This year's Oulanoff Memorial Lecture “‘Her Life’s Sacrifice’: The Abandoning Mother as Positive Role Model in the Soviet 1920s” will be presented by Dr. Jenny Kaminer at 5:00pm on October 30th in the Rosa M. Ailabouni Room in the Ohio Union. This event is open to the University community.
Abstract:
The October Revolution inspired profound changes in all aspects of Russian family life but none, perhaps, as transformative as the relationship between mother and child. If, in prerevolutionary Russia, religious and cultural codes proscribed a self-sacrificial, conciliatory, and noble maternal figure, then the Bolsheviks aimed to legitimize an entirely new kind of mother: unencumbered by the oppression of domestic bonds, she could dedicate herself fully to the construction of the new society rather than to the preservation of the hearth. Maternal sentiment would no longer be circumscribed by biological attachment to “that piece of meat that is called [your] own child,” as one Soviet mother of the 1920s so vividly put it, but would instead broaden to encompass all of the children of this reconstructed state.
This talk will analyze a short-lived but radically new maternal ideal that emerged in the culture of the Soviet 1920s: the abandoning mother as positive role model. After briefly discussing popular texts published in women’s journals from the era, I will turn more sustained attention to Fedor Gladkov’s now classic socialist realist novel, Cement (1925). One of the earliest works of Soviet fiction to feature an exemplar of the new Soviet woman and to explore how the 1917 Revolution transformed the institution of the family, its plot and positive heroes would be repeatedly imitated in later Soviet fiction. Set at the beginning of the NEP period, the work’s central plot focuses on the return of the hero, Gleb Chumalov, to his hometown after a valiant fight for the Bolshevik cause. Alongside his efforts to resurrect the town’s abandoned cement factory, Gleb struggles to adapt to a radically altered home life. His wife, Dasha—the formerly tender and selfless young wife and mother to their daughter, Nurka—spurns her domestic role in favor of tireless activism for the collective. Nurka now resides in a communal children’s home appropriately named “Krupskaia.” My close reading of the novel will trace how Dasha’s journey toward the goal of revolutionary enlightenment necessitates the subsuming of her motherly emotions. Gladkov presents child abandonment as a necessary, if admittedly painful, prerequisite to the new woman’s full participation in the society of the future.
The fictional mother who abandons her children in the Soviet 1920s, as developed by Gladkov and others, is not meant to inspire antipathy or condemnation. Rather, the authors characterize abandonment as a wholly justifiable, even heroic, response to the exigencies of the historical period. Whether glorifying a mother who forsakes her children to serve society or demonstrating the danger of a mother left to her own devices, these texts illustrate how the Soviet state inserted itself into the mother-child relationship and assumed a position of primacy. The interests of the state either supersede those of the child, or the state is portrayed as more qualified to make the decisions traditionally the prerogative of the biological mother. In either case, the “halo of holy motherhood,” as at least one Soviet mother from the 1920s had advocated, is undeniably pierced.
