Controlling the Uncontrollable: Navigating Subjectivity in the perestroika and post-Soviet Prose of L. S. Petrushevskaia and L. E. Ulitskaia

Abstract

This dissertation deals with the daily, lived experience of women in the late- and post- Soviet Union as depicted in literature written around the time of its collapse. With respect to the specific challenges individuals in disempowered positions faced and the various ways they attempted to overcome them. The dissertation reexamines works by L. S. Petrushevskaia and L. E. Ulitskaia from the introduction of perestroika in 1987 through 2000. Drawing from studies of power in a range of contexts from Michel Foucault in 1970s France to Aleksei Yurchak in 2000s Russia, I focus my analysis on how any perception of control is portrayed as dubious, how individuals worked against traditional patriarchal power structures, and how the narrative structures replicate the environment of uncertainty and fear that came to mark the “Wild 90s” of Russian literature. I find that their protagonists’ constant navigation of subjectivity is particularly clear within the authors’ use of three topoi: corporeality, romantic relationships, and escapism. The first chapter argues that bodies do not only reflect subjective construction, but in fact become a primary vessel through which it takes place: while many texts depict how the regulation of bodies (and [self-]disciplining the body) indoctrinates subjects to codes of dominant (and patriarchal) social order, I find that these works also show the subjects’ reactions to such moments as situated in the physical. The second chapter examines how the binaries between private and public break down as individuals use the realm of interpersonal romantic relationships as a venue to challenge, refute, or adapt societal norms propagated by communist morality. The heroines manipulate and reinterpret dominant regulations on social relationships in attempt to lessen their suffering, much of which comes from living under the Soviet totalitarian regime. Their efforts are often not successful and many inevitably continue the cycle of violence that causes their pain in the first place, but their attempts to manipulate or resist regulations on social relationships is an example of testing the limits of subjectivity. Lastly, the third chapter ponders those moments when individuals try to escape psychologically. No longer striving toward the ideal, they attempt to create new spaces in which they are the ideal. These spaces do not fully free them from dominant power, but their search for an alternate understanding of reality – through fantasy, hallucination, delusion, madness, or other – allows them a greater sense of influence than does the society around them. Even when these efforts fail, the attempt itself is a form of resistance to the dominant culture. Petrushevskaia and Ulitskaia’s prose depicts those who feel control slipping rapidly from their hands; my work analyzes how they resist, evade, manipulate, and perpetuate the techniques of power to which they are simultaneously victim.