We Women and Our Authors

by Laura Marholm

At the root of it all there is something like a dark unrest, a hearkening terror, a mistrust, which makes him uncomfortable where he is, and lonely where he loves.

No other literature has understood women and described them as vividly as the Russian. Take for instance Turgenev’s young girls at the time of their physical and spiritual awakening, think of the wavering indecision of their lonely inner life, filled with wishes of which they are hardly conscious, while as yet untouched by experience; think of the vegetative, half-indifferent sensuousness of his widows, think of Garschin’s inspired description of the demi-monde, of Dostoievsky’s Sonias and Gruschenkas and other doubtful social phenomena, in the description of whom he is as successful as he is the reverse in his gentlewomen. The new feature in these writers is their astonishing depth of psychology, their instinctive grasp of the side of woman’s nature which is not turned towards man, and their intuitive comprehension of her as a feminine being dumb and unveiled in their sight. French literature knows nothing of it. In France a young girl’s life begins on her first meeting with a man, and the charm of her womanhood is only revealed with her first love-affair in marriage. But that is the stupidity of authorship modelled in accordance with the conventional rules and acquired blindness of a school of literature. In Russia there is, strictly speaking, no school, either in literature or anywhere else, there is no so-called “good school” for anything at all, and accordingly there is no tradition, no taste cultivated by morality, nothing fixed, no fashion, no high road. The Russian writer, with his gentle erotic nature and sensitive yearning soul, can wander whither he will. He has the sharp eyes of a young race, the unshrinking gaze which has not been blunted by generations of culture, and which is quick to realise all that it has seen. The young Russian girl is not only “a girl,” she is a woman. She has not undergone the hypocritical convent education of the French girl, she knows nothing of the German girl’s bourgeois conventions, and she has more temperament and more natural spontaneity than either. These are two of the reasons why in French literature a woman only becomes an individual when she is loved, and why in the German literature of the last century, even in that of the newest realistic school, she is not an individual at all but only a being who belongs to a human species, and these are also the reasons why in Scandinavian literature she is endowed with a half timid, half sorrowful individuality.

Woman as woman, unconditional and complete in the essence of her being, in the relative perfection of her nature before she comes into contact with man, has never yet been described. To do so is the task allotted to a future literature starting from other presumptions and working under other aspects.

The reason that the Russians are in advance of other nations in this particular is, I think, that with them there has never been a historic period of the cult of woman with all its visible and invisible offshoots. As in their religious conceptions the ideal of womanhood is not so much the “spotless Virgin” as the “Mother of God,” so in the language of the people there is no separate form for addressing a young girl, and when the ordinary Russian wishes to ingratiate himself with a woman he calls her “Matiuschka” (little mother), regardless of her age or position. Woman in the fulfilment of her natural function—woman as a mother—is that which appeals most to the direct consciousness of the Russian. Hence the artificial barrier, which the postulate of purity had raised between the man and woman of western Europe, falls away, and the Russian beholds woman as unity, as nature.

The Russian woman sees herself in the same light. No moral arrogance, no pose of purity has become a second nature to her. With the exception of a thin coating of western European culture and notions of propriety, she is more of a natural being, more whole-hearted and spontaneous in her affections, and more decided in her sympathies and antipathies than the woman of western Europe.

No Russian writer is more profoundly conscious of it than Tolstoy, and not one has described it with greater intuition.

It was this that originated characters like the Cossack girl in The Cossacks, who permeates the whole book with the warmth of her healthy young person, whose silence is more convincing, deeper, and more apparent than any exchange of thought between a man and woman; who loves and sacrifices herself unhesitatingly with the instinct of an animal, and rejects the young officer’s love, without being aware of it, which is, to him, the bitterest and most personal humiliation of all.

This was the origin of that child-woman in War and Peace; I think her name was Natascha or Nadieschda. That enchanting being who has just reached the age of transition when so many shoots sprout which cause life to perish or starve, unless they are too feeble to grow at all,—poor little blossoms that vibrate with a nervous shudder, seeking to hide themselves in fear of the beatings of her pulse, the variations of her every mood, while she seeks relief from her tears in the bed and arms of her mother—still a child, already a woman! This was also the origin of those scenes in the same book where the boy and girl seek one another, play and dance together, and cannot be happy without one another. A true picture, a piece of child-psychology, the depth and truth of which is shown at a glance.

There is also a thoughtful young officer in this book, who is in love with the merry playfellow of his childhood; but she slips away from him, and he marries an elderly, faded, impersonal spinster, and looks for happiness in a marriage grounded on mutual sympathy.