Typology of female characters in the fictional prose by Mikhail Kuzmin
Authors:   A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Zuseva-Özkan Veronika B. 
Published: November 2024

The article examines an aspect of Mikhail Kuzmin’s fictional prose – the typology of female characters. The careful and “continuous” reading of his novels, tales, and short stories shows that the writer regularly reproduced certain characters, with which constant motifs and plots are associated. The author of the article considers the following female types in Kuzmin: enthusiasts; oppressing mothers; female predators’ “Potiphar’s wives” (meaning the Old Testament prototype: a situation of failed seduction followed by revenge); “blessed women”, succumbing to carnal temptation (mainly Old Believers); harlots; “femmes fatales”; murderous women – vampiresses and witches; “brides from beyond the grave”; Amazons; occultists (“Anna Minclovas”); girls chasing suitors; “platonic Charlottes”, who voluntarily indulge in illusions about the man they love and agree to any role, even the most modest, just to be present in his life; women who do not understand art; and crippled girls. In addition to these types of unmarried and married women, the line between whom turns out to be very thin (sometimes they move from one category to another throughout the narrative, and their behavior differs little in Kuzmin), girls and old women, revealing in their characters specific features similar to those in young and mature women, are also studied. Apparently, girls already have qualities that fully flourish in adult women and are ridiculed and/or condemned by the writer, and older women are even more dangerous than young ones because, due to their age, status and often wealth, they have more influence and power that are destructive to others, especially men. It is demonstrated that positive female characters in Kuzmin’s prose are quite rare. The thesis about Kuzmin’s literary misogyny is confirmed: in the overwhelming majority of cases, he portrays women without any sympathy and endows them with many negative qualities. At the same time, Kuzmin does not only reproduce the topoi of the masculine gender order, which legitimizes men’s dominant position over women who are considered as inferior beings, but finds very original interpretations of these topoi. Such is one of Kuzmin’s main accusations against women, i.e. their tendency to fantasize, the “extremeness” of the female imagination, their need for constant agitation, and their “enthusiasm”. Although the origins of this claim can be found in the stereotype of women’s “inherent” hysterical nature, Kuzmin presents it in an elegantly modified form. The same applies to the traditional idea of “witchcraft”, to which women are allegedly inclined: on this basis, Kuzmin develops the female occultist type, but even here the main accusation of the writer is not that they allegedly serve evil, but that they exterminate the “spirit of life”, obscure the immediate joy of being with their muddy statements and “insights”. Ultimately, Kuzmin invariably acts as a “reality’s advocate”, a defender of the immediate joy of life, the ability to see a source of consolation in its little things, and his greatest allegation against women is their perceived inability to do so, to enjoy life in its many details and facets.