The Story of Stenka Razin and the Persian Princess in Direct and Inverse Projections: Yevgeny Zamyatin and Anna Barkova

The article considers two cases of the creative reception of the legend about Stenka Razin and the Persian princess in Russian literature of the 1920s – in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s tragedy Atilla (1925–1928) and screenplay Stenka Razin (1932–1933), on the one hand, and in the play by A. Barkova Nastasya Kostyor (1923), on the other hand. The direct and inverse projections of Razin’s plot are represented: in Zamyatin’s case the roles of Razin and the princess are distributed in the traditional way, as they are typical for the long history of this plot in Russian culture – both in folklore and in literature, and in Barkova’s case these roles are reversed in the gender aspect. This peculiarity is considered as connected to Barkova’s interest toward “woman question”, the problem of female emancipation, women’s equality. The plot of Stenka Razin and the Persian princess is analyzed in the article together with another one – the plot featuring the woman warrior, since they are closely interrelated in Russian literature of the 1920s. The hypothesis is that this relationship is due to the active demolition of the old gender order during this period.

“At the Western Palace”: The Dehumanization of Whiteness, Americanness, and Chinese-Americanness in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior

The dehumanization of whiteness in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) inheres in the overarching ghosthood metaphor. While first generation Chinese American immigrants in The Woman Warrior attribute the power of transforming people into ghosts to the United States of America as a country, the questioning of a person’s humanity by calling them a “ghost” is not reserved for white people alone. Chinese American immigrants also run the risk of losing their humanity and becoming ghosts if they renounce their relatives and their heritage. The husband of the first-person narrator’s Chinese aunt, Moon Orchid, is an example of a Chinese American man, who turns into a ghost on account of swapping his Chinese wife for a much younger American one. The clinic in which Moon Orchid’s husband works, a chrome and glass Los Angeles skyscraper, becomes a vehicle for the metaphoric representation of the United States as the Western Palace – also the title of the fourth of the five chapters of The Woman Warrior, exemplifying narrative techniques employed by Kingston in order to render the above mentioned dehumanization.

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “Hypertext” About the Female Warrior. Article I

This article deals with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “hypertext” about the female warrior, i.e. with the totality of her manifestations in the works of the writer and the semantic continuum that they form. This type of character is defined as a heroine with outstanding physical abilities (such as strength, horse-riding and shooting skills, etc. - and also great beauty), a strong, proud personality, persistence, ability to fight back, determination to gain the upper hand, to win at all costs - especially in the game of power and armed conflict with the male character that is in love with the heroine and/or is loved by her. The author identifies Zamyatin’s works in which the woman warrior appears, analyzes the plot functions and the characteristic motif complex associated with this image. The author demonstrates that the female warrior represents a very frequent type of heroine in Zamyatin’s works: the image appears at the beginning of his career as a writer, in the short story “Kryazhi” (1915), and accompanies him until the end, manifesting itself in the screenplays written in the 1930s. The author reveals that a specific variant of the plot featuring the female warrior is implemented in Zamyatin’s works: the heroine is shown as equal in strength with the male character, and the test of power happens, in particular in the form of a literal duel. Whatever its outcome is and whoever wins, the storyline usually finishes with the death of one or both characters - either during the combat or as its remote consequence. While the type of the plot is usually the same, the female character itself shows a wide variety: there are Valkyrie-like heroines (Ildegonda in the play Atilla), polenitsas from Russian bylina songs (such as Nastasya Mikulishna in the screenplay “Dobrynya” or Marya in “Kryazhi”), Mongolian women warriors (Borte, Ulek), and even contemporary heroines of this type (Zinaida in the screenplay “The God of Dance”). Usually such characters are attributed in Zamyatin to the legendary epic past or rooted in “folk archaics”; they belong to the rural world, to the Russian village. The constant topoi and the evolution of the female warrior in Zamyatin’s artistic works are revealed; in particular, such motifs as love-hate, test of strength (in the form of a duel or a competition), mutual intendedness of two “strong ones” and their tragic non-encounter are considered. The author notes that the supervalue of the female warriors in Zamyatin’s works is love, while for some other writers of the Silver Age, for instance, for Marina Tsvetaeva or Lyubov Stolitsa, such values were female agency, independence, control over one’s life, freedom, or even spiritual salvation. The play Atilla and its heroine Ildegonda are analyzed in this article in particular detail; the sources of this image are revealed.

“Female Rebellion” in Anna Barkova’s Play Nastasya Kostyor (1923)

The article examines the figure of the woman warrior and the theme of the “female rebellion” in the hitherto understudied play by Anna Barkova Nastasya Kostyor (1923) in the context of gender studies. Characters, motifs, and the play’s plot are placed against the background of the Barkova’s early work that heavily focused on the “woman question” and invented “new” femininity drawing from the archetypal image of the female warrior in literature and art. The author argues that in this play, Barkova for the first time relates the figure of female warrior to eschatological ideas and utopianism of the Silver Age, namely to Sophia myth. The problem of the ambivalent nature of the female character is in the focus of discussion. The essay explores the sources of this character — from the mystical snake woman of Russian Symbolists to Joan of Arc and the “female ataman” Alena Arzamasskaya (the character of the so-called “Stepan Razin legend”). It describes radical gender inversions in Barkova’s play and explores its original response to the topoi of female warrior that are abundant in this work.