P , S S URE TRONG AND EXLESS P W ’ B THE EASANT OMAN S ODY G U AND LEB SPENSKY S TUDIES IN S L LAVIC ITERATURE P AND OETICS V XLIII OLUME Edited by J.J. van Baak R. Grübel A.G.F. van Holk W.G. Weststeijn P , S S URE TRONG AND EXLESS P W ’ B THE EASANT OMAN S ODY G U AND LEB SPENSKY Henrietta Mondry Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006 3 Acknowledgements Some of these chapters have already appeared in earlier versions, and permission to use that material here has been granted by The Russian Review (Vol. 63. no. 3), Slavic and East European Journal (Vol 41, no. 3 and Vol. 47, no. 2). Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1828-3 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006 Printed in the Netherlands Table of contents Introduction 7 Chapter 1 “Daydreams”: the quest for social gender changes or a new type of beauty? 29 Chapter 2 “In a Woman’s Position”: truncated sexuality in young women and teenage boys 49 Chapter 3 How ‘straight’ is the Venus de Milo? Shaping gender in stone sculpture 65 Chapter 4 “A Good Russian type”: in search of a new masculinity 81 Chapter 5 Peasant sexuality and demonic possession 95 Chapter 6 “She Stopped!”: moral rebirth through hard labor 113 Chapter 7 Children: necessary evil or product of divine will? 133 Chapter 8 The sacred egg: a symbol of human procreation 151 Chapter 9 The final testimony: “Peasant Women” 167 Conclusion 181 Appendix: The Diary of Doctor B. N. Sinani: a record of Gleb Uspensky’s illness Translator’s introduction by Henrietta Mondry 189 Preface to the Diary by publisher Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich 193 The Diary of Doctor B. N. Sinani 195 Bibliography 273 Index 285 This page intentionally left blank Introduction Within the study of the representation of peasant gender in Russia there is a clear area of neglect: the portrayal of peasant women’s bodies in the work of the narodniki, or populist, writers.1 Their writing offers fertile ground not only for an exploration of the life and belief systems of peasant communities, but also for an investigation into sexuality and gender in Russian culture. Especially conspicuous in studies of body politics, peasant gender and sexuality is the absence of work on Gleb Uspensky (1843– 1902), an extremely prolific writer who devoted all of his numerous stories, sketches and notes to the representation of the lives of peasants in the 1870s and 1890s.2 This book aims to help fill this lacuna in Russian cultural history. In the history of Russian populist thought Gleb Uspensky occupies a unique position. Unlike other populists of his time, who sought to educate the people of rural Russia, he reversed the process and brought information about the life, language and customs of peasant communities to the Russian intelligentsia, disseminating knowledge through his numerous stories and sketches of peasant life.3 These prose pieces were highly valued by his literary contemporaries for their detailed accounts of the lifestyle, customs, habits and socio- economic problems of the Russian village, and for the totality of its byt presented there.4 Since the reading public was largely unfamiliar with life in rural Russia in the period following the great reforms of 1861, Uspensky’s writings, grouped into series such as “Krest’ianin i krest’ianskii trud” (“The Peasant and Peasant Labor”, 1880), and “Vlast’ zemli” (“The Power of the Soil”, 1882), were studied closely for their ethnographic content. His work was favorably received by many members of the contemporary intelligentsia because, while illustrating the negative effects of free market enterprise on the agricultural communities of the 1870s and 1880s, they avoided the ideologically dominant viewpoint of the early Russian populists and their romanticization of the Russian muzhiks. In particular, his sober skepticism regarding the motives behind the economic choices made 8 by the peasantry distinguished Uspensky from contemporaries such as Vera Figner and Vera Zasulich who invariably idealized the Russian peasant.5 Unlike these well-known revolutionary activists, Uspensky combined emotional identification with objectivity. So respected were Uspensky’s ocherki (sketches) that they became an important source of information even for Georgii Plekhanov and Lenin6 who based their ideas of the economic situation of the Russian peasant partly on these works.7 Perceptions of Uspensky the man have previously been dominated by the political and socio-economic aspects of his ocherki and by the legend which arose around his mental illness, which occurred towards the end of his life. This legend, which claimed that the illness had been brought on by his deep compassion for the “insulted and humiliated” people of Russian society, may have added to Uspensky’s fame, but it did not contribute to an appreciation of the literary qualities of his oeuvre, nor their thematic variety. His status as a glorified political persona, combined with the classification of his ocherki as purely journalistic accounts and social tracts, ultimately led to the neglect of the deeper and genuinely creative layers of meaning in his work.8 Central to this text are Gleb Uspensky’s ideas on the woman’s body, which put him at the vanguard of contemporary discourse on Russian sexuality, in which his work can be viewed as a precursor to more well-known debates on this subject. As a writer he systematically addressed a range of issues linked to sexuality— abortion, prostitution, infanticide, venereal disease and adultery, long before matters of sexuality were articulated by the culture of the Russian Silver Age (Vasily Rozanov, Nikolai Berdiaev, Pavel Florensky, the symbolists). In addition, Uspensky addressed the topic of gender differences, using the relationships between the sexes in peasant communities as source material.9 Yet his interest in the status of the women of rural Russia remains an understudied aspect of Uspensky’s work.10 Uspensky often depicted peasant women as strong, energetic, hard working and manly in their physique. Bourgeois women, on the other hand, were presented as “feminine” to the point of helplessness. Uspensky believed that, in order to develop their economic independence and escape male tyranny, bourgeois women should aim to be as physically strong as their peasant counterparts. He developed this view in a number of his ocherki and stories, in which he pointed out that bourgeois women’s lifestyle—with its lack of exercise, its reliance on 9 domestic help and its frequent dieting to maintain the approved body shape, combined with the lack of financial independence that necessitated what he regarded as the sexual slavery of marriage—had created a class of women which was completely dependent on men. On the other hand, he claimed, peasant women were practical, strong and able to support themselves and their children even in widowhood.11 Uspensky’s interest in the women of rural Russia went beyond socio-economic concerns, however. He also expressed an intense preoccupation with the gendered body. This study will demonstrate that Uspensky attempted to resolve a whole complex of problems linked to human sexuality through a process of de-sexing the peasant woman’s body. Quasi-androgynous, these bodies stand as precursors to the much favoured androgynous bodies of Silver Age culture (Matich 1979, 2005). Uspensky’s peasant women’s bodies can also be construed as prototypes of the utopian bodies of early post- Soviet discourse on sexuality, which explored the sublimation of sexuality and the channelling of energy for the common cause (Naiman 1997). Uspensky criticized Vera Figner’s idealization of the Russian peasant, and dubbed her ideal a “chocolate muzhik”. However, while he noted the sentimentalization of peasants in his fellow populists, he himself was involved in the project of creating utopian peasant women bodies, and the search for an adequate substitute for the flesh. Not only did Uspensky focus on such topics as peasant prostitution, the spread of venereal disease and the moral disintegration of the peasant community, but also his own biography presents a life affected by venereal disease: that his own mental illness was caused by syphilis has been well-established (Grombakh 1939). His contemporaries, including his psychiatrists, censored information about his having contracted syphilis as a young man, and so great was their admiration for his deeds and his contribution to the populist cause, that they refused to recognize the link between the syphilis and his mental illness to which he succumbed in the last ten years of his life.12 Instead, the accepted view was that his illness was caused by his compassionate nature and exhaustion from hard work. This view is promulgated by commentators up to the present day, as seen in Orlando Figes’ cultural history of Russia, Natasha's Dance (2002). Indeed, so little is known of Uspensky’s case that Irina Sirotkina’s monograph Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880–1930 (2002), which describes Russian