The Theurgy of Impurity: Fin‐de‐Race and Feminine Sin in Russian and Ukrainian Modernisms

Abstract

Much of women's writing emerged as a response to misogynic interpretations of the feminine in androcentric tradition. This paper examines intertextual affinities between the Russian modernist poet Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) and Ukrainian modernist poet Natalia Livyts'ka‐Kholodna (1902–2005) in the context of the European negative symbolism of the feminine; and as a manifestation of transnational modernist practices. It demonstrates how the representation of female sinfulness in misogynic mythology, in which women appeared as demonic‐vampiric, heterodox seductresses, involved a mapping of purported feminine moral deficiency onto the discourse of Orientalism. Identifying how women's writing in Ukrainian and Russian modernisms mimicked androcentric cultural symbolism, the paper demonstrates the complexity of this mimetic function, which simultaneously preserves the symbolic tradition of its origin while in effect canceling it. Specifically, it investigates the poetics of sin as a common thread between Livyts'ka‐Kholodna and Akhmatova. Focusing on the concept of sin enables us to vividly reconstruct the logic of cultural conventions that cast the woman's role as negative, and to trace how female authors departed from these conventions. The study analyzes, in particular, three aspects of the thematics of sin and sinfulness: temptation, heterodoxy, and betrayal.