Оригинал материала
TALES FROM VOLOGDA
by Galina Shchekina, member of the Union of Russian Writers and of the regional Women’s League, founder of the Arba feminist club for women, and correspondent with the magazine Meson
Official data on gender statistics are very sparse. There is, for instance, a publication called Men and Women, which was first published in Vologda in 2000 with assistance from the Statistics Sweden, the Swedish Central Bureau of Statistics. This, the first experiment of its kind, is a showcase of international cooperation. All the data is given in summary form: employment numbers by commercial sector, unemployment, crime, wages and salaries—all grist for the serious analyst’s mill. But there is nothing at all on the media. And one might well wonder if any sociological organization has the slightest interest in this subject. Well, they might have, but it would cost them. Consider, now—a set of these volumes costs 160 rubles, and in cultural institutions (83% women, 17% men) average salaries run between 946 and 1168 rubles a month.
There are about 40 newspapers in the region, and they are, with very few exceptions, headed by men. The Vologda regional newspaper is edited by V. Ekhalova. There is also Natalya Polishchuk, a very fine lady, who is not letting the grass grow under her feet. First she edited a wide-circulation periodical, then she became the editor of the city newspaper that she herself founded. Then there’s Elena Shershen, head of the Internal Affairs Administration’s regional press center. And Tatyana Prilezhaeva, editor of the regional classified-ad newspaper, Vologda Week.
I believe that as time goes by, women journalists, writers, and social activists are less and less worried by censorship. Those who want to express themselves will find a way to do it—although admittedly not in any periodical published in Vologda. If Elena Yushkova cannot find a regional publisher, she reaches out successfully to the Moscow periodicals (Mutual News). But more often it is the women themselves who balk; their internal censor kicks in. Either they become ad copywriters, producing copiously and well for good money, or they give up serious writing altogether.
By and large, it is hard to discriminate between the region’s newspapers these days. The number of party-affiliated newspapers is growing. But, as always, the most interesting stuff is happening in the realm of samizdat, underground publication. It is a truism around here that samizdat—especially journalistic samizdat—is blooming, absolutely thriving in Vologda. But there would be no need for that if everything could be published in the regular press.
- The samizdat periodicals of note are Voskresensky Avenue (a literary journal published in Cherepovets), Chronograph (for collectors and art buffs, published in Vologda), Autograph (also literary, also Vologda), Meson (socio-cultural, Vologda), and The Dragonfly (a literary journal for young people, Vologda). ...
It is very interesting to trace the changes in the way that women journalists present women, even if we restrict our examples to Vologda alone. Remember, now, that I am talking here only about writers who began as journalists. And I will name names, too: Elena Yushkova (Steps, Red North, Russian North), Tatyana Sopina (Sukhona Riverman, Vologda Bearing, Vologda News), Nina Avdyushkina (Russian North), Elena Volkova (Vologda Bearing, regional radio), Olga Kuznetsova (the Transmit radio station, Commercial Bulletin, Vologda Week), and Galina Shchekina (Vologda Bearing and work as a stringer on various other Vologda periodicals). If a woman can’t express herself creatively in a newspaper, there’s no one stopping her from doing so in a book.
A one-off piece in a newspaper doesn’t require a whole lot of psychologizing. A few lines, a story arc and it’s done, and nestles snugly between reports on financial scams and the latest to-do in the forestry industry. But no one is keeping an eagle eye on images presented in a book. An author has all the free rein she needs. Yet what results is not a particularly encouraging picture. The images of women that women writers produce are for the most part unattractive, and a detached observer can easily consign them to one of three categories: 1) looking for love (a consumer item) 2) predatory (aggressive) 3) betrayed (a victim) and lost Nina Avdyushkina’s heroines debuted in the newspaper Russian North and then made a smooth transition to the prose anthology Comme il faut. The series of pieces written for Russian North were unassuming little slices of life and so the book covers familiar ground—narrative vignettes, typical situations... and the image of women as a consumer item.
In “One More Autumn,” a girl with a braid is betrayed by the man she loves, who makes audio recordings of their amorous encounters and plays them for his friends. “Name-day of the Heart”... an egoist and another victim. “Everything’s Going to Be All Right”... a quarrel and a party where the heroine is almost raped... While the men are described, at least to some extent, the women are as alike as mannequins—all young, lonely, miserable, all blonde, as luck would have it. Their much-of-a-muchness is not as noticeable in the newspaper, where the stories are published every week or two, but when you see them all together, it’s like a clone convention. Or perhaps they represent an average girlish synthesis. Still as images go, you can’t exactly call it a sterling achievement.
Then there’s a rather stronger character, the “happy” Zhenka, who takes Moscow “by storm.” She becomes an out-call escort, which makes that happiness of hers quite a stretch for the reader. “A Romance by Mail” portrays a self-assured femme fatale (the predatory type) loved by an old university professor, literally to death (“some little blood vessel or other gave out”). But you are left wondering why he loved her, what made her so loveable. The reader is given nary a hint, since the story is all about banquets and crowds of admirers, which gives us little or nothing by way of character description. The plot is no more than a catalog (not even a description) of events. But one thing in it is only too obvious: success in this life comes to heartless women, female predators (type number two). First they are victimized, then they get angry and turn into harpies. Even a heroine by the name of Dasha in “Comme il faut,” the story that gave the book its title, is trapped by this norm. Long accustomed to her husband’s infidelities, she brings home a lover of her own, sparking a general confrontation. The characters’ misery and devastation grab the reader and won’t let go. All hope has fled. Everything is destroyed. The negative overpowers the book, although a mild wistfulness would have suited the original concept perfectly well. These newspaper-type stories are highly instructive, being less pieces of polished prose than reports straight from the police blotter. Conceptualization and personal involvement could have helped but, alas, you will find no such thing here. A habituation to the schematic has wrecked everything. If we had been dealing with one heroine, she might have learned at least a little something from her mistakes, but since one story ends and another begins, we’re taken through the whole thing all over again and quantity never makes the quantum leap to quality. While a newspaper imposes strict space limitations and an author has no such restrictions in a book, minds have clearly become fixated on the newspaper readership. It was the poet Mikhail Sopin who told me about this. He had a name for the situation in which a writer writes only to win public approval. He called it “self-flimflam.” It is an insidious thing. Several prose works by the journalist Tatyana Sopina—The Ends of the Earth, Invisible, Adventures of a Manuscript in a Disintegrating Age, and The White Cliff—have been published in Vologda in recent years. These are lightly fictionalized memoirs, and they grew out of the fact that there was no self-realization to be had in the brief commentaries they were paying her to write. An interest in people and a tenacious memory motivated Sopina to write prose that would not be over and done with in a day. It is no accident that her first book was entitled Invisible and was written in memory of Boris Gashev, the poet from Perm. The heroine herself is hardly described at all. Her tragedy is unrequited love. And the more tenderness and romance she puts into that love, the more disastrous the results. She is a good listener, a subtle soul, a literary talent, and all of this just compounds her confusion and her grief. She was raised on the ideals of the Russian sixties, which were fine at the time but make her look ludicrous now. Let us not forget, though, that this image is one of almost documentary authenticity. This is confession. A reflection of the times. In The White Cliff, a collection of stories, Sopina broadens the range of female images, but they are all plagued by the same flaw seen in Invisible, being mere ciphers and almost completely unvisualized. We can judge them only by their deeds; they all suffer from PLS—plot-line syndrome. The one that stands out is Nina, in “The Mistake.” Nina is a talented woman whose life in a slum with a former prison inmate destroys her. There is one commotion after another, but still she doesn’t leave him. The latent opportunity to portray a complex nonconformist is never realized, and the story has all the verve of a legal opinion. All that remains is a sarcastic one-liner from Lesha, the ex-prisoner: “These b**ches fancy themselves poets—another Akhmatova, a new Tsvetaeva.” And Nina takes that with her to the grave. Lidiya, another Sopina heroine, is a classic “wife-in-waiting.” Clever, pretty, a good cook, she is in love with a retired colonel. But she cannot appear with him in public, cannot go to the beach with him. Not because he’s angry with her, but simply because he is a master and she is a servant. The further you read, the madder you get. It is almost the kind of feminist story that makes you want to take to the streets. But there’s the rub. These Sopina pieces have not yet grown into stories; they are physiological essays (to quote Ruth Rafalovich, a Meson staffer).
Had Sopina so desired, she could have worked these notes up into a fictionalized research study. But that has not happened yet.
The most fully described heroine is Tanechka, a young artist in The White Cliff’s title story. Tanechka’s inner self is rich and tangible; the world is seen from her point of view, and every detail is unique. She is a composite of the author’s freshness, perception, and wisdom, a documentary character, a blast from the past, a product of the sixties in every way. Talking about it, you find people forced to envy her for just having lived when she did.
The logical continuation of this series of beginnings are Galina Shchekina’s more modern heroines (in “The Little Door,” “Melissa,” “Aria,” “Graphomaniette”—in Russian, even the titles are in the feminine gender). The basic occupation of her earlier heroines is to give birth at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Those women are too physiological and at the same time easy prey. One of them (“Children from the Mailbox”) even ends up with twins from a random liaison, making no effort to contact the children’s father or talk to him. Then his mother arrives and the two women become inseparable, leaving the actual perpetrator out in the cold.
Though the “feminist” conspiracy is not bad, it makes no one happy. The heroine is a typical victim. Other victims of circumstance, who seem to differ from the twin’s mother at first glance, are Shura (“Ira, Gera, Shura”), Lera (“Found and Lost”), Gera (“Allergy”)—all alike as peas in a pod—and even the heroine of “Graphomaniette,” whose name is Laricheva. Yes, the writing career she has chosen is littered with pitfalls; yes, she is overwhelmed by her friend Zabugina, her husband, her children, other writers, her writing, her unsuccessful personal life, which is all tangled up with guys called Batogov and Nezdeshny, and the fortunes of Upkholova, a fellow-writer...
It is all so dismal and sad that in the end she falls apart, stops writing, turns away from the one thing that brings beauty to her life. Some heroines yield to public approval, but Laricheva gives in to public condemnation. The story thus takes serious issue not only with a social system that drives a woman to despair but also with the woman herself, for being a typical victim and a bubblehead and not being prepared to fight for her own self. One has no difficulty identifying the journalistic influence on the portrait of Laricheva. The book’s parent-teacher meetings, seminars, commentaries on films and shows resemble nothing so much as little essays, set pieces. There is no sense of a rich inner life. But this is at least an attempt to raise the question of the woman’s place in the modern world.
- Let us not lose sight of the fact that these women are, by and large, doing just fine, with children, a husband, a job, a roof over their heads. But the something that is missing spoils it all. The most powerful personality is Olga Averyanovna (“Sonny Boy”), who finds the strength not only to raise a good son but also to understand her own terrible role in his personal drama. Melissa, the romantic eponymous heroine, Lisa Kotorgina the Pioneer (“Kamyshin at the Low Point”), and Corinna in “Arrested on the Spot” are all, sad to say, no more than variations on a theme of victimization.
The most intellectual modern women are found in Elena Yushkova’s Flying to the Light. One example is a heroine who wants to study psychoanalysis (in the really rather feminist story “The Consultation,” which also appeared in the Dragonfly almanac). But she comes up against men who have no insight into people at all and yet still have the nerve to go about telling others what to do. This heroine is stronger and more intelligent than any man and is justly proud of this. She has a good head on her shoulders.
Sveta (the heroine of “A Moth Flying to the Light”) is drawn, body and soul, to Natasha, a colorful friend around whom the narrative actually revolves. To her, Natasha seems to represent the ideal of freedom. She works where she wants and if she doesn’t want, she doesn’t work at all. Natasha, though, is feverishly flying not towards the light but towards her latest stud. At some point we are told, almost parenthetically, that she is married and is raising a son between affairs. Looking for love—that she is; all physiology—that she is. But what about her personal qualities, her character traits? Her cruelty grows, and the role that poor Sveta must play simply confirms that these have two of our types, the predator and the victim.
There are also some unanswered questions—“What is the best way to live? What should we live for?”—because Yushkova has created in Sveta another type too, the type of the lost woman. Many of Yushkova’s heroines, especially the ones just passing through, are tourists to the very core of their being. They wander around searching for something to get excited about, but are themselves ravaged inside. So in fact, Sveta and Natasha have a lot in common. They both have nothing but vanity, fearful vanity, and emptiness.
In the story “Rain,” another of Yushkova’s Natashas battles the savage jealousy of an abandoned wife. Her suffering is destructive, though, and drives an even greater wedge between her and the man she loves.
The story “Leaving” shows us a personification of loneliness. Elena Dmitrievna is a female variant of Plyushkin, Gogol’s pathetic old miser. This aging, lively, quite intelligent woman has filled up her life with hellishly hard work. Yushkova is seeking to analyze and quantify the dying woman’s spiritual discomfort, but the few precious details we are given result in no great revelations. The mannerisms of the essayist have clearly narrowed the scope of this psychological study of a leave-taking. A lot of thought has gone into it, but that is all.
Yushkova’s big success is a story called “Theater of Other People’s Dreams,” in which the three heroines counter the indifference and dejection all around them with their energy, ingenuity, and dynamism. They stage a reading by an unknown woman poet that results in a truly enjoyable give-and-take. Creativity gives meaning to their lives.
The poet Olga Kuznetsova has not yet published a complete volume of her own prose. But her stories represent an effort to describe northern women as they have never been described before. Alongside all the chaos, all the dashing about between the underworld and hopeless romanticism, her early prose contains a living truth. Kuznetsova’s heroines are alive, especially in “The Slipped Disc,” the story of a strong-minded flower seller, almost a typical new Russian woman, a sharp contrast to the bag lady who is always under her feet, mellowed by a patina of culture imported from the big city. The image is only lightly limned, not fully developed. I wish it had been.
Finally, in the well-known story “Helicopter Tree,” which won the Shukshin Prize, Kuznetsova investigates the roots of the northern woman’s vitality (an insight borrowed from the critic Vitaly Pukhanov).
The stories of Elena Volkova (in The Carousel) present a curious picture. Volkova’s typical heroine is a woman who is disenchanted by men and who, at the contrastive intersection of dreams and reality, is forever getting herself into comical situations. She is looking for love and love is all she needs—not a career, not fun trips, not fame. She could easily be typified as an abandoned woman or a victim, were she not so optimistic. One such woman is the symbolic Somova, an airhead for whom nothing ever works out. (from the cycle “Hello, Somova” in Where Love and Sorrow Meet). To be honest, Somova was literally the offspring of a periodical and was well liked by the workers at the bearing factory where she first saw the light of day. Somova has no money, is not building a country cottage; her lover leaves her, her husband ignores her; she is downsized out of a job. But she is indestructible. There is a lot about her that is passive, but not a hint of aggression. She comes to us out of the seventies—a little confused, rather stupid, but a kind soul.
Time is a great teacher. The heroine of “The Carousel” has done a lot of growing up and has become much wiser in the process. She speaks with a sad smile of the love that was not to be. “Big Broads” is a story without a heroine; its characters are all parodies.
“Doing a Re-sort” is enriched by a gallery of Volkova’s characteristic images, people changed by perestroika—like Ninochka, who is bold, a tad cynical, good looking, and has a successful business and a neatly organized personal life. She is a strong woman, the predatory type, but the story provides neither the time nor the space to delve into her character. In this instance, the journalistic shorthand is possibly a matter of habit. Or perhaps it is a sign of the times, of a harried age that only wants a quick, undemanding read. Or the haste could be attributed to money—writing for it, writing about it. But it’s a start.
Deep inside, every woman wants to be successful at work and in love. But how? The stock answer is: “Be heartless.” Fortunately, though, Volkova’s heroines are not that way inclined, episodic as they may be and clearly a bit on the shallow side.
Everything larger than life, of course, yet precisely observed—this is the kind of woman that Vologda’s women journalists are giving us. While I have tried to point up some patterns here, I have really only scratched the surface. For instance, I never even got to the talented and venerable Vologda journalist Antonina Medvedevskaya and her prose works. But she warrants a separate study all to herself.
It is widely believed that women experience the worst persecution at the hands of female supervisors. This type—a modern variant of Kabanikha, the playwright Ostrovsky’s domineering shrew—is yet to be tackled. Another neglected area of investigation is life in a women’s penitentiary (a program on this topic was aired on TV recently).
So, what do the women journalists of Vologda have to say about censorship? Tatyana Sopina has never run badly afoul of an editor. Women editors have been known to give her a hard time over details, but by and large, it’s been OK. And in her entire career as a journalist she has never seen it happen to other women. There is no censorship now, so if anything happens, it all comes down to your boss’ personal partialities. But you know about that going in.
Elena Volkova: “Do men walk all over me? You see how tall I am? There you are, then. No, they are afraid of me. If things are going badly at work, it has nothing to do with men. There is something wrong in you. Worst comes to worst, you can get another job. Male editors? Let them have their fun. We have work to do.”