In 1974, Carl Proffer published an article titled “The Attack on Mme Mandelstam” in The New York Review of Books. A highly regarded American Slavicist and the force behind Ardis Publishers, Proffer did so at the request of Nadezhda Mandeľshtam herself (1899–1980), and he included in the publication what he described as “a hostile letter” to her from Veniamin Kaverin (1902–1989), “a well-known liberal writer.”Footnote 1 In that letter, Kaverin famously responds to Mandeľshtam's controversial second volume of memoirs (Vtoraia kniga, or Hope Abandoned) by calling her a “shadow” of her late husband, poet Osip Mandeľshtam (1891–1938)—a shadow who should “know [her] place.”Footnote 2
Proffer asks his readership to take Mandeľshtam's side in what only appears to be a “domestic squabble” but is, according to him, a battle over the moral center of the “liberal camp” of the Soviet intelligentsia in the post-Stalin years.Footnote 3 Truth, he suggests, is on Mandeľshtam's side even when the stray fact is not, and he makes her into something of a proto-feminist hero by highlighting Kaverin's old-fashioned misogyny and her willful defiance.Footnote 4 A brave, lone voice, Proffer's Mandeľshtam says things “which no one else has dared to say,” losing friends and suffering the slings and arrows of enemies who call her “a gossip, a liar, a slanderer,” and even “a malicious old hag.”Footnote 5
The Cold War landscape that subtends Proffer's reduction of anyone who disagreed with Mandeľshtam to a kind of “Kaverin” allowed Proffer to elide the potent moral authority of someone who shared Kaverin's opinion but could not be so easily dismissed: Mandeľshtam's long-time acquaintance, Lidiia Chukovskaia (1907–1996). Although Proffer alludes to Chukovskaia twice in his essay (once, alongside her famous father and brother), he never refers to her by name. Instead, she is “a prominent liberal writer and friend of [the poet Anna] Akhmatova” who is writing a book in response to Mandeľshtam (Dom poeta, [The Poet's House]; never completed). Such a description erases Chukovskaia's gender completely. It also obscures their diverging view of the proper ethical relations subtending what scholars have characterized as the mixed private-public sphere in the Soviet era of dissidence.Footnote 6 While both women sought to influence its moral landscape, Mandeľshtam's efforts were informed by her sense of duty to the individual (specifically, her late husband), while Chukovskaia challenged the legitimacy of this approach and prized the collective, including the masses from whom she bemoaned the intelligentsia's estrangement.Footnote 7 At the same time, taking the conflict between two of the most formidable Soviet female writers of that era seriously reveals the uncomfortable truth that ultimately, both accepted the premise that the public sphere—be it official or unofficial—was and should remain fundamentally masculine in nature. This shared belief fueled the conflict between them.
Scholars such as Jonathan Bolton have argued that the western attitude toward so-called “dissidents” behind the Iron Curtain led to a romanticizing, flattening view of the people who took part in those struggles.Footnote 8 This view of dissidents is now coming under appropriate scrutiny as several scholars have worked to nuance the simplistic, heroizing narratives of Soviet dissenters.Footnote 9 But women remain especially susceptible to becoming the subjects of such narratives, and their contribution to the dissident movements of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s has only begun to be studied.Footnote 10 Furthermore, the dearth of scholarship considering how these women related to each other (rather than to male dissenters) is pronounced, and whether Mandeľshtam and Chukovskaia even counted themselves as dissidents has yet to be established.
Self-perception notwithstanding, the two women's sustained contributions to the dissident movement arguably provided the heartbeat of the classic phase of cultural samizdat (“self-published,” or unofficial) texts.Footnote 11 As such, they helped to shape what we might, with the help of Ann Komaromi and Nancy Fraser, call a Soviet dissident counterpublic.Footnote 12 But their ambitions extended beyond it, and they each sought to redefine the moral center of the liberal Soviet counterpublic more broadly. Their contribution, and conflict, deserve closer consideration not only in their own right, but also because of what they reveal about the place of women and of the feminine in the public sphere, then as now. Indeed, downplaying the conflict between Chukovskaia and Mandeľshtam amounts to what historian Joan Scott has evocatively termed a “fantasy echo”—an elision, however unconscious, of the discontinuities and conflicts of women's history that neatens its narrative.Footnote 13 Along the way, it also erases the unexamined conservativism at the heart of both women's messages.
This conservativism led each to question the authority of the other on specifically gendered terms. But they had more fundamental disagreements, also, such as their differing understandings of the rightful relationship between the public and private spheres (to borrow Jürgen Habermas's influential framework) in the process of coming to terms with the legacy of Stalinism. Drawing on a previously undiscovered prose fragment written by Mandeľshtam about Chukovskaia (“Lida”), as well as Chukovskaia's writings about her, this article argues that differing notions regarding the appropriate expression of womanhood and a woman's duties informed not only their mutual dislike, but also their diverging views of how the nascent liberal Soviet counterpublic should be shaped. These differing notions in turn affected their respective understandings of how the transnational public sphere could help bring about much-needed changes at home: to borrow Chukovskaia's words, the west was crucial in helping to “air the dirty linens” of the so-called liberal Soviet intelligentsia.Footnote 14 Downplaying the conflict between Mandeľshtam and Chukovskaia thus also obscures their diverging strategies for using the transnational public sphere to shape the one back home and the multiplicity of views that competed to be heard in the nascent liberal Soviet counterpublic.Footnote 15 Lost, too, is the role of gender in this competition.
It is understandable that the conflict between Mandeľshtam and Chukovskaia should have been deemphasized in the west as the Cold War and era of dissidence were ongoing: at home and abroad, these women stood—and still stand—for essentially the same brand of stalwart, backward-looking female truth-teller and mourner. But they were looking backward in order to look forward, and their mourning was in fact an effort to work through, albeit differently, the traumas of the past. In the west, reticence to examine the particulars of their discord has persisted even as the urgency of downplaying them has faded, and today, on the rare occasions when the women are discussed together, it is largely in this vein.Footnote 16 It is as if the disagreement between Mandeľshtam and Chukovskaia is perceived as being beneath their dignity, or beneath the dignity of serious scholarship, or both.Footnote 17 What is missed as a result is a fuller understanding not only of the way that their respective understanding of women's duty and of the place of the feminine in public discourse shaped the moral friction between them, but of the all-too-human qualities—the pettiness, competitiveness, possessiveness, and even envy—that contributed to it as well. The sum total of these things coexisted with their courage and, at times, arguably even fueled it.
Although scholars and enthusiasts of Russian literature within Russia itself more readily acknowledge the differences that divided Chukovskaia and Mandeľshtam than do observers in the west, they do not question the zero-sum premise that the women themselves subscribed to and have remained mired in a debate over “who was right.”Footnote 18 The fact that “Lida,” a prose fragment shot through with a specifically gendered brand of vitriol, has remained buried in the archives even though the rest of the writing found alongside it was ultimately published in Mandeľshtam's posthumous Kniga tret'ia (Third Book) suggests that in Russia, too, few are interested in thinking about how Mandeľshtam's and Chukovskaia's shared, unexamined notions of the appropriate place of women and of the feminine in public discourse contributed to their conflict—or, for that matter, about the legacy of that conflict in women's participation in the public sphere in Russia today.Footnote 19 This attitude is an artifact of the contested status of truth in an era of dissidence, wherein moral force sometimes superseded fact.Footnote 20
While both women saw the airing of dirty linens abroad as an important strategy for exorcising their home context of the ghosts of the Stalinist past and reinstating a clear moral standard in public life, Chukovskaia thought Mandeľshtam overly mired in individualistic grief over her husband to serve as a meaningful guide. Although Chukovskaia, like Mandeľshtam, was widowed in the Terror, her widowhood was never an overt part of her professional identity. According to Chukovskaia, Mandeľshtam's grief clouded her judgment and led her to a Manichean worldview that resulted in a misuse of moral authority to persecute others.
For her part, Mandeľshtam begrudged Chukovskaia the presumption of presiding over the moral life of their shared circle due to her family name and the connections it had long afforded. To her, Chukovskaia was both “just” a woman and not enough of one. While Mandeľshtam faulted Chukovskaia for frigidity and lack of maternal feeling (an odd fact given that Mandeľshtam herself never became a mother), Chukovskaia considered Mandeľshtam lacking in the moral rectitude and (masculine-coded) powers necessary to transmute suffering into art. Thus Chukovskaia, too, saw Mandeľshtam as “just” a woman, albeit too much of one—too many grudges and petty jealousies, not enough discernment. At the heart of this difference was a shared belief that the feminine needed to be subdued and transformed in order to earn a place in public discourse.
Their shared view of the proper place of the feminine in the public sphere was reflected in their attitudes toward their mutual friend, Anna Akhmatova (1899–1966). For Chukovskaia, Akhmatova embodied the formidable potential of a woman's suffering to be transmuted into art and thus into moral authority, in turn. By contrast, in Mandeľshtam's eyes Akhmatova managed to create great art in spite of her gender. Their differing approaches to the question of women's roles in the public sphere were, I suggest, in part a by-product of the distinct modes of authorship that Akhmatova encouraged: Chukovskaia, to take responsibility for the collective, and Mandeľshtam, to assume the role of Osip Mandeľshtam's unofficial widow.
After Akhmatova's death, neither was particularly good at conceding authority to the other (living) woman as she vied for the role of a kind of unofficial “widow” to her deceased friend. At stake were competing notions of the rightful relationship between the public and private at a crucial turning point in Soviet history as well as differing understandings of how and in whose name the transnational public sphere should be used in order to shape the one back home. And a shared, unexamined premise regarding the place of the feminine therein.
Ultimately, each insisted on seeing the other as a wife or daughter first and thinker second; as an insufficient substitute for the higher male authority to which she was heir. If there is something “feminist” about any of this, as western observers have long implied, then a realistic reassessment of how these women understood and exercised female authority to shape the nascent liberal Soviet counterpublic is very much in order.
The Origins of the Conflict
Both Mandeľshtam and Chukovskaia started writing as a response to the moral imperative to commemorate and preserve.Footnote 21 Mandeľshtam had been prepared for this traditionally female role by her husband, who taught her how to “listen to poetry”—training that would prove indispensable when she was later tasked with safeguarding his life's work.Footnote 22 After Osip Mandeľshtam's arrest in 1937, Nadezhda Mandeľshtam began moving from place to place to avoid the same fate, committing his poetry to memory and distributing lists of poems along with prose among friends in order to increase their likelihood of being preserved.
It was only after Stalin's death that Mandeľshtam began to set the details of her own experience down on paper. Her two tomes of memoirs circulated widely in samizdat before making their way into print abroad (in so-called tamizdat, “published over there”) in the early 1970s. The first volume, Vospominaniia (Reminiscences), known as Hope Against Hope to English-speaking readers, had been legible as an example of the well-known Russian genre of the “widow's memoir.” By contrast, the second volume exceeded the acceptable bounds of the genre by focusing on the widow rather than the mourned husband.Footnote 23 This radical reorientation was not without its casualties. In Vtoraia kniga (Second Book), even those closest to the author are revealed in all their imperfection: Osip Mandeľshtam as a demanding and unfaithful husband, and Akhmatova as an at-times coquettish, vain woman.
If, on her own account, Mandeľshtam was reborn into literature, Chukovskaia—the daughter of renowned children's author and literary critic Kornei Chukovskii—was simply born into it. She became active in literary life early, working for the children's division of the state publishing house (Detgiz) under the leadership of her father's friend and professional competitor, Samuil Marshak. Although her father had hoped that Chukovskaia would also become a children's writer, she preferred editorial work, and had it not been for personal tragedy and a sense of duty to record the injustices happening around her, she might have confined herself to this activity indefinitely.Footnote 24 That tragedy was the arrest of Chukovskaia's second husband, a young physicist named Matvei Bronshtein (1906–1938), in August of 1937. As she would later learn, he was shot the following February.
Chukovskaia began writing both poetry and prose “for the drawer”: her novella Sof' ia Petrovna, which tells the story of an ordinary woman slowly disillusioned and broken by the brutal politics of Stalinism, is a rare document written about Stalin's Terror as it was still ongoing, and Spusk pod vodu (Going Under) retells the story of that era through the eyes of a protagonist whose experience resembles the author's own.Footnote 25 According to Beth Holmgren, both works are “the careful creative designs of a highly conscientious female helper,” but Chukovskaia was a trailblazer in her own right. In the 1940s and 1950s, she edited and wrote numerous books that were published in the official press.Footnote 26 Yet it was her time spent assisting Akhmatova that served as a transformative experience. Although Chukovskaia had been introduced to Akhmatova as a girl, it was only after Bronshtein's arrest more than a decade later that their relationship began in earnest. It continued until Akhmatova's death, save for a nearly ten-year rift in the 1940s that has never been satisfactorily explained. The oft-told anecdote of their method for preserving Akhmatova's poetry is one of the most memorable of its era: the older poet would transcribe verses of her magnum opus Requiem silently, speaking of mundane matters, while Chukovskaia hurriedly memorized the lines and passed them back to Akhmatova, who burned the paper over an ashtray.Footnote 27 At her father's behest, Chukovskaia began recording details of her meetings with Akhmatova without the poet's knowledge and, after Akhmatova's death, published the highly respected, two-volume Akhmatova Journals abroad.Footnote 28
Mandeľshtam and Chukovskaia's prose writings, as well as the poetry they helped to guard against destruction (Osip Mandeľshtam's and Akhmatova's), played a significant role in the classic phase of cultural samizdat, which in Komaromi's words functioned “as a laboratory of values and identities, new and alternative ways of defining the subjectivity that public activity aims to defend.”Footnote 29 Mandeľshtam's Reminiscences were hailed by such prominent figures as Aleksandr Tvardovskii for their “exceptional strength and talent.”Footnote 30 When it was published abroad in 1965 under the title Opustelyi dom (Deserted House) without its author's knowledge and translated into English two years later, Sof'ia Petrovna was recognized as a significant, historically faithful document of its time.Footnote 31 Stephanie Sandler has argued that Chukovskaia's Akhmatova Journals helped to “restore to public literary discourse a sense of ethical norms and honest speech.”Footnote 32 In a well-intended legitimizing gesture, both women's books are regularly compared with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.Footnote 33 Although by the 1960s Mandeľshtam and Chukovskaia were already on tense terms, the former appreciated Sof' ia Petrovna greatly and wrote to Chukovskaia, calling the book a “tremendous gift” as well as a “brilliant piece of literature.”Footnote 34 For her part, Chukovskaia never thought much even of the first volume of Mandeľshtam's memoirs but conceded that it was “[a] powerful book…[a]nd smart, like the author herself.”Footnote 35
What originated as a literary contribution to unofficial public life slowly evolved, for both women, into something more. As Holmgren writes, the first volume of memoirs established Mandeľshtam's home in Moscow's Cheremushki district “as a ‘salon’” where people could “hear her uncensored stories,” “ask her opinion about everything from poetry to ongoing political events, and…meet other people who quietly shared the views she dared to articulate.”Footnote 36 Where Mandeľshtam “embodied a tangible connection with an uncensored past and encouraged a free and easy atmosphere,” Chukovskaia's contribution remained primarily textual.Footnote 37 However, her need to document the past morphed, in time, into a desire to actively shape the present and future.Footnote 38 Sof' ia Petrovna, Going Under, and The Akhmatova Journals had already brought her “to the flash point of public dissidence.”Footnote 39 By the mid-1960s, Chukovskaia threw herself into the dissident movement in a more public way, authoring several prominent open letters and showing her support with her physical presence as well, such as at the arrest of Andrei Sakharov.Footnote 40
Given their shared commitment to “record[ing] the system as it extended outside the guard towers,” it is not surprising that Mandeľshtam and Chukovskaia were often spoken of together in the west during their lifetimes, constituting alongside Akhmatova a kind of female moral triumvirate of mourners.Footnote 41 From a scholarly and more recent western perspective, too, Mandeľshtam and Chukovskaia are ultimately seen as more alike than different: Sarah Pratt calls both “angels in the Stalinist house” who “sacrifice…for the sake of their role as angels in the house of the Russian intelligentsia, for the sake of their function as guardians of its cultural and spiritual well-being.”Footnote 42 Moreover, despite highlighting their many differences, the premise of Holmgren's Women's Works in Stalin's Time (to my knowledge, the only work devoted to a close examination of their respective writings) is that, from a sizeable pool of possible female memoirists she could have written about, “Chukovskaia and Mandeľshtam, more distinctly than…others, undertook their task with a deep awareness of its historical, moral, and literary significance and, in the process of fulfilling it, realized their specific power and authority as writers and activists.”Footnote 43 Both women, Holmgren observes, moved from “the position of self-declared caretakers to (undeclared) creators of influential cultural/political texts and a new kind of dissident community.”Footnote 44 Although Holmgren acknowledges that they had “quite different interpretations” of their writing duties, she ascribes to Chukovskaia the conservative position.Footnote 45 Yet such a characterization takes for granted that Mandeľshtam and Chukovskaia envisioned the same “new kind of dissident community.” It also obscures the important specificity of their difference.Footnote 46
That difference was already starting to come to light by the time Chukovskaia read—and praised—Mandeľshtam's Reminiscences in 1965. Although she acknowledged the book as “powerful” and “smart,” she also pronounced it, in the same breath, “careless, half-baked, and slapdash, like the author herself” and tinged with “delusions of grandeur.”Footnote 47 Chukovskaia could excuse these shortcomings because the ends that Mandeľshtam sought—to enshrine her dead husband in his rightful place in the pantheon of Russian literature—likely outweighed, in her mind, the means. But she could no longer excuse what she saw as Mandeľshtam's insufficient respect for facts and her self-aggrandizement when, in Second Book (which Chukovskaia famously called “our misfortune”), Mandeľshtam overshot the mark of commemorating a life lost too soon and, in seeking to write about “[her]self alone,” in fact maligned others.Footnote 48
The problem, for Chukovskaia, boiled down to Mandeľshtam's destructive individualism and resulting moral contamination. The first can be seen in Mandeľshtam's moral topography. She divided society into two camps: those who did what they could to save her husband from the common grave, and those who did not.Footnote 49 This categorization became a point of fixation for her and shaped her public expression of widowhood even as her frustrations with Osip Mandeľshtam amplified in her later years.Footnote 50 It had arguably been Akhmatova who had “assigned” Mandeľshtam her role as unofficial widow to the dead poet by permitting her to take ownership over her husband's archive, first by burning the poems in praise of the White Sea Canal.Footnote 51 Mandeľshtam proved highly effective in her role, leading Akhmatova to pronounce her “the luckiest of widows.”Footnote 52 To Chukovskaia, this was a problematic and even parasitic stance, one that interfered with Mandeľshtam's duty to the collective.Footnote 53 In The Poet's House, for example, Chukovskaia reacts with alarm to Mandeľshtam's rancorous account of one “poor devil,” a NEPman who “decided to sacrifice himself for his family.”Footnote 54 Recounting the smug description in Second Book of his family's cries as the secret police led him away, Chukovskaia says, “In my eyes, in terms of spiritual culture Nadezhda Iakovlevna is not far from those three fine lads who conducted the search of the NEPman's family.”Footnote 55
As mentioned previously, both women were widowed in 1938, but only Mandeľshtam's professional identity was explicitly tied to widowhood. Their respective appearances in tamizdat highlight this difference: while Mandeľshtam existed only in reference to her husband, Chukovskaia's fame abroad was her own, since Chukovskii was a largely unknown quantity (a fact for which she privately blamed scholars like Gleb Struve).Footnote 56 In her 1966 open letter to Mikhail Sholokhov, Chukovskaia speaks not as a widow, daughter, or sister, but as a rightful representative of Russian tradition, and her obituary in The New York Times thirty years later only refers to her as a woman two thirds of the way through, naming her father several paragraphs later.Footnote 57 This fact would have pleased Chukovskaia, who, Holmgren has argued, had long resisted female labels.Footnote 58 The desire to transcend her gender arguably did not fade, and later in life she would write in her diary about her desire to “attain a masculine nature.”Footnote 59
But try as she might, Chukovskaia could not escape the societal expectations placed on her gender completely, and Akhmatova herself reinforced and encouraged its expression. While Akhmatova tasked Mandeľshtam with the duty of shaping the legacy of, and commemorating, one life (her late husband's), she encouraged in Chukovskaia a sense of responsibility to the collective. She praised Sof' ia Petrovna by saying that “[e]very word is true.”Footnote 60 By contrast, her remarks about Chukovskaia's lyric poetry were more ambiguous.Footnote 61 In Going Under, Holmgren sees the heroine, who is “lured out of her moral isolation into the roles of compassionate witness, intimate confidante, and surrogate parent,” as an elaboration of the role of the female writer articulated in Akhmatova's Requiem. Footnote 62 She asserts that both Chukovskaia and Akhmatova's engagement with literature was “deeply rooted in their sense of morality and concern for the lives and values of others.”Footnote 63 Thus, although Akhmatova may have authorized “bolder” modes of authorship for both women, in so doing so she arguably sent them down diverging moral paths: Mandeľshtam to derive her principles for public discourse from the husband to whose memory she devoted the vast majority of her literary output, and Chukovskaia to care for the collective.Footnote 64 Although it would be unfair to attribute the conflict between these two women entirely to Akhmatova, it is also true that neither questioned their friend's flawed premise: that these two roles defined the possibilities available to them as non-artists. And that space for women at the helm of the ship of public opinion was necessarily scarce.
The attitudes that would, in time, solidify into outright antagonism were reflected in the two women's respective relationship to Akhmatova herself: in both of their minds, there could “only be one,” a stance they maintained after the death of their mutual friend. Indeed, although Mandeľshtam and Akhmatova remained friends until the poet's death, in their later years each woman's sense of her own authority came to be increasingly at odds with the other's: Mandeľshtam comments in Second Book that in their later years, she and Akhmatova saw each other less because Mandeľshtam's presence made it difficult for her to “play the lady,” and those who knew them both have said that Mandeľshtam, too, preferred to hold court apart from her older friend.Footnote 65 With regard to Chukovskaia, Holmgren suggests that Akhmatova saw in her a “most obliging, most flattering mirror,” and Chukovskaia was more than happy to take a back seat: in her private diary she writes that she never became a poet because Akhmatova already had, and she is angered and embarrassed when she sees her photo appear alongside Akhmatova's on the cover of the Russian tamizdat edition of The Akhmatova Journals “as though [Akhmatova] is writing about me, and not I, about her.”Footnote 66 Although I have found no record of Mandeľshtam's reaction to being compared with Chukovskaia, such comparisons were anathema to the latter, who disparaged both Mandeľshtam's pseudo-scholarly method and her tone.Footnote 67
But it was Akhmatova's legacy and the question of who had the “right” to commemorate her that became the cause of the most pointed and direct disagreement between them. Holmgren speculates that after Akhmatova's death in 1966, Mandeľshtam “may have…wanted to write entirely free of Akhmatova's authority or, more specifically, the worshipful accounts the poet cultivated among her followers.”Footnote 68 Passing through two variants in the late 1960s before circulating more widely in samizdat in the early 1970s, Second Book reveals a side of the late poet's personality out of step with the image of herself she had cultivated so carefully to admirers in life.Footnote 69 Painted with Mandeľshtam's brush, Akhmatova emerges as prone to vanity and self-regard, frequently donning a mask that got in the way of their unencumbered friendship.Footnote 70 Nearly two decades Akhmatova's junior, Chukovskaia was inclined toward respectful idealization, and she considered Mandeľshtam's account of their old friend “extremely dangerous” for Akhmatova's legacy, a danger amplified by Mandeľshtam's authority in unofficial circles as well as abroad.Footnote 71
If Mandeľshtam's Reminiscences set out to “set the record straight” with regard to the “false” memoirs of her husband by others, in Chukovskaia's view Second Book was a kind of “false memoir” of its own.Footnote 72 The Poet's House aimed to be a corrective, to establish its author as the official “widow” of Akhmatova.Footnote 73 This sense of ownership extended beyond Mandeľshtam: in her diary, Chukovskaia expresses concern and even anger when those she perceives as “impure” (нечистые) lay claim to Akhmatova's memory or set out to commemorate her without acknowledging Chukovskaia's importance to her legacy.Footnote 74 Mandeľshtam's treatment of Akhmatova incensed Chukovskaia because it coupled what she felt to be inaccuracy with self-aggrandizement. Mandeľshtam rankled Chukovskaia with her pronouncement that “there were three of us and only three”—meaning she, Akhmatova, and Osip Mandeľshtam.Footnote 75 The battle over Akhmatova's memory was a battle for the authority to represent the purest strain of Russian literary tradition that had survived the ravages of Stalinism, and for her part, Mandeľshtam felt that Chukovskaia “held the banner of Russian literature too high.”Footnote 76
Although their methodological and stylistic differences have been commented on extensively among Russian readers, what has largely been ignored is the extent to which significant aspects of the discord between them revolved around their divergent understandings of the appropriate place of the feminine in the exercise of moral authority. Simply put, Mandeľshtam saw Akhmatova as a great poet in spite of her gender, whereas Chukovskaia saw her as a great poet because of it. But as divergent as these attitudes are, even as they idealized femininity, neither woman believed that the feminine (lower case f) had a place in the public sphere—an attitude that later informed their mutual disdain.
Gender & the Public Sphere
In his 1962 book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas famously argues that the so-called “liberal bourgeois public sphere” developed in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Europe; it subsequently declined in the twentieth century, when consumer capitalism once again blurred the line between public and private, state and society.
The veritable cottage industry that has sprung up around Habermas's theory attests to its relevance beyond its original context. Benjamin Nathans has noted that its applicability is in part the function of being based on “historical categories…rather than on events,” and for Komaromi, “Soviet dissidence exhibits a similar drive to recreate individual subjectivity and group identities independent of the state” to members of European (bourgeois) society.Footnote 77 She proposes applying the concept of the public sphere to the dissident era by routing it through the modifications posited by Nancy Fraser.Footnote 78 Two of her critiques of Habermas's original formulation of the public sphere are especially useful: the first, also noted by Komaromi, is Fraser's emphasis on what she terms “counterpublics” rather than a unitary public sphere.Footnote 79 The second, in my view, is Fraser's assertion—building on the work of Joan Landes and Geoff Eley—that Habermas's is a “masculinist conception” in which public and private (feminine) interests should be kept separate.Footnote 80
Mandeľshtam and Chukovskaia belonged to the same subset of the liberal counterpublic of the Soviet intelligentsia, comprised of those who saw censorship and hypocrisy as anathema to true Russian culture, as something to be extirpated rather than accommodated. Dominant Soviet culture was controlled by men. Unofficial culture was only slightly less so, and Stephen Anke's work to expand the definition of “dissident” to better include the women who contributed to the functioning of the movement has only underscored this problem.Footnote 81 Within this male-dominated landscape, Akhmatova was one of the few outliers, though it is worth noting that she, too, deferred what she deemed as the inconvenient aspects of femininity.Footnote 82 For Mandeľshtam and Chukovskaia, to purport to represent Akhmatova's memory was in fact a way of claiming that their own authorship and the moral authority that came with widowhood was somehow contiguous with hers.Footnote 83 In writing about Akhmatova, however, both women confront their feelings about her complex character head-on, in the process revealing their shared view that the feminine had to be transmuted and subdued in order for a woman to be able to exercise moral authority publicly.Footnote 84
In Mandeľshtam's eyes, Akhmatova's sense of freedom and “rightness” (pravota), while not as infallible as Osip Mandeľshtam's, helped qualify her as an artist. But that same sense of rightness was often squandered, Mandeľshtam thought, on concerns that were beneath her. In Second Book, Mandeľshtam writes that although “Akhmatova had much less sense” than Osip Mandeľshtam of poetic “rightness,” “in her private life, particularly when it came to unfaithfulness and divorce, she always insisted on her ‘incomparable rightness.’” Yet “Akhmatova's rightness, like [Osip]’s, was of a higher order, and all her feminine arguments about who had betrayed whom were beside the point.”Footnote 85 If, in her memoirs, Mandeľshtam takes great pains to establish that “belonging to the lower order of womanhood” and not being traditionally beautiful made her “free,” she saw Akhmatova's feminine qualities as obscuring her true self and considered her friend to have been mired in false “ladylikeness” (damskosť).Footnote 86 Chukovskaia fervently takes aim at this characterization in The Poet's House.
For Chukovskaia, the “feminine-sacrificial and the feminine-indignant” modes in Akhmatova's poetry did not stand in the way of poetic greatness; nor was there anything false about them.Footnote 87 Nonetheless, she was careful to distinguish between the female qualities in Akhmatova that served poetry and those that made her “just a woman” (and therefore did not). In a diary entry from the 1970s, she laments that whereas in the first volume of the Journals Akhmatova is “simply sublime in grief and in sorrow,” in the second she is instead “at times petty in her grievances against [Boris Pasternak,]…in her fixation on her own woes.”Footnote 88 These signs of resentment, self-pity, and professional envy were incompatible, in Chukovskaia's mind, with Akhmatova's romantic image as a poet. Given Chukovskaia's understanding of the interplay between gender and creativity, it is not surprising that, when comparing Akhmatova with Pasternak, she observes that whereas “Genius illuminates [Pasternak] with incredible clarity,” in Akhmatova “we see first beauty, and then her mind, the dignity of her bearing, her humor—genius is visible in her poems, not in her.”Footnote 89 Whereas Pasternak's distinctly masculine perspicacity embodies and reflects his genius, Akhmatova's charming mind and physique are, if not at odds with her genius, certainly beside the point. Chukovskaia's differentiation between female qualities that served poetry and those that did not is especially clear in her reply to Mandeľshtam's comment that “Both Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva…were very prone to jealousy.”Footnote 90 In response to that observation, Chukovskaia writes, “Judging by Second Book, Nadezhda Iakovlevna knew how to be jealous all too well: to cry ‘It's she or I!’ at her husband, pack her bags, etc.” She adds that the “difference between Tsvetaeva and Nadezhda Iakovlevna and between Akhmatova and Nadezhda Iakovlevna is not that Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova are two ‘great jealous women’ and she isn't, but that when they got jealous, they composed poetry, whereas she only broke plates.”Footnote 91
Taken together, these different impressions of Akhmatova suggest that, in Chukovskaia's eyes, any “female” qualities and emotions that could not be transmuted into poetry were at odds with the exalted image of grace, beauty, and suffering so key to Akhmatova's public authority.Footnote 92 For Mandeľshtam, the female was at odds with the “free” within Akhmatova, and in her eyes, too, the female alone could not wield the authority to reconstitute the spiritual center of a beleaguered people. It comes as no surprise, then, that Chukovskaia was concerned that Mandeľshtam had revealed the specifically female foibles of their late friend to the public in her Second Book: after reading a copy of Mandeľshtam's second volume of memoirs that was circulating in samizdat, Chukovskaia wrote that Mandeľshtam's portrayal of Akhmatova is “extremely dangerous” for Akhmatova's legacy because Mandeľshtam is a “major authority.”Footnote 93
To Chukovskaia, that authority had not been earned, and she shared Kaverin's view that Mandeľshtam had coopted the moral authority of her late husband in order to construct a false public image of herself. In The Poet's House, Chukovskaia blames Mandeľshtam for taking advantage of the west's credulity. She turns Mandeľshtam's own words about another memoir against her: “‘There is no limit, however, to what people in the West are prepared to swallow,’ Nadezhda Iakovlevna says about the memoirs of Georgii Ivanov. Why only the West? And why only Ivanov's memoirs? The West, East, North, and South will all gobble N. Mandeľshtam's Second Book up with great appetite. So much gossip…!”Footnote 94 In Chukovskaia's view, Mandeľshtam appealed to the lowest quality in her readers—their base curiosity—by deploying a traditionally feminine weapon, and in doing so threw all claims of ethical behavior out the window: “Pushkin once spoke in passing…about the immorality of our curiosity. All of Second Book is written with an eye to that immorality.”Footnote 95 According to Chukovskaia, Second Book did nothing to rejuvenate the public's moral sense; it merely took advantage of its lack of one.
Second Book also violated what was, to Chukovskaia, the sacred duty of the intelligentsia “not to persecute but to intercede,” and in the worst way possible: on the world stage.Footnote 96 Chukovskaia had invoked this sacred duty in her open letter to Sholokhov, who had denounced Iulii Daniel and Andrei Siniavskii in 1966 on behalf of all Soviet writers. In the letter, published in the November 19, 1966 issue of The New York Times, Chukovskaia vehemently denied that Sholokhov represented her, calling him a “renegade” from Russian tradition rather than its exemplar. Although, unlike Sholokhov, Mandeľshtam did not have the government on her side, she had the support of public opinion abroad. In Chukovskaia's view, Mandeľshtam misused this authority to condemn in the court of public opinion those with whom she disagreed, a function of having remained mired in the individualistic grief of widowhood. People like Carl Proffer, Chukovskaia likely believed, were taken in.
For her part, Mandeľshtam was surprisingly unwilling to acknowledge Chukovskaia's widowhood, a marked refusal given the credence she lent to widowhood as a potential source of moral authority.Footnote 97 And if, to Chukovskaia, Mandeľshtam syphoned off the moral authority of another for her own nefarious ends, to Mandeľshtam, Chukovskaia, too, was an insufficient stand-in for a great man—her “elegant” (изящный) father, Kornei Chukovskii.Footnote 98 In the prose fragment “Lida” (likely written sometime between 1978–1980 and, to my knowledge, previously undiscovered), Mandeľshtam speaks highly of Chukovskii, who had been generous to the Mandeľshtams in their times of trouble and continued to intercede on her behalf after she was widowed.Footnote 99 His children, “three ungainly offspring” (три неуклюжих потомка), are another matter, and it is for Chukovskaia that Mandeľshtam reserves her special brand of vitriolic scorn. We know from their correspondence that Mandeľshtam called Chukovskaia, who was eight years her junior, by the familiar, shortened form of her name, “Lida.”Footnote 100 The title of the excerpt thus marks its subject as junior and, perhaps, socially inferior. By contrast, Chukovskaia never broke with etiquette and always referred to Mandeľshtam with the respectful form, first name followed by patronymic.
Chukovskaia's diaries reveal that, to her, Mandeľshtam would always remain the “little girl” who was once “at [her husband's] beck and call” and now put on airs.Footnote 101 The title “Lida” suggests that in Mandeľshtam's view, too, her adversary never outgrew being a little girl—and a spoiled one, at that. Mandeľshtam devotes the most vivid detail of the short fragment to Chukovskaia's battle with typhus in Tashkent, where both were living during the evacuation. Chukovskaia's “mother would appear daily in the courtyard” and Mandeľshtam “would bring a chair out to her, and she would sit and wait for hours, eyes fixed on the forbidden door of her daughter.”Footnote 102 Readers may recall Mandeľshtam's account of her battle with tuberculosis in Second Book to partially explain her fixation on Chukovskaia's illness: unlike Chukovskaia, Mandeľshtam had been left alone, and her husband had told her unhelpfully on his way to go see his mistress “to be sure to take [her] temperature and not get up on any account.”Footnote 103 By contrast, even Mandeľshtam and her brother helped to take care of Chukovskaia (a fact Mandeľshtam claims to regret) as she lay ensconced in familial love and devotion.Footnote 104 Subtending Mandeľshtam's character attack on Chukovskaia is the deeper charge that Chukovskaia suffered less than she did and did not appreciate her relatively privileged position—a fact that made her an unworthy daughter.
For Mandeľshtam, Chukovskaia's failure was gendered in a threefold way: as a daughter, as a wife, and as a mother (biological and otherwise). By recounting Chukovskaia's apparently heartless rejection of her own mother during her battle with typhus, Mandeľshtam attempts to condemn her as a daughter, also claiming that her own father was ashamed of her conduct.Footnote 105 So too, Mandeľshtam finds fault with Chukovskaia for never having loved the father of her “lovely daughter Liusha,” Osip Mandeľshtam's one-time editor, Tsezar' Voľpе. “Why Lida did not love him, I don't know,” Mandeľshtam writes, citing his sad fate for added effect: “he died during the war as he was fleeing blockaded Petersburg.”Footnote 106 Mandeľshtam's account of Chukovskaia's family context is strangely partial: not once does she acknowledge Chukovskaia's second husband, Matvei Bronshtein, or his death during Stalin's Terror—a loss that coincided with Mandeľshtam's own. Instead, she makes Chukovskaia the widow of the wrong man, thereby making it possible to condemn her as an un-devoted wife, as well.
Mandeľshtam also draws our attention to Chukovskaia's failure as a mother. She claims that Chukovskaia did not disclose Voľpе’s identity to her daughter: “I don't know whether or not she told her who her father was. At any rate, in Tashkent during the war Liusha did not know this.”Footnote 107 Chukovskaia's dereliction of womanly duty does not end there: she failed, too, as a surrogate mother to Evgenii Chukovskii, the son of her brother Boris Chukovskii (1910–1942), who died in the Second World War: “she could not stand her tiny nephew, the son of her dead brother,” she writes.Footnote 108 In all these relationships, Chukovskaia is depicted as quintessentially frigid and unfeeling.
Whereas, according to Chukovskaia, Mandeľshtam was “too much” of a woman, in Mandeľshtam's view, in her interpersonal dealings Chukovskaia was “not enough” one. But—somewhat paradoxically—in her attempts to act as arbiter over Russian literature, Chukovskaia is not enough precisely because she is a woman. “Lida” was arguably provoked by what Mandeľshtam saw as an intention to preside over Russian literature and be the ultimate arbiter of fellow writers’ worth and belonging. In condemning that ambition, Mandeľshtam savagely describes Chukovskaia as “half-blind” and “lonely” (полуслепая, одинокая), a description that renders its target pathetic in a specifically gendered way: there is nothing sadder, we are often told, than an aging, lonely woman. This “half blind” busybody ironically “keeps an eye on [our] literature,” deciding “whom to spurn and whom to spare.”Footnote 109 Chukovskaia, Mandeľshtam naturally goes on to say, “spurned” her.
The problem is Chukovskaia's inexplicable sense of “rightness” or pravota, a word Mandeľshtam used to both praise and critique Akhmatova and which she repeats four times in the short fragment that is “Lida.” In fact, she attributes the decade-long rift between Akhmatova and Chukovskaia to a conflict over their respective sense of pravota, speculating that Chukovskaia shared this trait with Akhmatova and that this commonality may have estranged them: “after all, both were possessed of ‘incomparable rightness.’”Footnote 110 In light of Mandeľshtam's discussion of “rightness” in Second Book, we should hear a suggestion here that whereas Akhmatova managed to direct this “incomparable rightness” to worthier causes with great enough frequency, Chukovskaia did not. Indeed, if Mandeľshtam had known that Chukovskaia on occasion wrote poetry, this fact, too, would have likely been turned to derision—she valued Sof'ia Petrovna not for its artistry but for its historical fidelity and what she saw as its precocious sensitivity to social psychology.Footnote 111
Although the feud between Chukovskaia and Mandeľshtam was a well enough known fact among the members of the intelligentsia, its most vivid expressions—The Poet's House and “Lida”—never did make it into print during their lifetimes (or, in the case of “Lida,” ever; it remains buried in RGALI). While the fact that “Lida” was never finished may indicate that Mandeľshtam thought better of publishing it, her death may have simply precluded that possibility. Given her well-known disregard for the typically elevated tenor of Russian literary discussions, perhaps she would have welcomed this “airing of dirty linen.”
Liudmila Sergeeva uses the term “to air one's dirty linen in public” (in Russian, the equivalent domestic metaphor, “to take the trash out of the hut”) to describe the boldness with which Mandeľshtam exposed the contents of Kaverin's letter to the western world in the pages of the New York Review of Books and thereby won the “duel.”Footnote 112 This combination of metaphors is striking not only for its blending of imagery from different realms of Russian life (the peasantry and courtly life, respectively), but also for the way it brings together activities typically coded feminine and masculine: women fight with their words (as they wash linens and clean); men, with their swords.
Sergeeva is not alone in citing “The Attack on Mme Mandelstam” as an example of the bold way Mandeľshtam took aim at patriarchal power structures of the Soviet intelligentsia.Footnote 113 Yet it was Chukovskaia who arguably originated the move several years before Mandeľshtam's Reminiscences were published in the west. Writing in her diary about the era of her open letter to Sholokhov, Chukovskaia addresses the strategy of “airing one's dirty linen” in response to Siniavskii's alleged rhetorical question “Why take the trash out of the hut?” (зачем выносить ссор из избы?). In the pages of her diary, Chukovskaia issues a response: “Obviously, so the hut can be cleaner…” (Очевидно, чтобы в избе было чище…).Footnote 114 Chukovskaia's words show her highly pragmatic approach to forging an emergent liberal Soviet counterpublic: she understood that one public sphere (the west) was an important means for purifying the other. In contradistinction to Mandeľshtam, for Chukovskaia, the home that needed airing contained more than just the liberal intelligentsia: in another famous letter, “The Preservation of Muteness” (“Gnev naroda,” literally, “The Fury of the People”), she expresses her wish to take down the “soundproof wall, built by the authorities methodically and with malice between the creators of spiritual values and those for whom those values are created.”Footnote 115 Chukovskaia wanted to purify the proverbial Russian hut so that the intelligentsia and the people (narod) could live in it alongside each other, if not exactly as equals. Mandeľshtam, too, desired purification, but en masse the common people scared her, and as for the intelligentsia, under her pen purification took the form of a purge. Ultimately, both women paradoxically upheld a masculinist conception of the public sphere even as they participated in it boldly, and they understood differently the proper relationship between the public and private therein: to Mandeľshtam, few facts were private enough not to be entered into the public record. By contrast, Chukovskaia believed that “the public…is the same as the private,” and if anything, the public should be made to serve the private rather than the other way around.Footnote 116
In Worlds of Dissent, Jonathan Bolton reminds readers that in the era of dissidence, onlookers in the west believed they were listening in on a conversation they were in fact helping to stage.Footnote 117 Mandeľshtam and Chukovskaia made use of the west as a stage, as a public sphere beyond their own that they could use to shape the one closer to home. Bolton cautions readers that we must see dissent “as a human, and hence imperfect, phenomenon” and expresses his hope that we might “free the dissidents from our own need for heroes and moral absolutes.”Footnote 118 It has been my argument that, with regard to Chukovskaia and Mandeľshtam, observers in Russia and in the west have largely succumbed to the temptation of moral absolutes, as if we, too, have been stuck on the question of pravota. We have either relegated the conflict between them to a footnote (if that) in the service of an alluring narrative of unity, or we have fallen into the “trap” Chukovskaia and Mandeľshtam themselves set: if one woman is right, then the other must be wrong. Their conflict, the product of their own moral absolutes, suggests the importance of tracing not just the history of women as a genuine plurality in the Soviet Union, but the history of the feminine in public sphere discourse specifically.
It would be easy, and not at all unjustified, to suggest that even as they earned their place in the canon of unofficial Soviet letters and in the public discourse, Mandeľshtam and Chukovskaia demonstrated the limited tolerance for the feminine in public life (indeed, the fates of the feminist dissident movement and of its leaders attest to this fact). But in reality, their assessment of one another also reified this limitation, or at the very least did little to dislodge it. In writing this, I neither wish to suggest that Chukovskaia and Mandeľshtam were any less heroic or worthy of praise nor that we have been entirely wrong in thinking of them together. Indeed, we would do well to continue to acknowledge the courage of both women but recognize, too, the shared, unexamined premise that wrought havoc on their ability to view each other generously: that the public sphere is and should remain primarily masculinist in nature; that in order to participate in it, women must check their gender at the door, and that the podium they are to stand on is necessarily a narrow one.
This faulty premise points to the fundamentally conservative core of their respective projects, which bear resemblance to what Lauren Berlant has termed “intimate publics” in her discussion of public-sphere femininity in the United States: a strategic “[becoming] public on behalf of privacy” with its own built-in “horizon of autoerasure.”Footnote 119 Women, in other words, might temporarily take part in public life, but the traditional divide between the private-feminine and the public-masculine remains fundamentally unshaken. That conservativism is still palpable in Russia today, to say nothing of elsewhere. I would therefore like to suggest the utility of continuing to study not just how women related to men in unofficial Soviet culture, but how they related to each other, as people and as women. We should also view the stories we do and don't tell about them as manifestations of our continued struggle to imagine meaningful alternatives to the structure of public life as Chukovskaia and Mandeľshtam conceived of it. By airing their dirty linen in public, we could indeed free the formidable women who contributed to the dissident movement not only from our need to smooth out the wrinkles of women's history, but from our own need for moral absolutes. As well as them, belatedly, from their own.
