Natalia Ivanova. Railway

Railway
Natalia Ivanova

Publication date: February 13, 2004

A few years ago, at the next World Congress of Slavists in Warsaw, among others, the report “Victoria Tokareva as a female Bunin” was announced. I didn’t go to the report, but I remembered the name. However, this is not surprising: gender studies in the West are a very common thing, and feminism itself has long become not a marginal ideology. What does the literary and practical development of Russian soil, podzolic or loamy, look like for them - gender consciousness and feminism? Mastering is based on the format, not the essence; the content, as is our custom, is washed away.

What is the publishing profit from dividing modern Russian literature in half? By floor. That is: the series “Women’s Handwriting” existed for several years in “Vagrius”. And you are half, and I am half. (And in the photo of the author on the cover there is also half a face.) How you position yourself is how you will live: “Women’s handwriting. A series of books by contemporary Russian and foreign writers. About life. About love. About man. About everything that disturbs the mind and heart and is called REAL WOMAN'S PROSE . " Books have been published from Svetlana Vasilenko, Marina Vishnevetskaya, Nina Gorlanova (skipping...), Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Irina Polyanskaya (skipping...), Nina Sadur (skipping...), Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Galina Shcherbakova. Success of the series? I do not know. I know that the circulation of books in the series varied. And I suspect they put him down not for his gender, but for something else. For success, for fame, for being in demand among the public, etc. For each of the writers, we note, all these indicators are different.

In the late 80s - early 90s, they decided to make their way together, compiled collections such as “New Amazons” , “Clean Life” , and the magazine “October” organized a competition for the best “women’s story” (Gorlanova, it seems, won then). But it was necessary to unite then for one reason: to break through together, to attract the attention of critics (and the public). “Women’s Handwriting” in the late 90s tried to continue a strategy that had historically exhausted itself. (Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, included in the series, has never made her way , especially in a group - read at least her “Volume Nine”, published in EKSMO last year.) The series is over - completed - exhausted itself - but an interesting initiative was picked up others, those who, despite the difficulties of book distribution and lack of profit, continue to publish modern prose. "Zebra-E" opened the series "Male Speech", which for some reason included "Maskavskaya Mecca" by Andrei Volos, which has nothing to do with masculine/feminine (except for more than traditional love/dislike), "EXMO" began the series " The Stronger Sex”, which already included books by Marina Vishnevetskaya, Olesya Nikolaeva and Olga Kuchkina. In this way, the original context of the appearance of works of modern literature, their “place” in the literary hierarchy, is destroyed, and in its place a completely different context is built, which does not correspond to the course of things (who gave birth to whom, who responded to whom, where someone else’s word sounds, who wins whom and how refutes, etc.). It’s strange that it still hasn’t occurred to anyone to push Elena Schwartz, Elena Fanailova, Inna Lisnyanskaya, Vera Pavlova, as well as Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva into some kind of “Women’s Style”, and Alla Latynina, Irina Rodnyanskaya and yours truly - in "Women's Criticism".

Maybe the “female” prose writers themselves have some specific flaw or, on the contrary, some special quality, dignity - and therefore their placement in one storage is literary justified? But what could Lyudmila Petrushevskaya and Tatyana Tolstoy have in common - in terms of women? If there is this general thing, then it is located within the general large text of modern Russian literature and nothing more. And, as I assume, both of them understand this very well. And if a critic “places” the prose of both of them in one article, then he does not do so on the basis of gender (see “The Burning Dove ” - in my book “Hidden Plot. Russian Literature at the Transition of a Century.” St. Petersburg, BLITZ, 2003 ). Completely different, if not polar, literary-critical subjects include the prose of the sophisticated Irina Polyanskaya and the meticulously corrosive Tatyana Nabatnikova, the shifted and tense prose of Nina Sadur - and the magnifying glass of Olga Slavnikova, the lightweight - of Victoria Tokareva and the painfully sensitive - of Marina Paley. And each of them, by the way, is located in the literary periodic table today much closer to the “male” analogues (discourse, style and genre) than to the female ones. Polyanskaya - to Andrey Dmitriev. Sadur - to Ergali Ger, Vishnevetskaya - to Slapovsky, Slavnikova - to Bykov (D.), N. Gorlanova - to Popov (E.), Povolotskaya - in general to N. Leskov, T. Nabatnikova - to V. Kurnosenko. I can also come from the other side: V. Makanin - to L. Petrushevskaya. O. Pavlov - to Vasilenko. Etc.

Nevertheless, a person, even if a woman, is weak. He is strong, this floor, but still. And so they agree. ” Beautiful literary ladies, who had not previously been seen in anything like this, agree: they agree to the proposed (beneficial to the organizers? literary managers? publishers?) conditions: and at the Leipzig Book Fair, Tolstaya Tatyana participated in a round table on a topic designated as “women’s prose and in Frankfurt too. While she, having lived and taught in the West, understands what is meant. And, as far as I remember from joint “panels” at various Slavic conferences, Tolstaya T. always energetically and temperamentally resisted the attempts made to drive herself into the ghetto of “women’s prose.” And even then: a strong and fresh voice breaks out of the cage, and does not strive to get into it. Voice? A voice, and also a subject, excuse me, pointer: if these are the famous three “k”s, then maybe this is “women’s prose”? and now, due to historical changes, the gastrointestinal tract is located around the genitals? Here is the newest ZhP from Lyudmila Ulitskaya, " Sincerely yours, Shurik " ("New World" ## 1-2, 2004).

“At the airport he was met by a fictitious mother-in-law, whom he saw for the first time in his life - a snow woman with a felt bucket on her head, with pursed lips. That year, the capital fashion of the year before last reached the Ural city: white synthetic fur was replaced by tired black astrakhan fur. Shurik was taller than her, but next to her he felt like a little boy next to an adult, angry teacher."

Where is the “change of fur”, where is the little boy, where is the mother-in-law, in whose mind what fashion... This is the purest, like a tear of a Komsomol member, ZhP: and the entire plot of Ulitskaya’s new novel branches around the outstanding Shurikov tree, I apologize for the metaphor, for which various female individuals cling to. “And out of pity for all this poor, feminine thing, something hardened inside him . ” And so on everywhere: “eyes covered in blue . ” Enough.

What remains - outside the ZhP? What remains is something written differently, something that does not fit into the designated format, something that is addressed not only to a man with his “simple and unpretentious movements” or a woman in whom “something was pulsating, opening and closing, spilling and drying up again.”

So what kind of beast is this - ZhP, women's prose? Are there certain— literary —signs that place prose written by a woman on that special shelf? Judging by the plot - pro eto? family and household? - if in terms of emotional content, a sob and a squelch, if in terms of characters, the obligatory protagonist is a woman? Doesn't add up. Then a generally rare, extremely rare text that corresponds to the listed parameters will fit on this shelf. And how and why Iris Murdoch, Joyce Carol Oates and Francoise Sagan ended up in the ZhP group (and their books were also published in the “Women’s Handwriting” series), no one will explain. Or rather, they will explain (as you know, everything can be explained and motivated; the path from a fly to an elephant seems to take only ten intermediate words), but I will not believe these explanations. Telling about the difficult fate of women in the love-production struggle against sexism, a female author defends women's rights. More like that. Everything is correct - from an anthropological, socio-psychological and historical point of view. Only literature as the art of words, as a substance has nothing to do with it.

Finally, some statistics. Andrei Nemzer in his “thirty” selected (article “ A Wonderful Decade lists 7 female names ” in the book “A Wonderful Decade of Russian Literature”, M., 2003); in Sergei Chuprinin's guidebook "Russian Literature Today" (Moscow, 2003) - out of 130 "writers of Russia" only 30 are female; in general, you will laugh, but the ratio is remarkably the same, almost to tenths or hundredths: for Nemzer and Chuprinin, women are one fourth. With a tail (0.28 for Nemzer and 0.33 for Chuprinin). You will laugh, but according to the annual content of the “New World”, the same sacramental figure (in prose) mystically turns out; out of 30 - seven and a half (half - Gorlanova and Bucur), as for poetry, the situation there looks completely different: 20 out of 50, i.e. almost every second. (Or - each first of two.) The names of women are least common in the list of " 50 modern Russian prose writers" ""Literary Newspaper" (# 2, 2004) - 6, i.e. less than one tenth. This is the problem of glance, selection.

And bringing perception and reality into line, breaking the stereotype of limiting the presence of women in literature, where women dominate today in terms of real results, in real statistical lists of both sales and circulation, is probably only possible “in general.” This is where the “female” series comes from. And the humility of women writers. ZhP so ZhP.