In short, the task of being a woman was socially unsupported and, in practical terms, a nightmare. And even though Marina and I came of age in the dying days of this massive gender abolition experiment, we emerged two very different people. My friend was not in two minds about being a woman, but every bit of me was. Why did all that insane ideological bullshit work on me? Why, as a teenager and a young woman, was I so obsessed with achieving some kind of phantom gender neutrality, pretending, at the age of twelve, that I did not know what perfume was? (Please!) Getting off on being treated as one of the guys? Why did it work on me, even though my own mother was the living proof that you could be deadly smart, strong and independent while being beautiful and feminine to boot? That you did not need to de-sex yourself in order to be taken seriously? That being the woman of the family could be a source of joy rather than simply the painstaking fulfilment of duty? Unlike me, Marina instinctively knew early on that happiness was essentially a private affair rarely achieved in the service of ideology or ideals, that sensitivity was not a weakness, that emotion would not undo us, and that caring for your family was as noble a pursuit as feeding the hungry. Like I said, she was a woman first.
Billie’s birthday present from Marina and family is five hours of Carmen at the Mariinski Theatre. The Mariinski, known for most of the twentieth century as the Kirov Opera and Ballet, is in its two hundred and twenty-sixth season. Bizet’s opera first played there in 1885, igniting its massive popularity across Russia. The composer Petr Tchaikovsky is said to have predicted Carmen’s fatal appeal when attending its premiere in Paris several years before. ‘In ten years,’ he apparently said, ‘Carmen will be the most popular opera in the world.’
At the Mariinski everything is mixed together: the tradition, the magnificence of the architecture, the high artistry of performers – and the petty viciousness of a group of middle-aged women behind us, who at first look so harmless and homely in their glasses and neck scarfs, like a bunch of geography teachers on the cusp of retirement. We are in the row in front of them and, it would seem, blocking their view of the stage. ‘Both the girl and the boy think they are the only ones in the theatre,’ they say. They are not even whispering but enunciating clearly, the dull kitchen knives of their words driven into our backs with great deliberation. ‘Valya has let her hair out and all the sailors are falling over themselves’: a line from a Russian folk song is meant to encapsulate the scandal of Billie’s long and luxurious hair eating up the viewing space around her head. Marina stays silent, used to women like this and the constant white noise of their disapproval, which is not addressed to anyone in particular yet is voluminous and demanding just the same. But I am out of practice.
‘What specifically would you like to see happen?’ I turn around and face the group. ‘You are clearly upset, so please tell me how the situation can be improved.’ My voice bristles with the exaggerated politeness of someone ready to throw punches at the slightest provocation.
And so Billie’s hair is pulled back for their viewing pleasure, but the women do not rest for long after this victory. Judging it much too minor, they move their attention to a young woman in the row in front of us, who happens to be wearing a rather ostentatious beret (ostentatious, at least in their opinion). This is how it is with the Arts: the good, the bad, the ugly, the profound, the petty, the profane, all hopelessly intermingled in one experience. In the Ermitazh Theatre, where we watch the ballet Swan Lake a few days later, some Russian men on the balcony wash down booze straight from the bottle with soft drinks straight from the can. The rest of the auditorium is filled almost exclusively by four busloads of American tourists, who spend most of the performance digesting their recently consumed large meals. The sublime and the ridiculous always together here, each other’s faithful keepers.
Carmen, everyone knows, is based on Mérimée’s 1845 novella. But what you may not realise is that Mérimée was heavily influenced by Alexander Pushkin’s poem The Gypsies. A non-gypsy man falls for a gypsy woman; plunged into a melancholy he cannot explain, he is led away from his settled urban life to be with the woman–wanderer he so ardently loves. And when, with time, having given birth to his child, she tires of him and falls into the arms of a younger lover, he murders her in rage and desperation. Pushkin’s gypsy is the woman who calls the shots, who cannot be possessed or loved into submission. No sacrifice in the world can keep her safely near. Carmen is essentially this woman as well – the fearless, fatalistic, face-slashing, hip-swinging, hot-blooded, drop-dead Carmen. She is the highest calibre of femme fatale, capable of causing a man to forsake his principles and honour and, finally, to become a murderer.
The femme fatale was, of course, the antithesis of the Soviet woman as comrade. Straight after the Revolution the New Woman – a type embodied by Inessa Armand and Alexandra Kolontai, Lenin’s close allies – was precisely the type who worked, fought and risked her life for revolutionary ideals, standing shoulder to shoulder with the man next to her, rather than using her charms to seduce and ensnare him. Any New Woman fit to become an equal member of the revolutionary society wanted equality, freedom and mutual respect in her relationships with men, instead of craving co-dependency, irrational passion and insularity. Both Armand and Kolontai were every bit the burning revolutionaries, but they were also true proto-feminists (which is more than you can say for most of their male comrades). Their radical views on the emancipation of women included a vision of women’s sexual liberation in which it was perfectly fine for women to have multiple partners and enter into open marriages. They were both strikingly beautiful (which always helps, whether you’re a New Woman or an old one), possessed of abundant charms and sex appeal.
Despite multiple refutations, the rumours of Lenin’s longstanding affair with Armand have refused to die down for almost a century. Then there was Lilya Brik, the strikingly beautiful and unconventional de facto spouse of Stalin’s favourite revolutionary poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and you might say more of a New Woman in the Western mould. For large periods of time Brik, Mayakovsky, and Lilya’s husband, Osip Brik, lived and worked together in one apartment, in a Soviet mini-version of the Bloomsbury set. By all accounts, Brik, who was surrounded by smitten suitors all her life, loved both Vladimir and Osip, and the two men admired each other and managed to share her with a spirit of remarkable camaraderie. To openly live with two men – one of whom was rapidly becoming the ‘loudspeaker’ of the socialist ideas and ideals – was an incredibly gutsy thing to do in austere and puritanical Soviet society. Brik was routinely condemned as a perverted bourgeois femme fatale, rather than being praised as a social revolutionary. Predictably, most references to her as the poet’s muse and partner were expunged from the official version of Mayakovsky’s life after his suicide in 1930. Yet her life was apparently spared by Stalin himself. Seeing her name on an execution list during the Great Purge, Stalin is said to have remarked, ‘Leave Mayakovsky’s wife alone’, and struck her name from the list.
The vision of the New Woman did not last for too long after the Revolution, because it was simply too radical and inconvenient for the men in power, and too challenging for women of traditional values to support, as Brik’s case suggests. A newly formed nation already dealing with revolutions, civil wars and massive industrialisation challenges would simply implode if women stopped taking care of men, or giving birth to children, or bearing the lion’s share of the so-called domestic sphere.