THE RESTRUCTURING OF GENDER MODELS IN THE NOVEL BY E.N. CHIRIKOV MY ROMANCE

Abstract

The novel My Romance (Paris, 1929) written in exile by E.N. Chirikov (1864–1932) and dedicated to the so-called ‘tragedy of refugee’ has become the object of consideration in this article. In this novel, the writer started from thinking about the fate of millions of exiles who were forced to leave Russia as a result of the Civil War and the Red Terror, and focused on depicting the fate of a woman in conditions of loss of home, family and former social status. Chirikov’s appeal to the ‘women’s issue’ led to the use of a gender approach in the analysis of the text of the work, which in turn allowed to demonstrate the unique place of My Romance in the literature of the Russian emigration. The latter actually ignored the problem of changing of women’s status in the family circle and beyond provoked by the very course of history in the first quarter of the 20th century, and focused exclusively on preserving for posterity the memory of pre-revolutionary Russia, etc. Chirikov in My Romance clearly recorded the breaking of traditional female-male gender ‘roles’, revealing their dependence on socio-political processes. Thus, he discovered the artificiality and conventionality of many norms of female and male behavior familiar to contemporaries and summed up the debate about the status of women in the family circle and beyond which had been heard in Russian society for almost a century. At the same time, Chirikov demonstrated in My Romance that a man compared to a woman is more painfully enduring the loss of traditional gender functions, revealing greater spiritual weakness and moral vulnerability