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11-1-2013
Remarkable Russian Women in Pictures, Prose and
Poetry
Marcelline Hutton
[email protected]
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Remarkable Russian Women
in Pictures, Prose and Poetry
N
Marcelline Hutton
Many Russian women of the late 19th and early 20th centuries tried to
find happy marriages, authentic religious life, liberal education, and ful-
filling work as artists, doctors, teachers, and political activists. Some
very remarkable ones found these things in varying degrees, while oth-
ers sought unsuccessfully but no less desperately to transcend the genera-
tions-old restrictions imposed by church, state, village, class, and gender.
Like a Slavic “Downton Abbey,” this book tells the stories, not just of their
outward lives, but of their hearts and minds, their voices and dreams,
their amazing accomplishments against overwhelming odds, and their
roles as feminists and avant-gardists in shaping modern Russia and, in-
deed, the twentieth century in the West. It covers poets and writers such
as Evdokiia Rostopchina, Nina Berberova, Nadezhda Sokhanskay, Karo-
lina Pavlova, Elena Gan, Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, Anastasia Verbits-
kaya, Anna Akhamatova, Maria Tsvetaeva, Mirra Lokhvitskaya, Olga Fre-
idenberg; free-thinkers like Zinaida Gippius, Elena Blavatsky; diarists and
memoirists like Countess Sofia and Tatiana Tolstoya, Anna Dostoevsky,
Nadezhda Durova, Agrippina Korevanova, Ludmila Stahl, Elena Skrja-
bina; artists Natalya Goncharova, Anna O. Lebedeva, Zinaida Serebria-
kova, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova, Liubov Popova, and Aleksan-
dra Ekster; adventuresses (military or sexual) Maria Botchkareva, Natalia
Sheremetevskaya, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna; doctors Anna Bek and
Vera Figner; revolutionaries and reformers like Nadezhda Krupskaya, Ce-
cilia Bobrovskaya, Vera Broido, Alexandra Kollontai, Catherine Bresh-
kovsky, Konkordia Samoilova, Maria Golubeva, Tatyana Ludvinskaya,
and Cecilia Bobrovskaya.
In their own words and images, and each in their own unique way, these
remarkable Russian women construct a fascinating tapestry of a culture
at the crossroads of modernity and on the brink of catastrophe—a thrill-
ing tour of an age when everything seemed possible and none could truly
imagine what lay in store.
Marcelline Hutton is the author of Russian and West European Women,
1860-1939: Dreams, Struggles, and Nightmares (2001) and Falling in Love
with the Baltics: A Travel Memoir (2009).
Cover: Zinaida Serebriakova, “Self Portrait: At the Dressing Table” (1909)
ISBN 978-1-60962-045-5 ebook
Zea Books, Lincoln, Nebraska
Remarkable
Russian Women
in Pictures,
Prose and
Poetry
N
Marcelline Hutton
Zea Books
Lincoln, Nebraska
2013
AaAaAaAaAaAaAa
Copyright © 2013 Marcelline Hutton.
All rights reserved.
isbn 978-1-60962-044-8 paperback
isbn 978-1-60962-045-5 ebook
Set in Palatino Linotype types.
Design and composition by Paul Royster.
Zea Books are published by
the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries
Electronic (pdf) ebook edition available online at
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/
Print edition can be ordered from Lulu.com, at
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/unllib
Preface
I first fell in love with 19th century Russia as a teenager after see-
ing the film “War and Peace,” starring Audrey Hepburn and Mel Fer-
rer After reading Leo Tolstoy’s novel on which the movie was based,
I was even more smitten with Russian culture. When I took a Russian
history course in college, my lifelong love affair with Russian His-
tory began and continued into graduate school and beyond.
Part of the attraction of Russian History was its sense of “Other-
ness.” It was grander than anything I had known living in the Mid-
west. Moscow and St. Petersburg, as described by Leo Tolstoy and
Fedor Dostoevsky, were more exotic than places I had ever known.
Russian culture also attracted me because it was more expressive
than the subdued Nordic culture in Northern Indiana where I grew
up. Only years later did I realize that Russian History embodied not
only great mercy, tenderness, and promise, but terrible sadness, suf-
fering, and cruelty as well.
During my studies at the University of Iowa from 1962-1987, I
found Russian women, their writings, and history more and more
fascinating. I was impressed by their social and political challenges
to the status quo. Their personal achievements and troubles also at-
tracted me. I wrote my Master’s Thesis on the “Woman Question”
in the 1860s, following it with a dissertation entitled “Russian and
Soviet Women, 1860-1939: Dreams, Struggles, and Nightmares.” My
first book was entitled Russian and West European Women, 1860-1939:
Dreams, Struggles and Nightmares. This book covered patterns in
Russian women’s social, educational, political, and economic lives.
However, it didn’t reveal a lot about their personal lives.
In contrast, this book Remarkable Russian Women in Pictures, Prose
and Poetry provides glimpses into women’s hearts and minds in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. It reveals more about their quests
for happy marriages, search for authentic religious life, and desire
for education and fulfilling work serving poor peasants and workers
as doctors, teachers, and political activists. In many ways, 19th cen-
tury Russian women’s complaints about unhappy marriages resem-
ble modern American women’s. Some experienced emptiness, alien-
3
remarkable russian women
ation, and even the squandering of their fortunes by unscrupulous
husbands. Female poets spoke of their lyrical loves as well as their
romantic and marital failures. They criticized their society’s tradi-
tion of arranged marriage. Several severely judged their country’s
political oppression in their poems and were punished. The lives of
these women writers as well as gentry-class women like Countess
Sofia Tolstoy sometimes resembled the arranged marriages depicted
in the recent PBS series “Downton Abbey.” Where possible, this
book showcases the voices and art of women writers, painters, doc-
tors, revolutionaries, peasants, workers, wives, and mothers across
several decades, making them visible and their words heard.
Middle and upper-class Russian women left many kinds of
written records—novels, poetry, diaries, autobiographies, and inter-
views. Some of their writings portray a Russian twist to idyllic Eng-
lish gentry-class life depicted in “Downton Abbey.” Some of their
critiques of marriage highlighted the pilfering of their dowries and
the ruining of their personal lives by profligate, philandering hus-
bands. Still, most women in all classes wanted the respectability that
marriage offered, and most married. However, some rebelled and
wanted different sorts of lives. Some from all classes sought the re-
ligious life as nuns or pilgrims. Some found fulfillment in careers
such as writing, painting, teaching, medicine, even political activity.
A gifted generation of late 19th and early 20th century women
artists known as the Avant-Garde has left an impressive legacy of
paintings and illustrations. They portray an array of self-portraits as
well as paintings of peasants and working-class women. Much of
their work featured abstract paintings, stage designs for innovative
theatrical productions, even costume designs for modern ballets.
Wedding laments and folk songs give us a look into illiterate
peasant and working-class women’s lives, revealing some of their
struggles in those epochs. From our perspective, many peasant
and working-class women seemed to live lives of quiet desperation
and drudgery. Yet, who knows the solace they found in respectable
married life and motherhood or the pride they took in their hard
work on family farms or in factories. Their survival during the dark
days of the 1891 famine, the industrial revolution, WW I, the Rev-
olutions of 1905 and 1917 attest to their remarkable endurance in
4
preface
not merely existing, but even thriving and producing children dur-
ing hard times. Women’s roles as wife, mother, and provider dur-
ing the harsh circumstances of the late 19th and early 20th centuries
were remarkable.
The present book emerges from many influences. One was Ser-
gei Prokudin-Gorsky’s impressive color photographs of Russian
women prior to World War I. His dramatic pictures show strong
peasant women working in the fields, charming peasant girls
dressed in holiday frocks, and thoughtful women at rural chapels.
Pictures from the Russian Film and Photo Archive in St. Petersburg
also show women at home, work, and in society. Wikimedia also
supplies some wonderful photographs of Russian icons, Russian re-
ligious and political processions, as well as pictures of famous Rus-
sian women writers, artists, wives, and revolutionaries. Striking
paintings in the Russian State Art Museum in St. Petersburg also in-
fluenced me. Teaching at Lithuania Christian College in Klaipeda,
Lithuania, from 2000 to 2007 enabled me to visit this museum sev-
eral times and become familiar with its holdings. Pictures of cultural
figures like poet Anna Akhmatova and dancer Anna Pavlova, as
well as paintings by Natalia Goncharova and others captivated me.
Mikhail Nesterov’s painting “The Great Taking of the Vows,” fasci-
nated me with its beautiful young nuns. Some of Natalia Goncharo-
va’s works depicted powerful women workers and peasants. All of
them excited me because I had not been familiar with them when I
wrote my dissertation and first book on Russian Women.
Yet another influence is the large body of Russian women’s liter-
ature and history that Slavic scholars have made available to Amer-
ican readers in the past few decades. It was my privilege to meet
and get to know translators and linguists such as Joe Andrew, Toby
Clyman, Helena Goscilo, Diana Greene, Birgitta Ingemanson, Mary
Zirin and others at the annual Slavic Summer Laboratory held at
the University of Illinois in the summers during the 1980s. A host
of social historians has also enriched our knowledge of Russian
women. Again, I was fortunate to meet Martha Bohachevsky-Cho-
miak, Ann Kleimola, David Ransell, Bernice Rosenthal, Christine
Ruane, Rochelle Ruthchild, Richard Stites, Isabel Tirado, Christine
Worobec and others at the Summer Laboratory and at various his-
5
remarkable russian women
torical conferences. Their hard work and that of many others cited
in the Notes helped make this volume possible. I want to make
some of this scholarly material about Russian women available to
non-specialists.
Jackie Bartz, a colleague at LCC, read my first book Russian
and West European Women, 1860-1939: Dreams, Struggles, and Night-
mares, and she mentioned how much she liked the quotations of
the women writers. Since the book was rather long, I had shortened
many of the quotes, but decided the present study can include long
ones to give readers better examples of women’s voices. Of course,
there are “filters” and limitations in using personal, historical
sources. Those who wrote diaries, autobiographies, and memoirs
were usually educated, unusual women. Sometimes women wrote
in their diaries when they were depressed, and we can’t assume
that their lives were always as miserable as depicted. This is espe-
cially true of Countess Sofia Tolstoy, who often complained about
her depression and desire to end her life. Yet, if we look at photo-
graphs from the same time period, she often looks quite happy and
engaged, so perhaps the pictures cloaked her real misery.
In both the Tsarist and Soviet periods, government censors im-
posed boundaries on writers. Women sometimes also dealt with in-
ner social censors which tempered what and how they wrote. So,
let the reader remember that women’s publications are their per-
ceptions of reality and their feelings at the time they wrote. Their
works are incomplete, but valuable, historical records. All these con-
straints, as well as the availability and limitations of the holdings at
the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where I lived and did my re-
search from 2009-2013, as well as my own personal choices and un-
derstandings of Russian history have shaped the depictions of Rus-
sian women presented in this book. I have tried to include not only
famous Russian women, but also ordinary ones whose writings
have been preserved and are available to English speakers.
My fifty year study of Russian Literature and History has re-
vealed fantastic pluck and perseverance among Russian women.
I also resonated with some of the themes and crises in these wom-
en’s lives and careers, finding them remarkably similar to my own
struggles as a married graduate student and mother at the Uni-
6
preface
versity of Iowa in the 1960s and later decades. Who isn’t moved
by the idealism of the intelligentsia, the plight of Russian peas-
ant women, or the exploitation of working-class women a century
ago? The work most poor women did for their families’ survival
was phenomenal.
Material for this book sometimes emerged from unexpected
sources. Russian ethnographers have provided folksongs of 19th and
early 20th century peasant and working-class women, so that we can
“hear” their voices. In addition to Russian women’s personal writ-
ings, there are also English and American women journalists, gov-
ernesses, and translators who speak of the late Tsarist period.
7
Description:Many Russian women of the late 19th and early 20th centuries tried to find happy marriages, authentic religious life, liberal education, and fulfilling work as artists, doctors, teachers, and political activists. Some very remarkable ones found these things in varying degrees, while others sought un
