American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Balancing Acts: Contemporary Stories by Russian Women by Helena GosciloReview by: Natasha KolchevskaThe Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Winter, 1990), pp. 538-540Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/308211 .

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538 Slavic and East European Journal

of the feminist issues that are likely to be discussed in recent Soviet literary works. Each story is also preceded by a short biography of the author and references to literature by and about the author available in English. There are explanatory notes at the end of the book.

There are many excellent aspects of this book, but there are also some irritating shortcom- ings, mostly of an editorial nature. Among the good qualities is the original concept. For a reader of several recent collections of works by Soviet women authors, it is gratifying to find that these stories about women are not all written by them. Further, McLaughlin's selection is interesting and offers a variety of situations in the lives of women, thankfully not limited to the hectic existence of overworked professional women, on the order of Natal'ja Baranskaja's 1969 story "Nedelja kak nedelja" which is, incidentally, not included in the present work. Most of the introductions to the individual stories are excellent and informative. The preface, however, is not as satisfactory; the reader is repeatedly irritated by stylistic lapses including omissions, unnecessary paragraph divisions and clumsy sentences, for example "this man has always and still is entirely self-centered." This shortcoming is unfortunate, as many of the ideas McLaughlin brings up are extremely interesting. At the end of the introduction Mc- Laughlin quotes Zoja Boguslavskaja at length; one becomes interested in this author and wishes that a selection by her could have also been included in the book. Further, there seems to be no apparent reason for placing explanatory notes in a separate section entitled "Glos- sary" at the end of the book. Footnotes, when they are needed, are easier on the reader. One also wonders whether there is in fact a need for such entries as "Collective farm," "Summer or Pioneer Camp" and "Interruption of pregnancy, see Abortion." The abortion question, for example, is discussed briefly in the preface also. Why not move the entire discussion on this subject to the preface?

For the most part the translations read well, but here too one can find some distracting details, both overcorrections and "anglicisms." Here follow some examples with alternatives preferred by this reviewer: "Lilya had been in a light coat" (130) (better: Lilya had been wearing a light coat); "You should have . . . put him some questions" (4) (better: You should have . . . asked him some questions); "Without stopping to sob" (93) (better: She didn't stop sobbing); "photograph on shiny paper" (65) (better: photograph on glossy paper).

In spite of these minor details, McLaughlin's book is a welcome contribution to the growing stock of Soviet literature easily available in English translation. The quality of the writings selected by the editor is excellent and thus the importance of the collection exceeds that of merely a feminist anthology. The collection is thus of great interest not just to readers inter- ested in women's studies but to anyone interested in Soviet literature of the last few decades.

Margareta O. Thompson, University of Georgia

Balancing Acts: Contemporary Stories by Russian Women, edited by Helena Goscilo. Bloo- mington: Indiana University Press, 1989. xxvii+ 337 pp. $17.50 (paper).

While one can hardly say that women have been underrepresented as characters in Russian fiction, the number of Russian women authors has traditionally been small, and while poets and memoirists (Axmatova, Cvetaeva, i(ukovskaja and Evgenija Ginzburg immediately come to mind) have found their Western audiences, the same cannot be said for Soviet women prose writers. One can find a partial explanation for this in the derogatory connotation that venskaja or damskaja proza has carried over from the nineteenth century, so that today no prominent female Soviet writer will characterize herself as such. Nevertheless, as Russian readers of tolstye furnaly and contemporary prose are well aware, there has been a number of talented women writing on matters close to the heart of most Soviet women. With Balancing Acts,

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Reviews 539

Helena Goscilo has compiled a volume of translations of stories by women writers, including some such as Tat'jana Tolstaja and Natal'ja Baranskaja, whose names might be known to American readers, and many others, like Viktoria Tokareva, Ljudmila Petru'evskaja and Maja Ganina, whose works unquestionably deserve a larger audience. The stories are well annotated, and Goscilo provides brief biographies and bibliographies (of major works in Russian and in English) for each author, as well as a thoughtful introduction.

Most of the nineteen stories in Balancing Acts were published between 1965 and 1986 in prominent thick journals. While the authors' ages vary widely, from the venerable Baranskaja (b. 1908), to the relatively young writers Tolstaja and Elena Makarova (both born in 1951), the majority are of the generation that was born in the 1930's and came of age in the 50s and 60s. This generational fact is reflected in the stories themselves, for the protagonists are most often women "of a certain age," or beyond, whose lives have been shaped by the conflict of personal needs and professional demands. The "themes" of many of these stories echo the litany of problems often expressed in the popular press and in sociological polls: the difficul- ties of this generation, the first with a large proportion of professional women, as it deals with issues of motherhood, careers and careerism, home, children, men, friendship, love, and aging. Not surprisingly, from these stories we discover that men more often than not are emotionally unreliable, children physically and emotionally distant from parents, the search for a mate and a traditional family more painful than fulfilling, and female friendships may or may not fill the resulting void. The venues of the stories-cramped apartments, dreary hospi- tals, workaday streets and trains, and remote fieldwork sites-testify to the impact of the external world on the dynamics of family and personal life.

While most of these stories deal with byt in one form or other, they vary widely in their treatment of this familiar subject. Anna Mass's, "A Business Trip Home," with its straightfor- ward depiction of the various tensions pulling at a married Soviet geologist, ends on a rather heavy-handed, preachy note all too familiar in mainstream Soviet fiction. Galina Scerbakova's well-crafted story, "The Wall," with its serio-tragic treatment of a marriage based on ca- reerism and selfishness, provides an artful retelling of a familiar tale. Nina Katerli's "The Farewell Light," one of several stories with a male protagonist, gives a moving portrait of an elderly mother as reconstructed by her middle-aged son. While the older generation tends to explore, through extensive psychological probing and identification with its often abused female characters, the burdens that Soviet reality has placed on women, younger writers often break this mold. Certainly, Tolstaja's fanciful tale of a hopelessly dumpy young man ("Pe- ters"), Makarova's disjointedness in "Herbs from Odessa," and Petru'evskaja's laconic and bleak tales of lonely young women ("The Violin," "Mania,") stand out in this respect.

In her enlightening introduction, Goscilo fills the need to contextualize stories by Soviet women writers, otherwise the uninformed American reader in search of positions generally associated with Western feminism may too readily dismiss most of these because of their "pre- feminist" consciousness. Soviet women as different as the sociologist Tat'jana Zaslavskaja and the writer Tat'jana Tolstaja have on numerous occasions expessed their doubts about Western notions of feminism and developments in feminist thought of the last twenty years, and it is no surprise that few of these stories challenge sex-role stereotypes. Hence, Goscilo's historical and theoretical remarks, in which she draws on the works of a number of Russian and non- Russian feminists and scholars, are essential both for understanding these women's voices as a cultural system that is distinctive from the male-dominated traditional one, and for explaining the pervasiveness of certain traditional attitudes (especially motherhood and the acceptance of male authority and superiority) in Russian culture.

The volume includes works by fifteen different authors, and Goscilo's bio-bibliographical sketches, though brief, succinctly summarize each one's life and artistic modus operandi, providing the reader with some essential schematic guides for each writer.

My reservations about the volume are few. In her introduction, Goscilo frequently refers to

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540 Slavic and East European Journal

I. Grekova (pseudonym of Elena Vencel), probably the best known woman writer of recent decades, but does not include any of her stories in Balancing Acts. One assumes this is because Grekova is the one author likely to be familiar to non-Slavists. Other less known but impor- tant contemporary writers such as Tat'jana Nabatnikova and Julija Voznesenskaja are also mentioned but not included in this volume, and one would have liked to know the basis for Goscilo's selection of the authors whom she did include.

Although Balancing Acts is the work of a number of translators, a strong editorial hand is evident, and the level of translation is consistently satisfying. Goscilo herself translated almost half of the stories in the volume, and certainly these are among the strongest from both psychological and aesthetic viewpoints. There are, inevitably, a few mistranslations. These involve translating too directly from the Russian ("heart rupture" for razryv serdca, ["Herbs from Odessa"], "communicating courtyards" for proxodnye dvora ["Peters"], "organism" when "body" is clearly meant ["Nothing Special"]), or using a British rather than American English variant for a word ("whiting" instead of "whitewash" ["The Wall"], the card game of "patience" rather than "solitaire" ["Peters"]). On the editorial side, in Galina Sverbakova's "The Wall," two men's names are confused (117), and Goscilo is incorrect in identifying oktjabryata as "schoolboys," as she does in her note to "Herbs from Odessa," since schoolgirls can also join that early training program for little Communists (30). While too much annota- tion can be distracting, there are times in this anthology when yet one more note is called for, as for the pronunciation of the woman's name "Manja" in Petru'evskaja's story of that title, which Goscilo transliterates as "Mania," leading those unfamiliar with Russian names to potentially erroneous associations.

Clearly, these are minor exceptions to what is otherwise a fine selection of vignettes of a woman's view of Soviet life-a view that is too often perceived from back alleys and lonely hospital wards. While one may agree with Goscilo's comments that "complexity, regrettably, is not a constant feature of current women's fiction," (xxvi) she has presented the reader with sufficient thematic and literary variety to make Balancing Acts an essential part of any course that deals with perspectives on current Soviet culture and society.

Natasha Kolchevska, University of New Mexico

Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov. Volume II: Prose, Plays, and Supersagas. Trans. Paul Schmidt. Ed. Ronald Vroon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989, xii, 403 pp., $39.50 (cloth).

Velimir Xlebnikov has always had the reputation of a poet for the initiated, "a poets' poet." His experimental language, "zaum" ("beyonsense, " as translated here), abundant with neolo- gisms and linguistic innovations, was labeled as incomprehensible, and it even became in Russian synonymous with nonsense. It would seem that any attempt to translate the works written in this language should end in failure. However, the present volume which contains Xlebnikov's prose, plays, and supersagas forcefully refutes such a supposition. The volume represents the second installment in the monumental task which Paul Schmidt undertook in bringing the entire body of Xlebnikov's works to the English-speaking audience. It shows that the difficulties in understanding Xlebnikov's works arise not so much from his unusual vocabu- lary and syntax, but from the complexity of his philosophy, his vision of the world, history, and time; from the complexity of the mythopoeic system which the poet created in his works. Russia was not the reason for Xlebnikov's experiments with Russian words, but Russian words were the means for understanding immense, unknown Russia. And unlike the Russian patriotism of some Russian writers and scholars (like Sivkov, in the 19th century, or contempo-

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