Abstract
Since its re-emergence as an important cultural and political force in the late 1960s, feminism has presented ‘incontestably the most important challenge’1 in recent years to accepted academic approaches to literary studies. In the course of the last two decades several ‘feminisms’, indeed, have emerged, but each in its own way may be said to have the aim of radically reinterpreting established literary practices, strategies and analyses. The purpose of this present study fits into this tendency, namely, to reinterpret three influential texts from late eighteenth-century Russian literature from a feminist perspective. Central to this enterprise will be the notion that literary texts have an impact on contemporary and later audiences’ perceptions about the perceived world, including such matters as the roles of women in society. This impact occurs irrespective of the author’s intentions. By re-reading the ‘classics’ in this way we achieve two things: we see the image of women in a particular culture, and we derive a new perspective on the world of the work concerned and, consequently, on the effect it had, and has, on women’s roles, expectations and so on.
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Notes and References
K. K. Ruthven, Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction, Cambridge, 1984, p. 7. See this work passim for a general discussion of the developments in feminist literary criticism.
S. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, London, 1972, p. 162. The relevance and power of a feminist analysis is admirably conveyed by Ruthven: ‘To read a canonical text in a feminist way is to force that text to reveal its hidden sexual ideology which… tends not to be mentioned in non-feminist criticism’ (p. 31).
The best analyses of the origins and theory of patriarchal hegemony are probably still those of J. S. Mill and Engels: J. S. Mill, On the Subjugation of Women, London, 1869,
and F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, London, 1972. See also de Beauvoir.
L. Althusser, ‘Ideology and State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London, 1977, pp. 121–73.
An excellent, and personal account of this process is given by Rachel M. Brownstein in Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels, Harmondsworth, 1984. A powerful account of the problems involved for young ladies reading novels is presented in the Russian context in Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin.
J. V. Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process, Oxford, 1981, p. 24.
See L. M. O’Toole, Structure, Style and Interpretation in the Russian Short Story, New Haven, London, 1982, and The Structural Analysis of Russian Narrative Fiction (Essays in Poetics Publications, 1), ed. J. Andrew, Keele, 1984.
For a discussion of this period and its culture, see The Eighteenth Century in Russia, ed. J. Garrard, Oxford, 1973,
and H. Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia, Cambridge, Mass., 1960.
For a discussion of these two terms, see H. M. Nebel, N. M. Karamzin: A Russian Sentimentalist, The Hague, 1967,
and G. S. Smith, ‘Sentimentalism and Pre-Romanticism as Terms and Concepts’, in Russian Literature in the Age of Catherine the Great, ed. A. G. Cross, Oxford, 1976, pp. 173–89.
All references to this work are taken from D. I. Fonvizin, Nedorosl’, in Sobranie sochinenii v dvukh tomakh, vol. 1, ed. G. P. Makogonenko, Moscow, Leningrad, 1959, pp. 105–78. Page references are given in parentheses in the text.
See D. J. Welsh, Russian Comedy: 1765–1823, The Hague, 1966.
See N. K. Miller, The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722–1782, New York, 1980, p. xi, for an excellent discussion of the vulnerability of the traditional heroine.
See J. Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter’s Seduction, London, 1982, pp. 74–5, for a discussion of the symbolic and psychoanalytical interpretation of the Father and his ‘Law’.
See p. 140 of the text for a description of Prostakova’s family background. The theme of the benighted, brutal family in rural Russia was to prove enduring: see, for example, A. N. Ostrovskii’s The Thunderstorm (1859)
and Chekhov’s The Peasants (1897).
For a discussion of this model of female relationships, see S. M. Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, London, 1980, pp. 43–4.
See M. Ellmann, Thinking About Women, New York, 1968, p. 74ff.
M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York, 1977, p. 27.
For a discussion of labelling in literature, see T. Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression, Baltimore, London, 1979, pp. 346–54,
and M. Daly, God the Father, Boston, 1973, p. 47.
All references to this work are taken from A. N. Radishchev, Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Moscow, Leningrad, 1938; reprinted, ed. I. K. Lupol et al., Vaduz, 1969, pp. 225–392. Page references are given in parentheses in the text.
Pushkin, ‘Alexander Radishchev’, in Pushkin on Literature, trans. and ed. T. Woolf, London, 1971, p. 390.
For a discussion of the depiction of women in de Sade, see A. Carter, The Sadeian Woman, London, 1979.
For a discussion of a ‘typical’ eighteenth-century rake, see L. Stone on Boswell in The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800, London, 1977, pp. 350–78.
A. G. Cross, N. M. Karamzin, Carbondale, 1971, p. 103.
All references to this work are taken from N. M. Karamzin, Bednaya Liza, in Izbrannye sochineniya v dvukh tomakh, vol. 1, ed. P. Berkov, Moscow, Leningrad, 1964, pp. 605–21. Page references are given in parentheses in the text.
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, Princeton, 1977, p. 117. Showalter is referring to Jane Eyre.
Pechorin, an unreconstructed rake, makes the following illuminating comment about his relations with women: ‘But surely there is a boundless pleasure in the possession of a young, scarcely burgeoned soul! It is like a flower whose finest aroma evaporates at the first ray of sunlight; one must pick it at this moment, and, breathing in to one’s fill, cast it on the road: perhaps someone will pick it up.’ (M. Yu. Lermontov, Geroi nashego vremeni, in Sochineniya, vol. 4, Leningrad, 1962, p. 401.)
E. G. Belotti, Little Girls, London, 1975, p. 102, quoted in A. Oakley, Subject Women, London, 1982, p. 109.
For an extended discussion of this interconnection, see L. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, New York, 1960.
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© 1989 Catriona Helen Moncrieff Kelly, Michael Laurence Makin and David George Shepherd
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Andrew, J. (1989). Radical Sentimentalism or Sentimental Radicalism? A Feminist Approach to Eighteenth-Century Russian Literature. In: Kelly, C., Makin, M., Shepherd, D. (eds) Discontinuous Discourses in Modern Russian Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19849-8_7
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