The Representation of the Amazons in The Exploits of Alexander the Great by Mikhail Kuzmin
Authors:   Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow, Russian Federation), Zuseva-Özkan Veronika B. 
Published: March 2021

The article considers the construction of the image of the Amazons by Mikhail Kuzmin in his romance The Exploits of Alexander the Great. The analysis of the romance in this aspect is performed in comparison with Kuzmin’s long poem “The Horseman”, which was written almost at the same time (both works were created in 1908) and in which another woman warrior appears. The aim of the study is to reveal the characteristics of the figures of female warriors in Kuzmin’s work and to determine their place in the artistic whole. The analysis is conducted at the boundary of historical and literary methodology, comparative and gender studies. The study has found that the relationship of The Exploits of Alexander the Great with its prototexts (literary, in particular with the Hellenistic Alexander Romance by Pseudo-Callisthenes, and historical, for example, the histories of Alexander’s deeds by Quintus Curtius Rufus and Diodorus Siculus) is such that Kuzmin mainly follows their event chains but makes new semantic accents. This shift in emphasis is due to the fact that the plot of the romance, same as of the poem “The Horseman”, becomes that of the mystery where the hero embarks on a journey towards the secrets of being, towards immortality and perfect love. Kuzmin creates the homoerotic mystery where there is no place for women, including the Amazons who do not follow any gender stereotypes and defy all “normative” representations of femininity. Moreover, the type of “masculine woman” is despised by Kuzmin, who is generally known for his misogyny, twice as much as the type of a “normative woman” since he deems it the poor imitation of a man. Hence is the fact that Kuzmin in many ways brings down the heroic, belligerent aspect of the Amazons’ image, in particular, while describing their pastoral lifestyle (not mentioned in the sources where their life is represented as that of a military camp) and focusing instead on their reproductive customs. Though Kuzmin reproduces a number of traditional topoi concerning the Amazons, he also introduces new elements and, in so doing, modifies the archetypal figure of the female warrior. He totally rejects the usual “romanticizing” of the Amazons. It is also very characteristic that this negative vector of change is built not only in the ethical (as is the case of “The Horseman”) but also in the aesthetic field. While in “The Horseman” three incarnations of the woman’s love, rejected by the hero, are ranked from lowest to highest, and the relationship with the woman warrior is deemed the worst type of love (since it is “love-hate”), this hierarchy does not seem to exist in the romance: the Amazons appear simply as one of female types and the relationship with them as a variant of the decidedly “imperfect” love. Thereby, Kuzmin relieves the specificities of the image of the Amazon and the female warrior in general. While in the works of other Russian Modernist writers the woman warrior is opposed to the other, “normal”, women, Kuzmin denies her any exceptionalism.