Larisa Reisner: Myth As Justification for Life

Abstract

Lidiia Ginsburg's article Once Again about the Old and the New is an attempt to construct the typology of the generation was born around the turn of the century and initially accepted the Revolution. As an index of the correct attitude of her generation to the emerging reality, Ginsburg points to Marina Tsvetaeva's acceptance of Pugachev. Pugachev was not my hero but somehow it went without saying he was O.K. , writes Ginsburg about herself.1 Reisner belongs to the same generation. I remembered this phrase when I started collecting material about her. Larisa Reisner? The woman of the Russian Revolution? These two rhetorical questions usually exhausted the topic. The people I talked to did not know much about her, but somehow, it also went without saying Reisner was not O.K.. Reisner's name is usually associated with the Revolution and the Civil War. Whether or not one would call her fame magnetic as did Cathy Porter, her visibility could not be questioned.2 She was not in the first ranks of activists, but her simultaneous engagement in both the political and literary spheres of Soviet life made her fame broad but transitory, which explains, for example, why her name is almost forgotten today. It appears, however, in indices to many books devoted to the Revolution and the Civil War, to the early diplomatic history of Soviet Russia, to Soviet journalism, and even to the Russian Silver Age. Porter opens her biography of Reisner with a long list of attributes which define her as fighter, writer, first Bolshevik woman commissar, . . . the 'Revolutionary Pallas,' . . . a larger-than-life figure whose short life was so full that it is often hard to see her clearly through a halo of legends and hyperboles surrounding her.'