Motherhood, Love, and the Self in the Soviet Novel: Religious Reconstructions of Female Young Adult Identity in Postwar Novels (1945-1990)

Abstract

This project uses the lens of female young adults in novels to examine the war’s lingering impact and the destabilization of socialist identity conceptions during the postwar period. It pays special attention to women’s identity as explored through their engagement with religious conceptualizations of gender and the family unit. These issues of identity are examined through the young female protagonists in the novels Picture in the Teacup (1986) by Dina Kalinovskaya and Redemption (1984) by Friedrich Gorenstein. Both Kalinovskaya’s Serafima and Gorenstein’s Sashenka confront religious and socialist constructions of female identity during their constant movements between the child and the adult, the woman and the non-woman, and the perceived roles of the mother. This paper analyzes the linguistic nuances in both the translated English and original Russian versions of the texts, emphasizing how these authors used religious-coded language and constructs to implicitly critique the Soviet system and socialist culture.