human being
rather than a sexual object, which in turn encourages her to live up to his high expectations,
“And she felt that Simonson considered her to be an exceptional woman…. in order to be on the
safe side and that he should not be disappointed in her, she tried with all her might to awaken in
herself all the highest qualities she could conceive, and to be as good as possible.”
725
As Maslova
becomes a better person because of Simonson’s love, so does Simonson, who deems his feelings
for Maslova to be an incentive for his further spiritual growth, “His love for Katusha did not
infringe this conception, because he loved her platonically, and such love, he considered, could
not hinder his activity as a phagocyte, but, on the contrary, acted as an inspiration.”
726
In addition to providing Maslova with an example of a spiritual union between a man and
a woman, Simonson also offers her a successful precedent for changing one’s behavior from
723
Ibid.
724
Ibid., 403.
725
Ibid.
726
Ibid.
346
sexually promiscuous into abstinent. Indeed, Simonson’s own earlier transformation from a
“dissipated” youth (razvrashchennyi iunosha) into an ascetic adult gives Maslova hope that her
fall can also be overcome and her sexuality – transcended.
727
This hope is further sustained by
the fact that Maslova accepts Simonson’s marriage offer over Nekhliudov’s as a better option to
escape her fleshly past and a chaste alternative to a traditional marriage, “Nekhlyudov offered to
marry her from magnanimity and because of what had happened in the past, but Simonson loved
her as she was now, and simply because he loved her.”
728
In contrast to Nekhlidov’s proposal, which Maslova rightly views as motivated by his
expiation for her past sexual fall, she perceives the one by Simonson as dictated by his
unconditional love for her presently asexual stance, “as she was now” (takoiu, kakoiu ona byla
teper’). Based on this important distinction, Maslova’s choice of Simonson appears to be more
conducive to maintaining her awoken spirituality and sexual abstinence, which may be under
further threat if she is to accept Nekhliudov’s offer, “Marriage with you would be a terrible fall
for her, worse than all that's past; and therefore she will never consent to it.”
729
The spiritual nature of Simonson’s attraction to Maslova is also observed by Wasiolek,
who notices that Simonson’s rejection of sexuality plays a key role in Maslova’s final preference
for him over Nekhliudov, “It is no accident that Simonson’s interest in Maslova is not sexual;
and if there is no mention of sexuality in Nekhliudov’s interest in a redeemed Maslova, it cannot
be absent, if only in memory and recall.”
730
Indeed, whereas Nekhliudov’s sexual past with
727
Ibid., 402.
728
Ibid., 403.
729
Ibid., 441.
730
Wasiolek, “Resurrection,” 198.
347
Maslova disqualifies him from becoming her present spiritual partner, Simonson’s nonsexual
intentions make him a more appropriate candidate for nurturing Maslova’s soul as opposed to her
body,
You must not think I am in love with her […] I love her as a splendid, unique
human being who has suffered much. I want nothing from her. I have only a
profound longing to help to lighten her – […] To lighten her position […] I only
wish that this suffering soul should find rest.
731
Notwithstanding all the said manifestations of Simonson’s sexual purity and high moral
values, the fact that this platonic marriage never takes place in the novel makes it impossible to
assess its effectiveness or accuracy as Tolstoy’s proposed solution for a modern female
character.
732
By leaving the realization of Maslova’s marriage outside the plot, Tolstoy provides
yet another example of what Justin Weir calls “a significant absence” in that he excludes the
description of Simonson’s platonic household for a reason.
733
One of the causes behind this
exclusion may be Tolstoy’s unsureness about the possibility of marriage, albeit platonic, to
subvert the very structure that it is predicated on – that of patriarchy. Another reason may lie in
the fact that Maslova’s spiritual revival has already occurred at this point, which marks her
731
Tolstoy, Resurrection, 440-41.
732
Tolstoy’s ambiguity on the question of Maslova’s marriage to Simonson reflects his complexity as a thinker and
a writer. This duality finds further support in the scholarly binary interpretations of Tolstoy, who is described as the
resident and the stranger by Gustafson, the hedgehog and the fox by Berlin, and the thinker and the artist by
Wasiolek, to mention just a few. See Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy; Isaiah Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” in Russian
Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 22-81; Wasiolek, “Resurrection.”
733
Weir, Leo Tolstoy, 2.
348
upcoming marriage as non-essential for Maslova’s redemption and therefore unnecessary for the
novel’s plot.
Indeed, the decision to skip the description of marriage is consistent with Tolstoy’s
altogether different objective in Resurrection, which is not to rewrite a family novel in platonic
terms, but to change the sexualized perception of women in life and art. In this case, it makes
sense that Tolstoy is not so much concerned with the practical realization of Simonson’s marital
plans as he is with Simonson’s intention and ability to view Maslova asexually. Be it as it may,
the fact that Maslova is still unmarried by the end of Resurrection suggests that Tolstoy has
relegated all forms of marriage, including its platonic version, to the margins of his novel. In so
doing, Tolstoy purposefully leaves the future of marriage open-ended – both as a potentiality to
be realized and a remnant of the patriarchal plot that continues to haunt the modern narrative and
its emancipated heroine – the modern woman.
Notably, the only character who openly questions the platonic nature of Simonson’s
feelings for Maslova is this modern woman and another most influential person in Maslova’s life
– the virginal revolutionary Shchetinina. Weary of any man’s hidden sexual agenda, Shchetinina
does not consider Simonson’s love an exception: “[…] still, I believe that on his part it is the
most ordinary man’s feeling, though it is masked. He says that this love arouses his energy, and
is platonic, but I know that, even if it is exceptional, still at the bottom of it lies the same
nastiness ….”
734
The validity of Shchetinina’s comment is ambiguous, given her own sexual
inexperience. The fact that her monologue is cut short by Nekhliudov also raises questions about
its appropriateness. In addition, the narrator’s equivocal remark about Shchetinina’s bias with the
topic likewise diminishes the relevance of her observation. Even so, the existence of this passage
734
Tolstoy, Resurrection, 442.
349
is still important because it reveals Tolstoy’s awareness of the problematic nature of the platonic
relationship between sexes and gives another possible justification for Tolstoy’s decision to
exclude the depiction of marriage from his last novel.
Besides providing another viewpoint on Simonson’s presumably innocent love,
Shchetinina also offers Maslova an example of an alternative female behavior that is not based
on sexuality. Even though the prostitute Maslova and the virgin Shchetinina are the polar
opposites in terms of their previous exposure to sex, the fact that they both unequivocally
condemn it reinforces Tolstoy’s view of radical chastity as equally beneficial for any female
experience:
They were also united by the repulsion both felt from sexual love. The one
loathed that love, having experienced all its horrors; the other, never having
experienced it, looked on it as something incomprehensible, and at the same time
as something repugnant and offensive to human dignity.
735
By using Shchetinina to liberate Maslova from her sexual past, Tolstoy also emphasizes the role
of women in forging Maslova’s “path to virtue.”
736
Found “through the help of other women” in
general, and Shchetinina in particular, this path introduces Maslova to a new, asexual outlet for
her body and mind – that of helping others:
735
Ibid., 401.
736
Moss, “Tolstoy’s,” 582.
350
Mary Pavlovna never thought of herself, but was always anxious to serve: to help
someone, in things small or great. One of her present companions, Novodvorov,
said of her that she devoted herself to the sport of philanthropy. The interest of her
whole life lay in searching for opportunities to serve others just as the sportsman
searches for game.
737
Shchetinina’s willingness to serve others makes her a particularly effective guide for
Maslova, whose own “peculiar expression of readiness” (vyrazhenie gotovnosti) can now
transform from her eagerness to fulfil men’s sexual needs into a desire to aid all people
spiritually.
738
By showing Maslova how to channel her excess of energy into a spiritual task,
Shchetinina offers Maslova not simply a theory of service, but a hands-on positive model to
imitate and learn from:
The tenderness and kindness of so uncommon a being touched Maslova so much that she
gave her whole heart to her; and, unconsciously accepting her views, could not help
imitating her in everything.
739
737
Moss, “Tolstoy’s,” 582 and Tolstoy, Resurrection, 400-401.
738
Tolstoy, Resurrection, 35.
739
Ibid., 401. This excess of energy also appears in Karenina and becomes one of the main factors that attracts
Vronsky to her. However, as opposed to Maslova, Karenina never finds another outlet for her sexual energy or a
teacher like Shchetinina and, as a result, is unable to transcend her sexual status of an adulteress.
351
What makes this model particularly important for Tolstoy’s revised perception of the
feminine is that its roots lie not only in Shchetinina’s virginity, gender, and friendliness, but also
in her revolutionary background. Indeed, the fact that the revolutionary Shchetinina has a
revitalizing effect on Maslova’s soul suggests that Tolstoy accepts the trope of the martyr-
heroine as an appropriate substitute for the patriarchal portrayal of the feminine as a sexual
object. In turn, Maslova’s responsiveness to the revolutionary ideals and admiration for their
proponents also implies Tolstoy’s support for her transformation into a supporter of the
revolutionary cause. That Maslova’s submission to the revolutionary community coincides with
her emancipation from the narrative of prostitution is yet another indication that Tolstoy both
recognizes and appreciates the purifying function of the martyr-heroine. Finally, since
Resurrection is Tolstoy’s first attempt to portray revolutionary women and, in that, a radical
departure from his earlier familial female depictions, the martyr-heroine emerges as a major
component of his new ethical art and an important part of the later writer’s view of the modern
concept of the feminine.
The literary origins of this concept are found in the depictions of the revolutionary
women from the previously discussed works by Polonsky, Turgenev, Korolenko, and Garshin.
As such, the chaste character of Shchetinina is Tolstoy’s adaptation of the virginal martyr-
heroines that appear in The Prisoner, The Threshold, and The Strange One. Likewise, the more
ambivalent character of the prostitute turned martyr-heroine Maslova is a variation on Garshin’s
Nadezhda Nikolaevna, who also begins as a prostitute and is then reformed through her
modelling for a painting of the revolutionary Corday.
Notwithstanding these affinities, Tolstoy’s approach is uniquely his own in that he
neither isolates the martyr-heroine narrative as his only focus, which is the case with Polonsky,
352
Turgenev, and Korolenko, nor portrays it metaphorically and colors it with violence, which is the
case with Garshin. Instead, Tolstoy provides a more balanced and synthesized description of
female revolutionaries, whose best representatives reflect a profoundly Tolstoian commitment to
chastity, non-violent resistance, and service and, as such, present a valuable alternative to the
morally corrupted narratives of family and prostitution.
Whereas Tolstoy’s portrayal of the revolutionary women in Resurrection shows his
familiarity with the literary tradition of the martyr-heroine, it also reveals his larger
preoccupation with the actual proponents of female revolutionary activism. Further evidence for
this preoccupation is found in Tolstoy’s strong emotional reactions to the trials of Zasulich and
Perovskaia, his expressions of support for several female prisoners, and his numerous remarks
about revolutionary women in diaries, letters, and essays.
740
To illustrate, with regards to
Zasulich and Perovskaia, Tolstoy condemns the violence of their actions, while at the same time
recognizing the importance of their protest as well-meant yet misguided. In the case of Zasulich,
Tolstoy prophetically writes “the Zasulich affair is not a joke…it is like a harbinger of the
revolution,” lamenting both Trepov’s actions and Zasulich’s acquittal as equally immoral (17:
485, 487).
741
In the case of Perovskaia, Tolstoy demonstrates an even stronger concern by
sending a letter to Alexander III, in which he asks the tsar to forgive the assassins of his father by
showing them a higher spiritual model – that of love and mercy (17: 521-529).
By taking a mediator’s position between the government and the revolutionaries, Tolstoy
criticizes the violent methods of both sides without necessarily attacking the latter’s ideal of
740
For more on Tolstoy’s attempts to help female political prisoners, see 17: 557 and 19: 318. For more on Tolstoy’s
ambivalent perceptions of the revolutionaries, see 17: 536 and 19: 318-319.
741
“Засуличевское дело не шутка. […] это похоже на предвозвестие революции.” For more on “Tolstoy’s
reluctance to glorify Zasulich” because of her resort to violence, see Medzhibovskaya, “Tolstoi’s Response,” 523.
353
“common prosperity, equality, brotherhood” (obshchii dostatok, ravenstvo, bratstvo) (17: 529).
In fact, Tolstoy often expresses sympathy for the peaceful female propagandists and even agrees
to help the ones already imprisoned, “[…] I have been reading the manuscripts of
Dmokhovskaia. The poems by Bardina moved me to tears. […] I was doubting whether I should
be helping the political prisoners. I did not want to but now I have understood that I have no right
to refuse” (19: 320).
742
After reading the letters of one such protégé, Natalia Armfel’d, Tolstoy
actually blames the unnecessary police repressions for the revolutionary shift from propaganda to
bombs, “One cannot forbid people to express to each other their ideas about ways to get better.
And this was the only thing that our revolutionaries did before the bombs” (19: 318).
743
In
another critique of government brutality, Tolstoy also voices indignation for the way the
revolutionaries, especially the young girls, are mistreated, “I would have been ashamed to be a
tsar in a state where there is no other way to preserve my safety but to send thousands to Siberia,
among them the sixteen-years old girls. […]” (19: 344).
744
One of Tolstoy’s most articulate statement on the duality of his assessment of the
revolutionaries is found in his preface to Chertkov’s essay “On Revolution” (“O revoliutsii,”
1904):
Above all, it is a pity when you see that the best, highly moral, sacrificial, kind
people, as were Perovskaia, Osinskii, Lizogub, and many others (I am only
742
“[…] читал рукописи Дмоховской. Стихотворения Бардиной тронули до слез. Все это мне становится
ясно. […] Я сомневался, нужно ли помогать политическим заключенным. Мне не хотелось, но теперь я
понял, что я не имею права отказывать.”
743
“Hельзя запрещать людям высказывать друг другу свои мысли о том, как лучше устроиться. А это одно,
до бомб, делали наши революционеры.”
744
“Мне стыдно было бы быть царем в таком государстве, где для моей безопасности нет другого средства,
как ссылать в Сибирь тысячи и в том числе 16-летних девушек. […]”
354
talking about the ones who died), having become inspired by the fervor of the
fight, were driven not only to waste their best strengths for achieving the
unachievable, but also to allow a crime that went against their whole nature –
were driven to murder, to promoting it, to participating in it.
745
Tolstoy’s definition of Perovskaia as a kind and sacrificial person, whose erroneous belief in the
violent means of resistance has led her to murder, is a telling example of what Inessa
Medzhibovskaya calls the writer’s “stimulating and paradoxical set of views” on terror.
746
Since
these contradictory views are largely informed by Tolstoy’s equally ambiguous perception of
revolutionary women, it is not surprising that the character of the martyr-heroine also
accommodates the other two problematic elements of Tolstoy’s post-conversion poetics, such as
his search for an ethical aesthetics and his uneasy relationship with modernity.
While the martyr-heroine’s chaste, altruistic, and anti-familial nature fits the late
Tolstoy’s requirements of “universal Christian love” that “transcends gender,” its transgressive
side reflects the writer’s concerns about the violence and unpredictability of the modern age.
747
Notably, the characters of the second type are excluded from Tolstoy’s depictions of the
revolutionary women in Resurrection, among whom there are no assassins, but only kind and
745
“Более же всего жалко то, когда видишь, что лучшие, высоко-нравственные, самоотверженные, добрые
люди, каковы были Перовская, Осинский, Лизогуб и многие другие (я говорю только про умерших),
увлеченные задором борьбы, доведены не только до траты своих лучших сил на достижение
недостижимого, но и до допущения противного всей их природе преступления, - убийства, до содействия
ему, участия в нем.” See L. N. Tolstoy, “Predislovie k stat’e V. G. Chertkova “O revoliutsii,” vol. 36 of Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii, ed. V. H. Chertkov and N. K. Gudzii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennaia literatura,
1928-58), 151; my translation.
746
Medzhibovskaya, “Tolstoi’s Response,” 531.
747
Mandelker, Framing, 8.
355
selfless propagandists, such as Vera Bogodukhovskaia, Lidiia Shustova, Shustova’s aunt
Kornilova, Maria Shchetinina, Grabets, and Emiliia Rantseva. By portraying his fictional martyr-
heroines as the victims rather than the victimizers of the tsarist regime, Tolstoy highlights their
sacrificial yet nonviolent pathos, which makes them a welcome addition to his new art and an
acceptable foundation for the rebirth of the fallen woman of the patriarchal narrative.
In order for this rebirth to take place, any manifestations of female transgression – be it
the aforementioned violence of the revolutionary martyr-heroine and the sexuality of the
patriarchal female tropes – are gradually removed from Tolstoy’s narrative. In so doing, Tolstoy
finally rehabilitates his original perception of the feminine as “the sole component of moral
regeneration” and, as such, the main constituent of his ethical aesthetics.
748
No longer is
Tolstoy’s heroine a source of anxiety, a character to be ashamed of, or a sexual object of passion,
aka Karenina, Stepanida, or Pozdnyshev’s wife. Neither is she a body, through which “groups
that are normally distinct from one another merge together” in sexual depravity, aka the fictional
prostitutes from Gogol, Nekrasov, Dostoevsky, and Garshin.
749
Instead, the reformed Maslova is
a spiritual mediator who changes her focus from physical to mental and, as a result, unites people
from different social strata, such as the political prisoners, the peasants, and the aristocrat
Nekhliudov, in virtue rather than vice. Because of her successful transformation, Maslova is not
another notch in Tolstoy’s belt of famous female characters but rather a testament to the late
writer’s uncanny ability to liberate his portrayal of the feminine from the sexual and familial
definitions of the nineteenth-century patriarchal narrative.
748
Stanton, “Feminine,” 88.
749
Murav, “Maslova’s,” 39.
356
Conclusion
If, to paraphrase Eikhenbaum, Anna Karenina is Tolstoy’s attempt to create a female
character capable of undermining the traditional love novel of realist literature, then in
Resurrection Tolstoy may be trying to create a female character capable of sustaining a new type
of an ethical novel. Just as the suicide of the infamous Karenina cor