La femme libérée dans le roman soviétique des années vingt

Abstract

The Liberated Woman in the Soviet Fiction of the 1920's. The Russian woman liberated by the Revolution played an important role in the Soviet literature of the 1920's. Her equal rights were a fait accompli but her difficulties were not over, because she still had to learn how to use her new freedom. Peasant and proletarian women, stultified by the misery of their pre-revolutionary life, were slow to "awaken", but the few hardy pioneers who did, were enthusiastically portrayed by the fiction of the period. These fictional heroines took in stride the difficult economic postwar conditions, unhesitatingly assumed social and political duties, and accepted new attitudes towards old-fashioned morals and domesticity. Dasha Chumalova, the protagonist of Gladkov's Cement (1925), became the standardbearer of the liberated women of the 1920's. The young women from the intelligentsia faced a different set of problems and found their solution more complicated. Students, party activists, occasionally factory workers, living on meager incomes, they uncomplainingly carried their load of manifold social and professional duties. But, strict conformity to a new ethical code demanded by young zealots of Marxism, deprived these allegedly liberated women of personal freedom. "Free love" became almost obligatory, domesticity was branded as "bourgeois prejudice". Desoriented, frustrated in their femininity, many a heroine came to a tragic end. Not until the advent of Socialist Realism did the Soviet fictional heroine emerge as a happy and free builder of Socialism.