Book Review : Ten Days That Changed Their World
The Women’s Decameron by Julia Voznesenskaya, translated by W. B. Linton (Atlantic Monthly: $16.95)
The scene is a maternity ward somewhere in Russia. The circumstance is a mild rash that puts the new mothers in quarantine for 10 days. The device is almost as old as Western literature itself: To amuse themselves, the women decide to tell stories each night--to make up a women’s Decameron.
The set topics are these: First Love, Seduced and Abandoned, Sex in Farcical Situations, Bitches, Infidelity and Jealousy, Rapists and Their Victims, Money, Revenge, Nobel Deeds by Men and Women, and Happiness. The 10 women includeZina (a tramp and a slut, who has spent time in the labor camps and “has no fixed abode”), Emma (a theater director with a lively knowledge of Russia’s alternative culture), Albina (an airline hostess for Aeroflot), Olga (a shipyard worker), Nelya (a music teacher of Jewish descent who barely survived World War II), Larissa (a doctor of biology who fobs off most of her storytelling responsibilities with a series of goofy anecdotes), andNatasha (an engineer).
Idealized Russian Types
Three final women, who represent extreme, idealized Russian types, are Valentina (a party bigwig who believes the world begins and ends with the Communist hierarchy), Galina (married to a dissident, and almost as familiar as Zina with the ongoing horrors of the labor camps), and Irishka (sweet, good, funny, self-effacing and easily pleased . . . the perfect Russian woman).
Julia Voznesenskaya, like Solzhenitsyn, has served time in a Soviet labor camp. She’s a dissident, a protester, but her Decameron probably does more to point up the differences between men and women than between Russians and Americans. The jacket copy somewhat pompously promises that if we read this Decameron we will learn about “the stark reality of a society torn apart by suicide, divorce and alcoholism, by the difficulties of finding food and a place to live, by the threat of harrowing imprisonment.” No doubt all that’s true, but far, far more important here is that you get a sense of how a whole society lives--not simply as players in a mindless international football game. (Are the Americans really better than the Communists? How does their alcoholism stack up against our drug addiction? Doesn’t the fact that they buy Levi’s prove finally and absolutely that capitalism is morally superior to their foul political system?) “The Women’s Decameron” is extremely subversive in terms of both sides, because it discounts that international score-keeping altogether.
These are women, living as best they can, in a society thought up and run by men; men who have been known, in some instances to do a noble deed or two, but who are largely incomprehensible and “uncivilized” to the women who use them in their stories. These are women who prize domesticity, calm, beauty and order. Nelya, the music teacher, cherishes an image from the pre-war past that sums up what they all want: “The only picture I still have in my mind’s eye from that life is of mother playing the piano . . . could life really ever have been so wonderful? The open window, the breeze filling the lace curtain that billows into the room, lightly touching the edge of the piano. And mother sitting at the piano, looking very beautiful in a white dress . . . and just everywhere--on the shiny black lid of the piano, on her white dress, on the yellow floor that smelled so nice, little sunbeams are dancing to the music. . . .”
Obviously, in a Russian man’s world, a memory like that hasn’t a chance in hell. For Nelya, these lovely afternoons are put to an end by pogroms. But Albina’s disillusion is cast in personal terms, when, as a child ice-skating star, she’s systematically and continuously molested by two brutish skating coaches. (Then, later, in another story, Albina is raped again, and assured by a sanctimonious general--a hero of the people--that decent girls never get raped.) In fact these women are at the mercy of a society run by someone else. Even if they work for the society (as does Valentina, “a Communist Manifesto in a skirt”), they are to the system as enlisted men are to the army. The system may work or not, but it’s the cannon fodder--not the officers--that is, in any case, expendable.
It’s because of this that Valentina can remark wistfully, “There are decent people among us, just as anywhere else, and we know how to joke too,” and then go on to tell a sappy, heavy-handed story about having sex with her husband under a shield with a portrait of Nikita Khrushchev on it. Her husband jokes dimly, “Valentina! What if the general secretary died after having it off with you? You’re quite hot stuff you know, and he’s no spring chicken anymore . . . .” In Valentina’s story, Khrushchev does die the next day. In the author’s story here, all the ladies in the ward laugh along with Valentina, because this is a personal, individual, feminine world, built on gossip and good feeling, where the size of a country’s rockets simply is not important enough to devote even one short story to.
The labor camps in these stories figure as another kind of revelation. We tend to forget, here in America, that these camps, the whole concept of “Siberia,” was not invented by the Communists but has been in the Russian tradition far longer than their regime. To be a dissident is--at some level--to be in a respected part of society. The prison stories here focus less on political injustice than on life, pure and simple, in the camps: how life is lived, how humans survive--how women make civilizations even in the most primitive and brutal situations invented by men, with their crack-brained theories about politics, power, supremacy.
Life, as seen in this Decameron, is hard. Working wives worry themselves sick over inadequate day care. Because of the drudgery of wage-earning, and doing all the housework, women are kept from going to the top of their chosen professions. Every one of these 10 has a gruesome story of rape. Or of being seduced and abandoned. Life under the Communists! Wow, it’s pretty bad. It’s a good thing we’ve figured out how to deal with these problems, over here on our side.