Gender, Nostalgia, and Memory: Women Writers in a Twentieth-Century Russian Émigré Community in France

The paper will use the theoretical framework of gender studies to analyze the cultural and intellectual discourses of the Russian émigré community in twentieth-century France. In the aftermath of the October Revolution, many Russians immigrated to France; 45,000 such newcomers settled in Paris. Their universe crumbled with the old regime, and the memories of pre-1917 Russia and the Belle Époque came to dominate the themes of the Russian émigré literature in interwar decades. I shall analyze the works produced by Elsa Triolet (1896-1970), Irène Némirovsky (1903-1942), Nadezhda Teffi (1872-1952), and Irina Odoevtseva. Russian writers explored nostalgia as a mechanism for generating myths about the Old regime and one’s life; they were well aware of a gap between perceptions and realities. Russian women-writers unveiled the way in which exaggeration and mythmaking went along with a sentiment of émigré nostalgia. The women-writers emphasized that this inward and retrospective attitude predisposed the émigrés to engage in the endless cycles of rewriting their biographies and the history of the Russian empire. The authors scrutinized these narratives; they were fascinated with the whimsical patterns of such tales and eagerness the Russian exiles created this mythology. Russian women-authors explored the process of mythmaking and found irony in a gap between the petty realities of Russian émigré existence and grand narratives created by them.

Russian women constructed the experience of exile in gendered terms. Teffi depicted everyday struggles for survival that took place in the life of Russian émigrés. Russian women could not afford luxury of being immersed in eternal nostalgia Many characters in Teffi’s stories are busy and crafty women who are the breadwinners for their families and for their husbands. They celebrate their little victories in their perpetual labor and do not succumb to melancholia.

Nostalgia could also be Revolutionary as the analysis of the writing by Elsa Triolet will show. Elsa Triolet was a writer and winner of the Goncourt Prize in literature (1944), the wife and the muse of Louis Aragon, a tireless promoter of Soviet cause in postwar France, and a friend of Soviet avant-garde writers. Elsa was a bilingual writer whose works written in French achieved recognition in the French public. In her novels, Triolet wrote about the difficult experience of many immigrants in France: Russians, Spanish refugees who came to Paris after the Spanish civil war, Polish miners, Armenians, Algerians and Italians (the immigrants of poverty), the survivors of the Turkish genocide, and even an American, a victim of McCarthyism. Using a metaphor by Triolet, France was an unloving distant mistress to them: one could sacrifice one’s life for her glory, but one would never earn her love. For such immigrants, profound nostalgia over the lost motherland was an inherent part and, in fact, the core of their identity. Internationalism is a cure for this alienation. The novel expressed nostalgia for the Russian Revolution. Yet, it was not the Revolution how it was, but how it could have been, how it was remembered, and how Triolet wished it to be.