Writing women : gender, alterity, and representation in Russian realism
Keywords: Slavic Languages and Literatures.

In her landmark study on gender in Russian literature, Barbra Heldt observes, "there is no lack of general pronouncements about how women act or feel or think in Russian literature... [yet they] have been overwhelmingly made by men." Paradoxically, this phenomenon is most pronounced in the "woman question, " a broad term that encompassed all public intellectual debates on the roles and duties of Russian women in the family and society. Although women were the nominal subjects of the woman question, the realities of publishing and social participation in 19th century Russia meant that male voices were amplified and enjoyed greater legitimacy than women's voices. My dissertation examines why male intellectuals in 19th century Russia so enthusiastically embraced women's issues in their journalistic and literary writings and what the consequences of this were. My dissertation is divided into an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction reviews existing scholarship on gender in Russian literary studies and outline of my own methodology. Scholars have primarily deployed models that prioritize the role of individual experience, either by focusing on women's own narratives of experience or by critiquing men's texts as lacking verisimilitude of femininity. My analysis concentrates on systematic power imbalances in literary representation. I demonstrate that male intellectuals -- even those who espoused feminist or pro-woman discourses -- often failed to escape gender biases reflected in existing conceptual and aesthetic framework. In Chapter I, I examine Alexander Druzhinin's (1824-63) novella Polinka Saks (1847) within the context of Zhorzhsandizm, a Russian literary movement which emulated and responded to the fiction of French author George Sand (1804-76), as well as supposedly gender-neutral philosophies of beauty. In the case of Polink Saks, the gendered dimensions of aesthetic theory are transparent. The novella details the efforts of Konstantin Saks, a 31-year-old bureaucrat, who attempts to instill "proper" aesthetic sensibilities into his 17-year-old wife Polinka in order to raise her to a higher level of consciousness. Konstantin's effort ultimately fails when is his wife is unable to overcome the handicaps of her inferior education, social coddling, and, above all else, her gender. When she betrays her husband for the superficial, Byronic Prince Galitsky, it is as much as a rejection of her husband's vision of shared aesthetic sensibility as an arena for equality and intellectual communion between women and men. Chapter II is devoted to literary representations of women's lives during the early years of the woman question. I analyze Alexander Herzen's (1812-70) short story The Thieving Magpie (1848), which recounts the story of a serf actress who resists the sexual advances of her master. While the serf actress is the heroine of the story, her story is retold by another [male] actor to an audience of male intellectuals. While the story features aspects of a "feminist" text -- a strong heroine, resistance to injustice, and thoughtful attention to women's suffering -- the men appropriate her suffering for their own ideological purposes. Drawing on Spivak's work on representation, I demonstrate that male intellectuals, writing from a position of relative power, assume the universality and accessibility of experience, including that of the feminine Other, and, consequentially place their own subjectivity at the center of the woman question, transforming the Woman Question into a Male Question. Chapter III focuses on Nikolai Chernyshevsky's (1828-89) novel What Is to Be Done? (1863), the most influential and enduring example of Woman Question fiction written by a male author. My analysis of the novel is two-fold, examining, on the one hand, how Chernyshevsky constructs his argument about the historicity of gender inequality vis a vis Hegel's text Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1831) and, on the other, how the author demonstrates the centrality of the male gaze and masculine aesthetic practices to gender oppression throughout history and across all human societies. As I argue, these aspects of What Is to Be Done? require the reader and scholar to reevaluate the originality and extent to which Chernyshevsky engaged with feminism as a core value in his philosophical and literary writings. In the Conclusion, I will examine the importance of gender alterity to male and female respondents to the Woman Question alike. I turn my attention to the phenomenon of male literary critics evaluating the veracity of women's literary representations of feminine lived experience and their theorizing of "women's writing, " on the one hand, and, on the other, examine how female writers portrayed the successes and failures of male intellectuals attempting to understand feminine existence and advocate for women's political interests. In the first portion, I analyze the relationship between Evgenia Tur (1815-1892) and Ivan Turgenev (1818-83) who, despite being close friends, engaged in serious criticism of each other's literary texts, including an article in which Ivan Turgenev theorizes women's writing as lacking verisimilitude of gendered experience. In the second section, I address the work of anti-feminist woman author Avdotia Glinka (1795-1863), who poses the Woman Question as an insincere and dangerous attempt by male intellectuals to bring feminine experience in line with philosophical abstractions. In 1884, feminist Maria Tsebrikova posed a question: "how is it that Russia, which by no means occupies the foremost rank in European civilization, is first in this matter of women's emancipation?" Russia has a unique and understudied role in the history of feminism. Today, its leaders present themselves as guardians of patriarchal values yet, as Tsebrikova observes, Russia was the site of one of the world's most radical feminist movements. My dissertation examines the participation of male intellectuals in imperial Russian feminism, but unlike the earlier scholars who focused on whether individual writers were misogynist and whether they created "realistic" depictions of women's experiences, I contextualize them as mid-19th-century thinkers and as possessors of a distinctive male identity. In deconstructing their pervasive "mansplaining, " I probe the political connections between the overt renegotiation of women's role in society and a less obvious reconsideration of male gender identity