Russian literature: exploring ‘My Last Letter to A.’ by Maria Arbatova (2006)🖋️

The context – who is Maria Arbatova?

Arbatova is a leading feminist figure in Russian literature and the first female writer to have an openly feminist ideology in Russia. During her Soviet-era youth she refused to join the Komsomol, was a hippie activist, and left Moscow State University’s journalism course early due to her ideological views.

She went on to graduate from a dramatic arts course; much of her literary output has been in the form of plays. However, she had also written striking feminist prose such as the story covered here. Arbatova advocates against the traditional male-female relationship in Soviet and post-Soviet society, in which women are largely dependent on men for their social status, and expected to fulfil roles as wives and mothers above all else.

The story – a letter to a lost love

‘My Last Letter to A.’ is made up of a series of vignettes which, as a whole, comprise a letter the author is sending to A. He is a free-spirited poet and artist with “honey-coloured eyes” who appears to live in Paris.

At some point he and the author have had a relationship, and she remains in love with him. As well as his beauty, the author fell for him because he “never uttered a single trite word, never offered a view that had not fed through his heart.” He was, amidst the many other disappointing males the author had encountered, “a real man among automatons.”

A varied group of vignettes drawn together

The vignettes are hugely varied in their focus and content, but interrelated along that central theme of male-female relationships and societal expectations in post-Soviet Russia.

Hopeless males…

Men are portrayed as living in a “hopeless male world, with the phallus at its centre, worn-out by the same macho civilisation”. Drawn towards measuring themselves by a “physiological yardstick”, they prove unable to deal with any level of emotional complexity.

For example, the author portrays a boyfriend who suddenly disappears in the night because he feared he “was not up to the mark in bed”, an ageing male author who struggles when he meets his estranged son but comments that the son’s wife “looks a bit of all right”, and men who are interested only in the “hierarchy of power” over women: “he will wear the number of your orgasms with him like a row of medals.”

A. stood apart from this society, but that in itself was enough to make him unattainable: “he has decided to draw and write, rather than living a life.”

…and repressed females

By comparison, women are repressed because they are denied the forms of introspection that the phallocracy affords to men. We hear of girls becoming physically women but struggling to fit into school uniforms that have not been designed for a woman’s body.

And at school, they are taught by sexually and sensually repressed women who forbid them to have their hair down or wear jewellery because these are apparently the first step towards becoming a sex worker; though these women weep at night, bemoaning their “unclaimed femininity”.

In adulthood the women remain unhappy as they continue their struggle. Repressions of femininity continue through older female work colleagues and nurses who fear “fashionable clothes” and rail against young women who are “without complexes”.

Arbatova is at her most direct when countering these women, and the way in which they pass their complexes on to their daughters: “I fight my way through the concrete walls of the family scenario, through the serfdom of the Soviet marriage experience, through those iron bars of totalitarian prohibition”.

Even when women seemingly have the upper hand, there is recognition that it brings nothing but more unhappiness. A female friend who’s bought a flat overlooking her ex-husband’s places takes the opportunity to wind him up whenever a new lover visits, but feels no better herself.

Arbatova notes how their children are the “saddest participants” in the failed marriage, “earnestly trying to represent a happy childhood with their expensive toys” for their parents who never truly lived as man and wife.

Key themes in ‘My Last Letter to A.’

Anton Chekhov once stated that the role of a writer is not to solve a problem, but rather to state it correctly. In ‘My Last Letter to A.’, Arbatova does precisely this, recognising that her work is not the solution but rather the next stage in a lengthy struggle. She pictures A. looking for a subtext in her letter and not finding it because the writing is “nothing special” and is “by no means the last in that eternal genre of women’s letters addressed to their long-lost lovers.”

Arbatova demonstrates clearly through her vignettes the struggle that women face to break through societal norms and expectations. Their wide range and their multiple characters emphasise the deep-rootedness of the problem; the number of occasions in which other women are complicit in maintaining the repressive norms is notable.

Also notable is the way in which Arbatova’s males are not secure in the phallocracy. From the lover who runs away because he thinks he isn’t good enough in bed, to the author who dies alone, to the man who lives for drinking and womanising but has nobody to talk to and thinks of ending his life, we get the impression of a societal structure that suits nobody.

Where to read ‘My Last Letter to A.’

The story appears in the Glas collection ‘War and Peace’.

Like that? Want a little more?

If you’re interested in female writers in the Russian language then I can suggest Nadezhda Teffi and Nina Berberova. Some of Teffi’s late prose, such as ‘Thy Will’, is both complex and stunning. Berberova’s ‘The Murder of Valkovsky’ is a clever tale of an infatuation which becomes overbearing and needs drastic measures.

I mentioned Chekhov as well, and am a big fan of his short stories. Recently I explored his story ‘The Bet’.

A full list of all the 50+ stories I’ve explored is here.

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