Authors

Discussion

Childbirth metaphors have been a mainstay of European revolutionary rhetoric since the French Revolution: in Politics and Narratives of Birth, Carol A. Mossman describes nineteenth-century France as ‘heir to an overdetermined symbolic discourse in which political change is figured in terms of birth and offspring’. Such metaphorical language was also used widely in Russian revolutionary rhetoric. Marx’s metaphors of pregnancy and childbirth, referring to the latent potential of societies awaiting revolution, were taken up by Lenin and Trotskii and used in their arguments for revolutionary violence. Writing on the ferocity of the Civil War, Lenin asserted that ‘while individuals may die in the act of childbirth, the new society to which the old system gives birth cannot die’.

By using such metaphors in their political writings, early soviet writers sought to show that the successful outcome of the revolution was predetermined. For the revolutionary baby to be delivered, it might need the assistance of a metaphorical midwife (as per Marx, the use of Gewalt, or force), but delivered it would be. In literature written in the first decade of Soviet power, however, anxiety surrounding the successful birth of the revolution is seen in the portrayal of uncontrollable and difficult pregnancies, mothers, and childbirth. I will argue that such literary portrayals embody the uncertainty surrounding the authority of the new Soviet state over the "elemental" forces of the revolution as personified by women, and that they attempt to assuage this anxiety by asserting dominance over pregnant bodies.

In my paper, I present an analysis that sheds light on the role of blood in two literary examples of this anxiety: Vladimir Zazubrin’s short story The Chip (1923) and Evgenii Zamiatin’s novella The Flood (1929). Both texts use a combination of elemental and mechanical metaphors to construct women’s blood as a vital but dangerous revolutionary force. In The Chip, the Revolution is personified as a pregnant Russian peasant whose bloodthirstiness and power prove too much for protagonist Andrei Srubov. The Flood sees the childless Sof’iia murder an orphaned girl whom she and her husband Trofim had taken in, and with whom he had started an affair; the blood which flows from this murderous act is cathartic, allowing Sof’iia to correct her “failure” and become pregnant. In both texts, women’s bodies are imagined as pressurised containers of building revolutionary energy, with the inevitable “release” of this pressure channelled through the blood of birth, murder and revolutionary violence: not just their own blood, but also that of their victims. Flowing blood becomes positively coded even when associated with violence due to the link it establishes between childbirth and socialist creation. Better blood (and revolutionary energy) that moves, destroys, and creates, than that which stagnates.