Northwestern Only Among Women: Philosophies of Community in the Russian and Soviet Imagination, 1860–1940 (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory)

Only Among Women examines idealized relationships between women in Russian literature and culture from the age of the classic Russian novel to socialist realism and Stalinist film. It reveals how the idea of a community of women―a social sphere ostensibly free from the taint of money, sex, or self-interest―originates in the classic Russian novel, fuels mystical notions of unity in turn-of-the-century modernism, and finally assumes a place of privilege in Stalinist culture, especially cinema.  Rethinking the significance and surprising continuities of gender in Russian and Soviet culture, Eakin Moss relates this tradition to Western philosophies of community developed by thinkers from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Jean-Luc Nancy. She shows that in the 1860s friendship among women came to figure as an organic national collectivity in works such as Tolstoy’s War and Peace and a model for revolutionary organization in Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?.   Only Among Women also traces how women’s community came to be connected with new religious and philosophical notions of a unity transcending the individual at the fin-de-siècle. Finally, in Stalinist propaganda of the 1930s, the notion of women’s community inherited from the Russian novel reemerged in the image of harmonious female workers serving as a patriarchal model for loyal Communist citizenship. Review "Anne Eakin Moss is like a triathlete who uses different equipment to cover a long distance and reach a distant goal. In this case, the distance is some eighty years of Russian and Soviet culture, and the goal is a fuller understanding of the representation and philosophy of communities of women. The ground traversed includes belles lettres, literature, philosophy, drama, and film . . . It treats works by Tolstoy, Chernyshevsky, and Chekhov, Muratova, Zinovieva-Annibal, Eisenstein, Muratova, and a number of lesser-known Soviet film directors. By juxtaposing these figures and treating them in from a new perspective, Moss inevitably poses questions that haven't been posed before, and we learn things that we hadn't even thought to ask about . . . Moss deserves our gratitude and our congratulations." --Sarah Pratt, The Russian Review ". . . an experimental project whose pleasures lie in the interplay of connections brought to light in a novel investigation of women's relationships . . . It is a dense and complex interweaving of cultural and ideological strands, and the discussions in each chapter offer penetrating readings of the texts in relation to their historical, philosophical, and literary contexts, as well as readings of Soviet films of the 1930s. This panoramic and nuanced treatment of women's communities that evolve across almost a century in the Russian and Soviet imagination is a subject that Eakin Moss assembles, identifies, and evaluates in relation to the Slavophile-Westerner controversy whose 'visions of community' she sees as 'intertwined, ' and not, as is 'classically' thought, opposed." --Sharon Cameron, Los Angeles Review of Books "This extraordinarily erudite and insightful book provides a new understanding of one of the crucial Russian cultural topoi. From Chernyshevsky and Tolstoy in the 1860s to Soviet cinema of the 1930s, idealized women's community has often been viewed as an emblem of humanity and a paradigmatic embodiment of the so-called 'Russian Idea.' However, as Eakin Moss demonstrates, the age of modernism yielded an alternative vision of womanhood, one stripped of idealistic belief in the essential goodness of the 'eternal feminine' and reduced to immanence. Understanding Russian thought, culture, and politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries requires a thorough comprehension of both the idealistic and the modernist paradigms in a variety of dialectical permutations. Ambitious, well researched, and elegantly written, Eakin Moss's book is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the complexity and ran