Slot: 29A-2 Dec.
29, 8:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.
Panel: Gender and Identity in Russian
Literature
Chair: Eugenia Kapsomera Amditis, Dickinson
College
Title: Intertextuality and Gender in Zinaida
Gippius’ Play Sacred Blood
Author: Tatiana Osipovich, Lewis and Clark
College
The well-known Symbolist author Zinaida
Gippius (1869-1945) published her first piece for the theatre, a short play
titled Sacred Blood (Sviataia
krov’), in the spring of
1901. Criticized for its unorthodox religious ideas and lack of aesthetic
value, the play was not staged and its text was soon forgotten. Only recently,
in connection with the re-evaluation of Russian women writers, have two English
translations and a few critical papers about the play appeared in print. One of
these papers (C. Schuler: 1995) calls Sacred Blood a feminist text because it presents an
allegory of a woman whom modern society views as a “soulless other” and because
it contains the message that this female “other” has the right to be a “chelovek” with her own unique and immortal soul.
Without disputing Schuler's feminist reading of Gippius’ text, I want to
examine gender aspects of the play from another angle. My claim is that Sacred
Blood reflects Gippius’
inner conflicts at the time she was working on the play: namely, her intense
search for religious meaning and her homosexual relationship with Elizabeth
Overbeck. I am most interested in
comparing Gippius’ play about a little water-nymph with its major literary
source, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid (1837), so I can draw important
differences between the two authors in regard to the gender issues of their
respective eras and the homosexual desires they both struggled with at the time
that they wrote their stories. I hope that the intersection of my psychological
and intertextual readings of the play Sacred Blood will allow me to shed light not only on
this little-known work of early Russian Symbolism, but also on the life of its
author, whose personality still puzzles and fascinates readers and scholars.
Title: The Lioness with a Lion’s Mane: Boris
Pasternak’s “Bisexual” Writing in “Detstvo Ljuvers”
Author: Meghan Vicks, University of Colorado,
Boulder
In “Detstvo Ljuvers” Pasternak places his
own artistic sensibility in an adolescent girl, and therefore creates an
“inter-relationship between the themes of poetic vision and womanly sensitivity
[…]” (Layton 163). This affinity
between Pasternak and Zhenya is based on poetics, on their shared artistic
vision and acuity to the metonymies and metaphors that shape their world; they
share a communion with the other,
with artistic consciousness.
Together they embody the masculine and the feminine, they come together
in a relationship that does not annihilate one or the other but rather embraces
both sexes; thus, it is in this masculine and feminine union that art is
created. As such, this union of
Pasternak and Zhenya into an imaginative consciousness exemplifies the bisexual
artist advocated in the theories of Hélène Cixous. To analyze, then, the awakening of Zhenya and her continual
growth is to witness the coming to awareness of the artist, the portrait of an
artist as a young woman.
Thus, I explore
the relationship between Pasternak’s femininity and Cixous’ theories of
bisexuality. Specifically, I focus
on “Detstvo Ljuvers,” and how this work embodies simultaneously the feminine
and the masculine, thus falling in the line of bisexual writing that Cixous
applauds. I begin with a brief
discussion of Cixous’ theories, and my understanding of the implications of her
ideas. I then turn to “Detstvo
Ljuvers,” and explore how the plot’s structure and the heroine of the story
embody and exhibit both feminine and masculine natures. Finally, throughout the course of this
paper I highlight the bond between the feminine and the artist, and
particularly how knowledge of this relationship enriches our understanding of
Pasternak’s “Detstvo Ljuvers.”
Layton, Susan. “Poetic Vision in Pasternak’s ‘The Childhood of
Luvers.’” The Slavic and East
European Journal. 22.2 (Summer, 1978): 163-174.
Title: The Vision-Adventure of Elena Shvarts's Lavinia
Author: Sarah Clovis Bishop, Wellesley College
Elena Shvarts coined the generic term визьён-приключения (vision-adventures) to describe a verse
structure over which the poet no longer has complete control (Polukhina
207). A "complicated baroque
form" inspired by a supernatural force, it takes on a life of its
own. At the outset, the poet
herself does not know the final destination of the vision, and the lyrics
themselves are better off without her.
Shvarts's 1987
book of poetry Труды и дни Лавинии, монахини из ордена обрезания
сердца [The Works and
Days of Lavinia, a Nun of the Order of the Circumcision of the Heart] serves as the fullest example of a визьён-приключение in Shvarts's work. Her longest poetic cycle, Lavinia consists of seventy-eight short poems
written from the perspective of a fictional nun, at times deeply religious, at
times heretical. Shvarts has
produced a number of other poetic cycles where she takes on the voice of a
fictional poetic persona, but Lavinia remains the most important to her (Shvarts 1996: 108). Distinguishing it from her "small
poemas" and collections of poetry, she has described it as a "novel
in verse, perhaps" (Shvarts 1996:
108).
This paper will
address the nature of Shvarts's "perhaps" to explicate more fully the
formal qualities of the book.
Particular attention will be paid to the book's title, which provides
the ecumenical mission of Lavinia's convent (Circumcision of the Heart), and to
the subtitle, "От Рождества до Пасхи" ["From Christmas to Easter"], a literal and
spiritual timeframe which Lavinia's poetry follows. The paper will conclude with a discussion of the book's
final poem, "Скит,"
which provides a resolution to the many seemingly disjointed threads of the
book.
References
Shvarts, Elena. Mundus imaginalis:
Kniga otvetvlenii. Saint Petersburg: EZRO/Utkonos, 1996.
-------. Opredelenie v durnuiu pogodu.
Saint Petersburg:
Pushkinskii fond, 1997.
Polukhina, Valentina, ed. Brodsky through the Eyes of his
Contemporaries. Saint Petersburg: Zvezda, 1997.