Abstract
The Ideal is unusual in its depiction of the oppressive atmosphere and stultifying routine of life in a provincial garrison town from which its heroine seeks to escape, but otherwise the story is improbable and the style sententious.1
This recent dismissive comment from John Mersereau is, in fact, one of very few remarks of any kind passed on the work of Elena Gan in Western criticism. (Mirsky accords her ten, not very gracious lines.2) This ignorance of Gan’s work, which is only now being redressed, is particularly to be regretted, given that, as Richard Stites has observed, she was ‘one of a number, larger than is commonly held, of cultivated women … who passed the ordinary limits of women’s consciousness of their age to look at the larger world around them’, and thereby anticipated the ‘woman question’ by twenty years.3 In her short life (she died in 1842 at the age of 28), Gan did, indeed, like many writers of svetskiye povesti (society tales),4 place women at the centre of her work. What is striking about her ceuvre, however, is not merely the questions she asked about women’s roles, but also the challenging way she dealt with these problems. In the four works considered here (The Ideal, (1837) The Locket, (1839) Society’s Judgement,5 (1840) and A Futile Gift, (1842)), Gan’s project was to subvert the literary imaging of women, as well as to offer new responses to the questions she was helping to formulate.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See John Mersereau, ‘The nineteenth century, 1820–40’, in C. Moser (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 163.
D. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature (London, 1968), p. 142. The work of Elena Gan has aroused a little more attention in Russia/the Soviet Union, although only three of her works, The Ideal, Society’s Judgement and A Futile Gift, have been republished.
The fullest account of Gan’s work (and life) is H.A. Aplin’s M.S. Zhukova and E.A. Gan. Women Writers and Female Protagonists, 1837–1843. (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, U.E.A., 1988).
For a discussion of this genre, see Aplin, pp. 49–66. The fullest treatment of the subject remains R.V. Iezuitova, ‘Svetskaya Povest’, in Russkaya Povest XIX veka (Leningrad, 1973), pp. 169–99.
All Gan’s work can be found in E.A. Gan, Polnoye Sobranie Sochinenii (St Petersburg, 1905), edited by N.F. Mertz.
The Ideal is more easily accessible in V.I. Sakharov (ed.), Russkaya Romanticheskaya Povest (Moscow, 1980), pp. 435–80 and this is the edition I have used.
For a discussion of this strategy in Chernyshevsky’s novel, see Andrew (1988), pp. 166–7. For a more general discussion of transformation in Chernyshevsky see Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism. A Study in the Semiotics of Behaviour (Stanford, 1988), especially pp. 159–218.
The best account of the conflict between ‘romanticism’ and ‘realism’ in the 1830s is still probably M. Malia, Alexander Herzen and The Birth of Russian Socialism (New York, 1965). See also Andrew (1980), Chapter 4 for a discussion of this tension in Belinsky and Paperno for its lasting legacy (the 1850s–1860s).
M.M. Bakhtin, ‘The Forms of Time and the Chronotopos in the Novel. From the Greek Novel to Modern Fiction’, in PTL. A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature (Vol. 3, No. 3, Oct. 1978, pp. 493–528), p. 493. (This is a translation of excerpts from ‘Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane: ocherki po istoricheskoy poetiki’ in M.M. Bakhtin, Voprosy Literatury i Estetiki (Moscow, 1975), pp. 234–61, 391–407.)
For more recent discussions and applications of the term, see J.J. van Baak, ‘The House in Russian Avantgarde Prose: Chronotope and Archetype’, in Essays in Poetics (Vol. 15, No. 1, April 1990, pp. 1–16)
and J.J. van Baak, ‘“The Guests Gathered at the Dača…”: The Dynamics of a Drawing Room’, in E. de Haard, T. Langerak, W.G. Weststeijn (eds), Semantic Analysis of Literary Texts. To Honour Jan van der Eng on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday (Amsterdam, New York, Oxford, Tokyo, 1990), pp. 51–66.
For a discussion of generic play in the development of Russian prose in the 1830s, see B.M. Eikhenbaum, Lermontov. A Study in Literary-Historical Evaluation (Ann Arbor, 1981), especially pp. 147–71.
For an excellent discussion of this theme in Russian literature, see Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1982), pp. 173–286.
See Andrew (1988) for various discussions of this plot. See also Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel 1722–1782 (New York, 1980), to whom I was (and remain) much indebted.
For an excellent discussion of ‘woman as enigma’ in culture, see Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Desire in Narrative’, in her Alice Doesn’t. Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (London, 1984), pp. 103–57, especially p. 110. See also Jacqueline Rose, op. cit.
A similar discovery is made regarding Germann in The Queen of Spades. See J. Doherty, ‘Fictional Paradigms in Pushkin’s “Pikovaya Dama”’, in Essays in Poetics (Vol. 17, No. 1, 1992).
For a discussion of this plot typology see de Lauretis, op. cit., and Yury Lotman, ‘The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology’, in Poetics Today (Vol. 1, Nos 1–2 (Autumn 1979), pp. 161–84. (I will return in more detail to Gan’s use of this typology in my discussion of Society’s Judgement.)
Miller, The Heroine’s Text, p. 26. See also E.A. Kaplan, ‘Is the Gaze Male?’, in A. Snitow, C. Stansell, S. Thompson (eds), Desire. The Politics of Sexuality (London, 1984), pp. 321–38.
For a discussion of this in nineteenth century literature see G. Gibian, ‘Love by the Book: Pushkin, Stendhal, Raubert’, in Comparative Literature, Vol. VIII (1956), pp. 97–105.
It is also a feature of A Hero of Our Time: see Marie Gilroy, Lermontov’s Ironic Vision (Birmingham Slavonic Monographs, No. 19, 1989), p. 43, where she notes ‘This theatricalisation is a form of hero-worship, a conscious modelling of one’s life on a literary character’. For a fascinating discussion of the interrelationships of ‘Reality — Literature — Reality’, see Paperno, op. cit.
For a fascinating discussion of Tatyana Larina as an anxious female writer, see Diana Burgin, ‘Tatiana Larina’s Letter to Onegin or La Plume Criminelle’, in Essays in Poetics, Vol. 16, No. 2, 1991, pp. 12–23.
This metaphor is one of the most striking instances of Gan’s anticipation of Princess Mary in which Pechorin remarks: ‘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 it in to one’s fill, cast it on the road: perhaps someone will pick it up.’ A Hero of Our Time in M. Yu. Lermontov, Sochineniya, Vol. IV (Leningrad, 1962), p. 401. The metaphor is, of course, a common poeticism, so direct borrowing/influence is not necessarily what’s happening here.
For a discussion of this topos in The Queen of Spades, see Yury Lotman, ‘Theme and Plot. The Theme of Cards and the Card Game in Russian Literature of the Nineteenth Century’ in PTL. A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature, Vol. 3, No. 3, Oct. 1978, pp. 455–92. (This article was first published in Russian in Trudy po znakovym sistemam, VII, Tartu, 1975, pp. 120–42.)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1993 Joe Andrew
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Andrew, J. (1993). Elena Gan and A Futile Gift. In: Narrative and Desire in Russian Literature, 1822–49. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22679-5_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22679-5_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-22681-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-22679-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)