Mikhail Kuzmin’s Short Stories with the Female Voice: The Problem of Constructing Femininity

Abstract

Purpose. The article aims to study the short stories and novellas by Mikhail Kuzmin written in a woman’s voice in order to show how the writer constructs femininity.

Results. It is established that in the few works of Kuzmin which are written in the female voice the diary form prevails, contributing to self-revelation, and in most cases, self-exposure of the heroines. According to Kuzmin, the characteristic features of the females are the tendency to consider themselves “the navel of the earth”, the inability to love unconditionally which is the only way to love truly, as well as the ineptitude of seeing true men’s nature instead of their own reflections, and the need for “romance”, agitation, extreme emotions, intensity of the atmosphere stemming from the same inability to love. The rare female characters that the narrative sympathizes with are women who have managed to overcome these failures.

Conclusion. It turns out that the hypothesis of Kuzmin’s misogyny is quite fair: indeed, in the overwhelming majority of cases, women are portrayed without any sympathy and are endowed with many unpleasant qualities. At the same time, Kuzmin does not only reproduce the traditional topoi of the masculine gender order, which considers women as inferior creatures by nature, he also finds original interpretations for them: such is, for example, one of Kuzmin’s main charges against women, i. e. their flair for drama. Although the origins of this charge lay in the stereotype of the supposedly “hysterical” women, Kuzmin presents it in an elegantly modified form.