Dialogues/Dialogi: Literary and Cultural Exchanges Between (Exsoviet and American Women) - Softcover

Barker, Adele Marie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822313901 ISBN 13: 9780822313908

Verlag: Duke University Press, 1994

Inhaltsangabe

Co-authored by Russian, Ukrainian, and American critics, Dialogues/Dialogi is the first fully collaborative and comparative study of American and (ex)Soviet women writers. Truly a dialogue, the book juxtaposes fiction by American and Soviet women from the 1960s to the present to reveal their similarities and differences and to show how questions of gender, race, and ethnicity are enacted in the societies and psyches each text represents. Begun in the early days of glasnost and completed in 1992, the book conveys the spirit and excitement of an unprecedented critical conversation conducted during a time of historic transformation.
Dialogues/Dialogi pairs stories by Tillie Olsen, Toni Cade Bambara, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Leslie Marmon Silko (reprinted here in full) with Russian stories by I. Grekova, Liudmila Petrushevskaya, Elena Makarova, and Anna Nerkagi, many of them appearing here for the first time in English. Exquisite in their stylistic and thematic variety, suggestive of the range of women's experience and fiction in both countries, each story is the subject of paired interpretive essays by an American and an (ex)Soviet critic from among the book's authors.
A colloquy of diverse voices speaking together in multiple, mutually illuminating exchanges, Dialogues/Dialogi testifies to the possibility of evolving relationships among women across borders once considered impassable.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Susan Hardy Aiken is Professor of English at the University of Arizona.

Adele Barker is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Maya Koreneva is a scholar at the A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow.

Ekaterina Stetsenko is a scholar at the A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow.

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"[This] book is pioneering. It is original and intellectually enterprising."--Catharine R. Stimpson, Rutgers University

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Dialogues/Dialogi

Literary and Cultural Exchanges Between (Ex)Soviet and American Women

By Susan Hardy Aiken, Adele Marie Barker, Maya Koreneva, Ekaterina Stetsenko

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1994 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-1390-8

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Preface, 
Note on Transliteration and Editing, 
Beginnings, 
Notes, 
1, 
Ladies' Hairdresser, 
Tell Me a Riddle, 
Stages of Dissent: Olsen, Grekova, and the Politics of Creativity, 
Revolutions from Within, 
Dialogue, 
2, 
Witchbird, 
That Kind of Girl, 
Children of the Sixties, 
Telling the Other('s) Story, or, the Blues in Two Languages, 
Dialogue, 
3, 
Home, 
Needlefish, 
The World of Our Mothers, 
Hopes and Nightmares of the Young, 
Dialogue, 
4, 
Aniko of the Nogo Tribe, 
Storyteller, 
Retelling the Legends, 
Crossings, 
Dialogue, 
Afterword: Histories and Fictions, 
Finding a Voice, 
Mythographies and Misogynies, 
Writing Otherwise, 
Notes, 
Selected Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Ladies' Hairdresser

* * *

I. GREKOVA

I came home from work dog tired. The boys were playing chess—what else is new! It's some sort of peculiarly male disease.

"What the hell is this?" I said, "That stupid chess game again! How long this time?"

On the table there was the usual mess—an ashtray full to overflowing with cigarette butts, beer bottles in which oversize bubbles slowly swelled and burst.

"Regular pigs in a sty!" I said, "Don't you have anything better to do, with your exams starting tomorrow?!"

"Let's have a paw," Kostya said ingratiatingly.

"No paw for you. Pigs, that's all you are. I may as well be coming home to a public tavern. Couldn't even empty one ashtray after yourselves! Do I, an older woman, really ..."

"Objection!" said Kolya.

"Cut the crap!" I shouted.

"Paw!" Kolya demanded.

I shouldn't have smiled, but my lips somehow started to part, and I gave him my hand.

"Not diat one!" Kolya yelled like one possessed, "The left one, the left one!"

(The left one is prized more highly because of the birthmark on it.)

"The right one's just fine for us commoners," Kostya said.

I gave him the right one. Each kissed his respective hand. Two lowered heads, one yellow as straw, the other black as coal. My little fools, my sons. But don't diink you got ofF the hook that easily. I'm still angry.

"Clear off the table this instant!" I shouted, trying to stand my ground.

Kostya, groaning, loaded the ashtray onto his shoulders while Kolya started wiping off the table with someone's trousers.

I was as hungry as a horse.

"Have you eaten?"

"No. We were waiting for you."

"Is there anything in the house?"

"No. We'll run and get something now."

"Some hell of a reception!" I said, working myself into a rage. "Do I really ..."

"Do you, an older woman, really ..." Kolya prompted helpfully.

"That's right, damn it! An older woman!" I yelled. "A working woman! A woman trying to raise you two fools!"

"Note with only limited success," Kolya interjected softly.

"Yeah, unfortunately—with limited success! My whole life's shot to hell and I have nothing to show for it!"

"Take it easy, girl" said Kostya, playing the peacemaker.

I grabbed a bottle and wanted to throw it on the floor, but didn't do it.

"I've had enough of this roadhouse! I'm leaving. You can live by yourselves."

"Live and let live," Kostya advised in that same quiet, even voice of his.

"Enough of your idiotic observations! I'm dead serious—life isn't a circus!"

"What was that?" Kostya asked, "Life isn't a circus? Permit me to write that one down!"

He took out a notebook, licked the point of his pencil and took aim.

"You know ... life ... isn't ... a circus," he wrote down.

"What's more," I broke in loudly, "I'm sick and tired of all this! Sick and tired! Got it? I'm going to Novosibirsk. No—better yet, I'll get married!"

"Aah—that's a good one!"

"What's that supposed to mean—you think I can't marry anyone at my age?"

"Only a lion tamer," Kolya said.

To hell with it!

I went into the kitchen, slamming the door behind me.

Even a glass of milk would do ... I opened the refrigerator. It was empty and dirty, with one solitary withered radish on the second shelf. More like a crypt than a refrigerator. No milk in sight, naturally. There was some this morning ... "Down the hatch," the kids' wet nurse used to say.

I've had enough of this, I thought, combing my hair and angrily tearing out whole clumps. Those two idiots can't even take care of themselves, to say nothing of their mother.... "Let's have a paw"—what nonsense! They lie around stuffing themselves while their mother goes hungry. I'm sick and tired of it.... And my stupid, neglected hair, half-grown-out and all over the place. So many gray hairs coming in, all in ridiculous places, like behind my ears—not the way to go gray with dignity, at the temples. Stupid—I can't even do that properly. And those home-cut bangs! Stupid old woman— you rolled them on curlers yourself. Now I can't sleep with them, it hurts too much.

I'm not cooking dinner for them any more. Let them fend for themselves ...

But I've got to do something with this hair. Get it cut, maybe? ltd be too bad—I've spent years growing it out, all that work down the drain.... No, enough. I'll get it cut. "I'll get a haircut and get started" my father always used to say. My father lived a troubled life, wanted to "get started" right up to the very end. "Get a haircut and get started ..."

"I'm going out," I said to the boys.

"Where?" Kostya asked.

"To get married," Kolya answered.

1

Still, it was lovely outside—everything was covered with fresh raindrops, and the newborn leaves of the linden trees were bright, lacquered. A street cleaning truck made its way down the street—for some reason watering the already wet asphalt—a rainbow sparkling in its mist. I bought an ice cream and as I walked took small bites from the hard candy rose that decorated its top. My teeth ached slightly, but I enjoyed eating on the go like this. Like when I was in school.

My legs are still sprightly, the spring day's not over yet, people walking, hurrying places, lots of pretty faces—I'll get a haircut and get started.

And here's a hair salon. In the enormous window display, photographs of girls three times larger than life, each one taking great pains to preserve her hairdo. The sign reads: "All styles, no appointment necessary. First come, first served."

Now or never. I opened the tall, heavy door with the word "PULL" written vertically on it. Inside it smelled of cheap perfume, burnt hairs and something else disagreeable. There were about two dozen women standing and sitting around.

God, what a line! Maybe I should leave? No—I've made up my mind, I'll stick it out.

"Who's last?" I asked.

Several heads turned toward me without answering.

"Would you be so kind as to tell me who's last?"

"There are no last ones here," joked a dark, Southern-looking woman with a big front tooth.

"You're looking for the end of the line, dear?" an older woman in light blue socks with a gray mop on her...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1994
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822313901
• ISBN 13: 9780822313908
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 440
• Herausgeber: Aiken Susan Hardy
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland