Moss , Anne Eakin Only Among Women: Philosophies of Community in the Russian and Soviet Imagination, 1860–1940 (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 745 as his efforts to get away from his family and thus escape the ecosystem that sustained his authorial existence. Both trips exposed Chekhov’s psychological and artistic limits, revealing to him his creative and existential dependency on others, which, as Rylkova argues, he then explored in ‘Sakhalin Island’ (1893–95) and ‘The Steppe’ (1888). In ‘The Steppe’ Rylkova finds a synthesis of the apprehensions Chekhov had to live through on the steppe and his authorial anxiety at being alone in the boundless terrain of his first novel (p. 88). The form of the novel moved Chekhov to think intensely about the meaning of life and death. In the second part of the book Rylkova explores the effect of Tolstoi’s and Chekhov’s texts on other others’ exploration of mortality. For Meierkhol´d the staging of Chekhov’s The Seagull (1895), where Meierkhol´d both identified with, and strove to overcome, the tragic fate of Konstantin Treplev, offered an opportunity to overcome his own artistic stagnation and develop his innovative stylized theatre. In a chapter on Ivan Bunin Rylkova explores Bunin’s attempts at writing biographies of Tolstoi and Chekhov as a means of living his own life through an intense identification with these two literary giants. The final two chapters offer Rylkova’s reading of Chekhov’s last play The Cherry Orchard (1904) in connection with the writer’s last days and funeral. Galina Rylkova’s Breaking Free from Death is a deeply personal study of Chekhov and Tolstoi and their respective legacies. The book is steeped in the author’s intimate knowledge not only of the writers’ fictional writings but also their epistolary heritage. While the book is aimed at a broad audience, specialists in the field will discover many new and intellectually provocative ways to think about these famous Russian writers. Vanderbilt University Denis A. Zhernokleyev Moss, Anne Eakin. Only Among Women: Philosophies of Community in the Russian and Soviet Imagination, 1860–1940. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2020. xviii + 272 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $120.00; $39.95 (paperback and e-book). The present study explores the depiction of women in Russian literature and film in the context of passionate debates in Russia which started in the 1860s about the woman question and about the role of women’s communities in transcending and modernizing Russia. As Anne Moss explains, she uses the term ‘women’s community’ with the view ‘to capture the philosophical and cultural meaning that accrued to the idealized portrayal of women’s relations’ SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 746 found in Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s novel What Is to Be Done (1863) and in Lev Tolstoi’s epic War and Peace (1863–69) (p. 1). Moss aptly argues that ‘as much as friendship among women came to figure a return to the past’ in the form of a national collective identity, ‘it also was mobilized to represent a future form of social relations that would be more altruistic and enlightened’ (p. 2). While Moss devotes more attention to nineteenth-century writers including Tolstoi, Chernyshevskii, Dostoevskii and Chekhov, she also analyses several works by twentieth-century authors such as Maksim Gor´kii, Aleksandr Kuprin and Lydia Zinov´eva-Annibal. In Moss’s view, the notion of women’s community was ‘central to the Russian and Soviet social imagination and literary tradition from that idea’s inception in the 1860s, to its disenchantment at the turn of the twentieth century, to its re-enchantment in the 1930s’ (p. 195). The epilogue briefly talks about Liudmilla Ulitskaia’s novel, Medea and Her Children (1996) which, as Moss notes, shifts away from ‘Tolstoy’s family idyll’ and presents it as a classical tragedy, ‘leaving us with women who live their lives ethically, if not heroically’ (p. 195). While the diversity of different approaches to the idea of a women’s community and its broad chronological scope make this study difficult to follow at times, the main focus on the uniqueness of women’s relationships as found in literary and cinematic representations as discussed in the book makes the analysis coherent and engaging. Thebookcomprisesanintroduction,fivechaptersandanepilogue.Itdevelops Nina Auberbach’s vision of...