Metaphysical self-identification of an emigrant woman in Vasily Yanovsky’s story "The Second Love" and Boris Poplavsky’s novel Apollo Bezobrazov
Authors:   Tomsk State University, Nazarenko Ivan I. 
Published: May 2023

The aim of the research is to understand the “male” version of a woman in the prose of young emigrants: firstly, the metaphysical intuitions of female characters, and, secondly, the discovery of the metaphysical essence of a woman in the perception of characters and authors. The material of research is Vasilyy Yanovsky’s story “The Second Love” (1933) and Boris Poplavsky’s novel Apollo Bezobrazov (1932), and episodically Poplavsky’s novel Home From Heaven (1935). The main aspects of comparative analysis are the image of an emigrant woman (Yanovsky’s nameless heroine and Poplavsky’s Teresa) and the plot of her personal and metaphysical selfidentification (building a myth about her connection with God and the transcendent). The attitude towards explaining the female consciousness appears in the narration: the main narrators, carriers of the male consciousness, introduce the female “voice” (the heroines’ diaries) that objectifies and mythologizes women. In both works, the picture of the world is built in accordance with the world image of female characters: in the opposition “earth/heaven”, close to the symbolist dual world. The plots of the heroines recreate their personal and metaphysical self-identification – the search for their place in the earthly and metaphysical realities, identification of themselves in relation to God, and not to society – and the author’s test of the salvation of the metaphysical myth both for the women and for the male characters. Based on the classifications of the image of a woman in Russian culture (traditional type, demonic type, woman- heroine), the author has established that the image of an emigrant woman in Yanovsky and Poplavsky is closer to the traditional type. Although the heroines are not allowed to realize themselves in the sphere of the family, to fulfill their biological destiny, they are not the carriers of Eros, but victims of the male world, open to metaphysical spirituality. Allusions to the Mother of God bring together the heroines of Yanovsky and Poplavsky (Teresa’s intercession for other characters, the pregnancy of Yanovsky’s heroine). The author interprets the key event of Yanovsky’s story – the transformation of the heroine on the top of the Notre Dame Cathedral as a result of the appearance of God to her – as a rewriting of real events for the aim of self-justification and self-persuasion. Transformation is associated with the expectation of a child, pregnancy, and the divine meaning she has acquired is a miracle of a new life that has arisen inside her. However, the modern “Mother of God” does not fulfill her mission: the heroine of Yanovsky does not give birth to a new life and does not find her place in the world; she remains an emigrant in an existential sense. Teresa in Poplavsky’s novel is unable to overcome the collapse of the “paradise of friends”, to cement the existence of a small circle of people with spiritual efforts. In the novel Home from Heaven, Poplavsky shows a really established type of a modern woman: “earthly” temptresses Katya and Tanya, who do not become a salvation for the central character, like Teresa in the first novel. Poplavsky finds a tragic gap between corporality and the metaphysics of the feminine, Yanovsky sees in a woman the connection between the physicality and the metaphysical. Both authors agree on the idea of the doom of a woman in modern reality and the impossibility of transforming the world with the Eternal Femininity.