Gender and byt (everyday life) in post-Stalinist culture stem from tacit conceptions linking the quotidian to women. During the Thaw and Stagnation the posited egalitarianism of Soviet rhetoric and pre-exiting conceptions of the quotidian caused critics to use byt as shorthand for female experience and its literary expression. Addressing the prose of Natal'ia Baranskaia and I. Grekova, they connected the everyday to banality, reduced scope, ateleological time, private life, and anomaly. The authors, for their part, relied on selective representation of the quotidian and a chronotope of crisis to hesitantly address taboo subjects.
During perestroika womens prose reemerged in the context of social turmoil and changing gender roles. The appearance of six literary anthologies gave women authors and Liudmila Petrushevskaia in particular a new visibility. Female writers employed discourse and a broadened chronotope of crisis, along with the eras emphasis on exposure, negation, and systematic critique, to challenge gender roles. Both supporters and opponents of womens literature now directly addressed its relation to gender instead of using byt as a euphemism. From 1991 to 2001 womens prose solidified its status as a recognized part of Russian high literature. Liudmila Ulitskaia and Svetlana Vasilenko employed a transhistorical temporality that was based on the family and offered an indirect critique of history through representation of womens byt. Critics debated the relationship between womens writing, feminism, and the new divide between elite and popular literature. Depictions of byt in the work of Ulitskaia imply that the everyday is an artistic resource in its own right as well as a conduit to higher meaning.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-10312004-115858 |
| Date | 20 January 2005 |
| Creators | Sutcliffe, Benjamin Massey |
| Contributors | Nancy Glazener, Helena Goscilo, Nancy Condee, David Birnbaum |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-10312004-115858/ |
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