Emancipated Femininity

The groundbreaking discovery of her own body ushered sexual emancipation into the life of Troianker, and sexual emancipation brought her to the discovery of her bodily freedom. Among her partners there were many literary figures, in­cluding many European guests, if one believes Troianker’s relatives and contem- poraries.⁷²Troianker boasted of having had affairs not only with such celebrities as Volodymyr Sosiura and Konstantin Fedin but also with Panait Istrati, a homo­sexual.

In the postrevolutionary mid-1920s, the conduct of Raisa Troianker, as well as of Valer’ian Polishchuk, hardly looked abnormal. The younger generation disregarded the arguments of the leading Marxist critics, who took pains to prove that that the abolition of private property should not be mechanically ex­trapolated to family relations. As Gregory Carleton has proved, young postrevo- Iutionary men and women took what they wanted from Marxist polemics on sex. For them, unrestricted sexual relations free from a burdensome marriage con­tract represented the immediate expansion of revolutionary emancipation. They thought “love-comrade” relations should render obsolete the institution of mar­riage and its attitude toward women as manipulated and appropriated assets. Marxist vocabulary was routinely used as a cover for promiscuity and license. In vain the leading newspapers again and again emphasized that Engels called on revolutionary proletarians to transform marriage into a voluntary union of two loving individuals and that Lenin restated that the cancellation of private prop­erty did and should not imply the rejection of monogamy and family ties.

The ubiquitous discussion of sexual relations in the Soviet press in the 1920s not only manifested the burst of revolutionary eros but also bolstered it. To calm down the spirits and “naturalize” sex within the Marxist canon, Aleksandra Kol­lontai compared the normalcy of sex to the normalcy of any other common hu­man urge (such as thirst), yet her sober “theory of a glass of water”—equating sex and drinking—unexpectedly triggered an overheated polemic on free love, on the multifaceted interests of human beings who rejected the boundaries of monogamy, and on disorganized sexual relations.⁷⁴ Summarized by a keen critic of these new ethics, the sexual conduct of the young Soviet generation required, first, that any male member of the Young Communist League could and had to satisfy his sexual instincts. Second, abstention was qualified as a petty-bourgeois prejudice. Third, any female member of the Young Communist League had to satisfy the needs of a male, otherwise she was considered a petty bourgeois who did not deserve to be a worker’s institute student or a member of the Young Communist League. In a Kharkiv journal read regularly in Troianker’s circle, a scandalized sociologist flatly rejected this perverse interpretation of grassroots sexual conduct and called for a healthy abstinence.⁷⁵ For Troianker this seemed but another dull straightjacket, one more quasi-religious imposition: she had disdained these restrictive ethics in the shtetl and renounced them again in Kharkiv.

The liberation from a bodily deficient shtetl implied the emancipation of the body. Once Troianker rejected the imposed shtetlesque gender relations, revolu­tion erupted in her poetry in the form of explicit sexual desire. It could hardly have been otherwise because, as Iurii Smolych recorded, “vulgarity and eccen­tricity have always been characteristic of this small, charming, and excessively erotic woman.”⁷⁶ It was particularly significant that eccentricity, charm, and eroticism permeated Troianker’s poetry, too.

Hryhorii Kostiuk (1902-2002), an accurate and trustworthy Ukrainian lit­erary historian, recalled how a number of respectable Ukrainian writers, engi­neers, teachers, and scholars gathered in his Kharkiv friend’s apartment to have drinks, sing scabrous songs, tell jokes, and recite erotic poetry. They recited Pushkin’s Gavriliada, unpublished Sosiura, and, as Kostiuk emphasized, “even more than that, our Raisa Troianker.”⁷⁷ In her recollections, paradoxically com­bining racial antisemitism with sincere empathy toward individual Jews, Dokia Humenna referred to the same hot topic, noting in passing Natalia Zabila’s love poetry and adding that “her poems reflected a fashionable contemporary theme. It was more than eroticism, it was sexualism. It was the fashion, and besides Zabila, it was represented also in the poetry of Raisa Troianker and Ludmyla [in reality, Luciana] Piontek, the wife of Ivan Kulyk.”⁷⁸ Apparently Troianker, al­though partially unpublished, was popular indeed in the 1920s—to the extent that Volodymyr Sosiura was offended when a critic listed Sosiura in his literary review among the “dead” poets and “such erotic poetess as Raisa Troianker” among the “living” ones.⁷⁹

Given that Ukrainian intellectuals were reported to have recited “our Raisa Troianker” and considered her “alive,” even if ironically, one should revisit the opinions of such writers as Iurii Smolych, who held Troianker’s poetry only as “pornography,” although “formally masterful.”⁸⁰The bigotry of the harbingers of socialist realism, even talented and noncanonical ones like Smolych, allowed them neither to assess accurately Troianker’s poetic innovations nor to explain how her verse made its way into Ukrainian periodicals. Moreover, there are rea­sons to believe that in his Intimate Confession, Smolych was more rigid about the literary than about the sexual moments of his Kharkiv youth. Still, Smolych had a hard time contextualizing Troianker, whose explicit eroticism was unparalleled in Ukrainian poetry.

Raised and bred in the midst of rural parochialism and its conservative per­ception of gender, pre-1917 Ukrainian poetry introduced the whole gamut of love themes. While Panas Myrnyi socialized love, Vynnychenko politicized it, and Lesia Ukrainka romanticized and psychologized it, before the 1920s no Ukrainian poet attempted to eroticize love. Sosiura broke the canon, poeticizing both male and female sexual activism, but Troianker was the first to celebrate erotic passion, to depict a vertiginous sexual encounter, to convey the postcoitus confusion of inexperienced lovers, to ponder on the paradoxical sense of embar­rassment of a girl who exhibits her body yet is still ashamed of it, and to empha­size the profound feeling of a resuscitated new being after its metaphorical death in the first sexual encounter. She placed her alter ego at the epicenter of her erotic adventure, furnishing it with autobiographical detail and later transform­ing the erotic encounter into a cultural and social one. For Troianker, unlike for Ukrainian poets before her, self-emancipation signified sexual revolution and sexual revolution signified the discovery of the erotic and poetic potential of her own body.

In her “Trava pryv’ialena” (The Grass Has Faded), Troianker ponders the birth of a feminine psyche. She manifests a certain sense of balance and taste while portraying how her alter ego became a woman. She pondered every mo­ment of postcoitus stress that transformed her introverted sufferings into a re­discovery of, and reconciliation with, the world around her. She starts with a vic­timized body—a body in fever, a falling body, a body in need of caressing, a naked body, an ashamed body—and culminates with a body coming to grips with itself and acquiring the calm and confidence of the land. Here is Troianker:

The grass has faded and the fall is numb.

It happened. What’s that? Am I alive?

In the grass my braids got entangled and dispersed,

My body and head are in fever.

My skirt is rumpled. My face is in a torment.

The red stains in the stripes of my underwear.

And the night falls, like a raven, into the abyss.

And the night calls me to fall, too.

My heart is heavy and anxious.

And you, lost, cannot caress me.

And what has happened cannot be reversed.

And my heart is compressed with cold.

You really begged me: be mine today.

And it did happen. Oh, the law of life!

We have forgotten Heine’s book in the grass—

Its leaves are rustling under the wind.

I am surprised. You saw all of me—

But in front of you I am ashamed to fix my stocking.

And go untied. And we seem strangers.

And a random pearl is tearing from my eye.

Oh, never more! I’ll never be the same as yesterday!

I’ll never erase the burning stains from my lips!

And the day is so regular and cheerful.

The tired earth so calm.⁸¹

Moving from the nature of her psyche to the psyche of nature, the poem is per­meated with Akhmatova’s metaphors. Akhmatova mesmerized Troianker with her strong poetic female voice, her explicit eroticism, and her classic form.

One can hardly imagine a female poet in the 1920s who could have escaped Akhmatova’s impact. Troianker was no exception. Several examples help to illu­minate parallels between them. Troianker’s heroine forgets a volume of Heine in the grass, whereas in Akhmatova the unnamed but recognizable Pushkin forgets a volume of Parni in an alley at Tsarskoe Selo (zdes lezhala ego treugolka /1 ras- trepannyi tom Parni, ³äè).⁸² Troianker’s dispersed plaits recall the disbanded feminine plaits portrayed in Akhmatova’s Kiev-penned “Zharko veet veter dushnyi” (Oppressive Wind Blows Hot, 1910).⁸³ The feelings the two women experience also seem similar: Troianker depicts the fever of her head and body, whereas Akhmatova experiences a blunt headache and a strange body fever. It is curious that Troianker referred to a poem that obliquely compared her partner with a poet: if Akhmatova’s Pushkin forgets in the grass a volume of Parni, who then was that mysterious addressee ofTroianker’s poem, if not a Ukrainian poet?

Troianker’s finale apparently goes back to the finale of Akhmatova’s poem “la prishla siuda, bezdel’nitsa” (I Have Come Here, the Lazy One, 1911) which rec­onciles the narrator with herself and her immediate natural environment:

I notice everything around as new.

The wet smell of the poplars.

I am silent. Silent, getting ready

To turn again into you, earth.⁸⁴

Compare Troianker:

And the day is so regular and cheerful.

The tired earth so calm.

But the differences are also telling. Troianker’s heroine goes through confusion and pain after sexual intercourse, whereas Akhmatova’s heroine experiences similar feelings after writing a courageous message. It is writing that triggers Akhmatova’s suffering; in Troianker, suffering is the result of erotic passion. Akhmatova places a written text into the fulcrum of her verse; Troianker makes her verse body-centered. For the former, writing is a renunciation of the past, for the latter, sex is a rupture with the past. These are not minor differences. In this case, as well as in several others, Troianker resorted to and entirely reworked Akhmatova’s imagery, pursuing her own purpose. We do not find Akhmatova- like religious symbolism in Troianker.

Akhmatova’s solitary self-contained sufferings are alien to Troianker. The romantic solitude of Akhmatova is replaced by the erotic outburst of Troianker’s protagonist. Troianker’s body language absorbs and transforms Akhmatova’s nuanced reflection. Instead of Akhmatova’s timid summer and rigid winter Troianker celebrates the abundant fall. Akhmatova says “I breathe moon”; Troianker claims that she “makes love in the transparency of the day.” Akhma-

tova becomes a “calm girl in the white field,” whereas Troianker goes to the field to give way to her tantalizing emotions. Unlike Akhmatova, Troianker celebrates her heroine making love, not contemplating it. Akhmatova’s wailing over a lost love is something entirely alien to Troianker, who is usually the first to depart from her significant other. Troianker knows neither Akhmatova’s intense self-re­flection nor her cautious manipulation of her heroine’s spoken words. Troianker learns from Akhmatova how to construct a dramatic dialogue within a lyrical dis­course, yet in her dialogue she is both one of the actors and the director of the play. Perhaps therefore Troianker radically departs from Akhmatova once she ar­rives at a new level of self-awareness. She does not allow any imposition: she, Raia Troianker, empowers herself to make decisions, choose lovers, and suffer.

A rupture with the world of a defunct tradition liberated not only Troianker but also her female protagonists. Tartar or Muslim girls enter Troianker’s poetic universe as soon as they replicate Troianker’s own life itinerary. In other words, they are as Tartar or Muslim as Troianker’s girl from a Hong Kong pub is Chi­nese. Like Troianker’s rebellion against tradition, their rebellion starts with a re­jection of religious canons, continues with the celebration of a unrestricted love, and culminates in “equal opportunity” rejoicing.

Here is the poetic monologue of a Tartar girl, who, among other things, men­tions the Women’s Department headed by Aleksandra Kollontai, who was mis­understood by many as a theoretician of free love:

“I have trampled down my chadar,

I myself have cut my plait off.

There was such uproar in my aul,

The old mullah has cursed me.”

And the Tartar girl pushed her copper leg

Into the sea, as if into the grass.

“And now the Women’s Department will send me

To work and study in Moscow.”⁸⁵

Troianker continues her poetic confession using female Muslims and Tartars, her decolonized sisters, as her mouthpiece. To be sure, her couleur locale is a sheer fiction: her Muslim and Jew are interchangeable. The sheytl (the wig or head covering of a married Jewish woman) becomes a Muslim chadar. The shtetl is replaced by a northern Caucasus aul, a distant mountain village, while a rabbi defending the last bastions of tradition is transformed into a mullah. Troianker shares with her characters her bygone victimization and an emancipating drive. It is less obvious that Troianker needs her exotic couleur locale to camouflage her own pondering on the liberating role of sex. Troianker’s outward celebration of sexuality makes her symbolism rather bold. She listens to her heroine’s confes­sion, charmed by the Tartar girl’s explicit eroticism. She admires her heroine’s resolute body language and reads it as a writ of her heroine’s liberation from re­ligious shackles.

Troianker marked the radical shifts in the lives of her personages, their liber­ation from religious canonicity, and their sexual emancipation with red or shades of red. “Red” connotes positive values, such as sexual maturity, carnality, physi­cal attractiveness, the quintessence of life. She associated “red” with a transitory present-perfect tense and placed it somewhere between the “yellow” past indef­inite and the sober “white” present. Depicting the first sexual adventure of her heroine in her much-acclaimed erotic poem, Troianker’s protagonist discovered “red stains” on her underwear. She bemoaned her lost virginity, her irreversible transformation into a woman, and her shameful blood. A similar yet more mod­erate symbolism enveloped the only dynamic scene in the poem on the Tartar girl. Troianker contrasted the motionless confession of her heroine with her rapid gesture. All of a sudden in the midst of a languid narrative, the Tartar girl briskly (rvuchko) enters the sea and makes visible part of her body. Whereas in the autobiographical poem, the girl is ashamed of her body, the Tartar girl feels fairly comfortable, and is fully aware of her physicality, to the extent that she seems to catch the eye of her female interlocutor. The more Troianker departs from her autobiographical motifs, the more pronounced is the physical self­awareness of her protagonists. All of them learn to speak by freeing their bodies from the imposed rigidity of traditional ethics. They are looking for their voice and language and find the language of their bodies.

This transition is further elaborated in the poem on the Muslim girl, another of Troianker’s alter egos, who praises her nonmarital love relations with her part­ner Ali. Here, too, Troianker emphasizes the red symbolism. The Muslim girl burns her head cover in a fire and refuses to confine herself to the ichkar, the sep­arate part of a Muslim house restricted for women only. The implicit red of the fire destroys the enslaving past and liberates the body. The explicit red of henna with which her lover paints his beard functions as an erotic attraction. The burn­ing religious artifact releases the Muslim girl: she escapes from what she perceives as the stifling domain of an observant Muslim household into the realm of unre­stricted love. She publicizes her relations, taking her lover to a teahouse, an un­equivocal Muslim public domain. She boasts that she is as free as her lover. Per­haps this is freedom not only from tradition but also from mutual responsibilities:

My Ali is such a slim Uzbek

He colors in henna his beard.

It’s such a joy, such a joy over market days

In my native kishlak.

My Ali is a joyous musician

He spends an entire evening in a teahouse,

He smokes his tobacco an entire evening,

He drinks his fragrant tea.

Oh, my yashmak was burning,

burning,

I go with my beloved to a teahouse,

I do not sit on the women’s side of the house,

I am as free as Ali.⁸⁶

Red symbolism cuts through a variety of Troianker’s poems and images, sug­gesting a well-conceived color scheme and gaining momentum in the poem “Visiting the Dad,” built as a dialogue between the heroine and her father. In it Troianker’s heroine articulates her diatribe against the Zionist dream. In Troianker’s poetic dialogue with her father, the color red imbues its utmost sense. Not only do ideas and items acquire new meaning once they become red. Now distant and alien, Troianker claims, Zion will become dear and close once it changes its color. The blue Zion will become red and perhaps will be incorpo­rated into the utopian world of the communist future. Red is the key to the fu­ture. Red revives and resuscitates, its presence guarantees the metamorphosis, it is both the essence of life and the guarantor of its immortality:

The old will die and disappear,

And Zion will no more be blue,

It will turn its color into red

And will knock at the commune door.⁸⁷

Consider now Troianker’s innovative approach to otherwise official color sym­bolism. This symbolism is more nuanced and complex than that of her con­temporaries of the late 1920s, such as Ivan Kulyk and Leonid Pervomais’kyi. Troianker’s red comes to be associated not so much with the canonic proletarian struggle for a happy future as with sexual freedom, a new feminine self-aware­ness, the rediscovery of a feminine physicality, a free and unrestrained eroticism, and the utmost emancipation of women.

Through the red doors, the old-fashioned Jewish utopia enters the commu­nist future. Red is the loss of virginity and the discovery of her female ego; but it is also the loss of the shtetl through the discovery of a red communist future. The red is about emancipation, both somatic/erotic and social/national. The red ends the Jewish-Ukrainian yellow and blue past and leads a Jewish girl to the modern world of Ukrainian poetry, inhabited, to be sure, by Ukrainian writers and poets.