Beyond Cruel Optimism: Fantasies and Failures in the Late Soviet Era Baltic Women Fiction

• In Event: Changing Femininity: The Social Construction of Women in Eastern European Literary and Periodical Texts

Abstract

The paper will explore representations of late Soviet-era womanhood in well-known fictional works by Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian female authors. The texts under discussion involve young female main characters and received widespread attention at the time of their original publication. These texts interest us for what they suggest about different modes of subject formation. How do these women relate to the common cultural norms of the era and how do these writers stretch and transgress the cultural imagination? While addressing these general topics, our interest lies with the intersections of the bodily-affective and the discursive layers of being-in-the-world. The paper relies on close readings of Valikuvõimalus (The Freedom to Choose, 1979) by the Estonian novelist Aimée Beekman, Nodevība (Betrayal, 1984) by the Latvian author Regīna Ezera, and Leona (1987) by Lithuanian writer Dalia Urnevičiūtė. All three novels display a situation of “cruel optimism”, as Lauren Berlant has termed impossible and thus potentially damaging cultural dreams. The tension between what’s desired and what’s actually achievable makes family happiness hardly reachable. The situation is further complicated by the split character of a (semi)emancipated woman, who desires both a harmonious family-life and the self-affirmation as an individual. Baltic women’s writing of the late Soviet era reveals both existential anxieties and cultural unsettlement around gender and the norms of femininity.

Authors

• Epp Annus, Ohio State U / Tallinn U (Estonia)

• Zita Kārkla, U of Latvia (Latvia)