SOURCE: “Hopes and Nightmares of the Young,” in Dialogues/Dialogi: Literary and Cultural Exchanges Between (Ex)Soviet and American Women, edited by Susan Hardy Aiken, Adele Marie Barker, Maya Koreneva, and Ekaterina Stetsenko, Duke University Press: Durham, NC, 1994, pp. 266–78.

[In the following essay, Koreneva discusses what Phillips and Elena Makarova reveal about the human condition in their short stories “Home” and “Needlefish,” respectively.]

Both Jayne Anne Phillips and Elena Makarova started writing in the 1970s, a decade which, unlike the previous ones, aroused little hope in either the Soviet Union or the United States. Yet it was not a period of great social tensions or catastrophes. In the USSR, after a short-lived “thaw,” a time began which later came to be known as “the period of stagnation.” In the United States, the end of the infamous Vietnam war was followed by the Watergate revelations and ensuing scandal. Both countries witnessed the political manipulation of ideals and spiritual values by members of the establishment who exploited their positions to advance their own immediate interests. These circumstances aggravated the general atmosphere of disappointment and disillusionment: in both countries, individuals felt ever more acute alienation from societies that had chosen unrighteous ways to achieve unrighteous goals. Earlier concern with social issues gave way to a desire to shut oneself up in one's own individual world, to guard it against society's aggression, and to turn it into a shelter where one could hide from social storms.

This fatigue in public consciousness was manifest not only in the pervasive desire for withdrawal into a private world but also in notions about the nature of that world. Where spiritual values were distorted, disgraced, or discredited, the whole sphere of the mind and spirit fell under suspicion, coming to be regarded as totally unreliable, deceptive as quicksand. The only thing one apparently could still trust was one's own senses, which seemed to restore the lost connection with the world from which man had been severed in all other respects. Reliance on the senses let one believe in the reality of one's own existence. Hence the search for moral and spiritual values gave way to a search for personal satisfaction, which became a sort of motto of a whole generation during the seventies. The odyssey to achieve self-knowledge through sexual intercourse or drugs became the individual equivalent of the space odyssey to conquer the unexplored expanses of the universe. Where spiritual bonds do not exist, people remain atoms moving haphazardly in space, their contacts momentary and inconsequential. Rootless emotions, receiving insufficient sustenance, cannot develop into genuine feelings, and the physical sensations that dominate existence continually demand greater and greater stimuli. Sex and drugs, the strongest of these, seem attractive if only because they allow one momentarily to forget one's loneliness. But the forgetfulness is an illusion, the pursuit of which ultimately drives people further apart rather than building human ties.

This escapist reliance on sex and drugs seems to govern the world created in Black Tickets, the short story collection that brought Phillips wide literary recognition. But her depiction of this sordid world aims not simply to shock her readers into the recognition of grim reality. Rather, by combining the disinterestedness and objectivity of a scientist with the imagination of a poet, she seeks to explore the malaise of a society that had disintegrated into what sociologist David Riesman called “the lonely crowd.”

Like many other characters in the book, the protagonist of “Home” suffers from extremes of loneliness. “Out of money” and feeling like a misfit in a world where she finds neither love nor comfort, she takes her mother's advice and comes home to heal her wounds. Because she is young, her defeat seems temporary. But she does not find what she seeks in the familiar situation in which she immerses herself. This time it is home, traditionally man's last refuge from the encroachments of society, that fails her. What it once represented no longer exists. Its former foundation, the family, is irreparably broken. Her parents are divorced and still harbor feelings of mutual ill will, and the absence of inner, spiritual ties that characterized the world the young woman has left behind is now replicated in her relationship with her mother.

Phillips symbolizes this emptiness through the mother's favorite pastimes—watching television, knitting afghans—both stupefyingly monotonous, meaningless occupations. Since the story never even hints at how the afghans will be used, they merely suggest an endlessly repetitive action, a woman's version of Sisyphean labors. The daughter notices the same qualities in the TV programs, so artistically weak that the primitive devices employed to manipulate the audience—especially the “repetition of certain professional laughters”—are glaringly obvious.

Phillips presents the invasion of home by television as something dangerous, even sinister. This symbol of the omnipotence of modern technology violates the sacred privacy of the domestic world, destroying all human ties. It tears the mother away from those around her, locking her into a one-dimensional electronic space. The young woman's attempts to rescue her mother from this McLuhanesque desert are futile. Ironically, the means of salvation the daughter chooses are representative of earlier, traditional family activities—reading and going together to the movies—that once were aimed at cementing the ties of kinship through the collective involvement of the family unit. That the mother rejects her daughter's proposals to subscribe to informative magazines or to replace television with books signifies the surrender of the older generation to the new technology, the loss of both traditional ways of life and the moral values inherent in them.

Obviously, the conflict between mother and daughter can be attributed to the generation gap: each is a product of her own era, sharing all its truths and delusions. The mother grew up during World War II, her ideas of the future shaped by global events. Like millions of others, she survived the difficulties of wartime, but also endured other, more personal burdens, nursing her sick, bedridden mother for years. She uses her claim that she had done her duty as a form of didactic reproach, justifying her superior, moralistic attitude toward her daughter, whose integrity she constantly questions. But her moral stance contains irritating overtones of self-satisfaction, pride, and complacency. She assumes that in a similar situation, which is more than just a possibility, her daughter would neglect to do “everything she could” for her.

Nonetheless, the mother's absolute conviction of her own righteousness, though it accords with the circumstances described in the story, appears less well founded when examined in detail. If her hasty marriage, just two weeks after first meeting her fiancé, does not refute her words, it nevertheless throws a shadow of doubt on past events. Was the wedding an unconscious attempt to flee a difficult situation, an irreproachable kind of psychological, as well as literal, escape from that duty of which she is so proud? Seeking to explain her action to her daughter, she can say nothing but that “he was older. … He had a job and a car. And mother was so sick.” No word of feelings—no hint of the romantic infatuation or sudden blaze of passion commonly associated with elopements. Though she is reluctant to recognize the fact, it seems clear that circumstances rather than feeling precipitated her decision. Her unwillingness or inability to face the truth about herself makes her once again insist on “doing her duty,” which becomes for her a kind of psychological mask for all occasions.

For the characters in this story the truth is too painful to bear. It must be concealed because it makes them vulnerable in their relations with the outside world. What began in one generation continues in the next, growing in proportion. The most dramatic symbol of this pervasive flight from reality is Daniel's refusal to take off his shirt, even during his most intimate moments. The daughter's lost true love, Daniel trusts neither her nor his own feelings. Fearing that a view of his napalm-seared back will shock love literally to death, he chooses concealment. Thus the generations, estranged from and averse to each other, become ironically united through their similar approaches to life's dilemmas.

Phillips's portrayal of the old and young generations is remarkably precise, though her characters act and speak as individuals. The daughter feels the mother's implied reproach but does not rush to justify herself in her mother's eyes. She bursts with indignation, but in the spirit of her generation she refuses altogether to acknowledge an a priori power of moral obligation over herself or anyone else, and she dismisses the guilt required by her mother's ethical code: “No one has to be guilty.” But her words are bravado, aimed not to reveal but to conceal her true impulses, her true self.

One of the fundamental principles of Phillips's poetics manifests itself in such delineations of character. Phillips conceives the individual as a multifaceted, even multidimensional entity, composed of many unrelated elements. She constructs her characters by revealing the interaction of these elements—words, actions, a general orientation to life, subconscious impulses, involuntary emotional bursts—with large gaps between them, which become an essential part of the modern fragmented consciousness.

One of these gaps is evident in the relation of mother and daughter. The unyielding stubbornness of the daughter springs from the authoritarian stubbornness of the mother, whom the daughter feels bound to defy. Yet beneath defiance and confrontation lurks their mutual love. They seem almost ashamed of it, for they never speak of their feelings, assuming that to mention them would be a tactless display, demeaning for both of them—a kind of emotional nakedness, like the physical nakedness that embarrasses the mother, prompting the daughter to buy a stranger's old bathrobe at a sale in order to avoid an uncomfortable situation. Here, as everywhere else in the story, the truth—particularly the truth concerning one's own feelings—remains concealed and thus works to further separate and isolate the characters.

Only once does Phillips make the reader aware of the true nature of the daughter's feeling for her mother. Characteristically, they are revealed not through words or descriptions, but through a simple physical action: helping her mother take a shower. Yet even here Phillips, bringing together all the lines of the stories, presents the daughter's tenderness, care, and affection for her mother in conjunction with her sense of nakedness as embarrassing and nauseating. Even the most innocent touch becomes unbearable for modern man, threatening his (or her) very existence.

As a result, life comes to mean exclusion, not inclusion, loss rather than enrichment through a meeting with the other. Intolerance turns the mother and daughter into irreconcilable opponents. This is obvious in the young woman's attitude toward her parents' relations, her outrage that her mother could not separate from her father for so long, and perhaps even that she married him in the first place. In a series of flashbacks Phillips reveals the heroine's consciousness as that of a damaged child who grew up in a house without love and understanding. In the narrative, presented from the daughter's point of view, the father appears as a coarse and unfeeling person who withdraws into himself, caring not at all what happens to his wife and daughter. He has lost all emotional ties with his family, with whom his relations are reduced to primitive demands for service.

Yet the young woman's memory includes something besides this crude, depressing picture which for her overshadows everything that precedes it. Although inclined to see her father as a villain, she describes him in terms that create rather a portrait of a luckless man, unhealthy and unsuccessful in business. Significantly, Phillips uses illness, which marks all three generations presented in the story, as the central motif of “Home,” both an indication of the sickness of the modern psyche and a metaphor for the illness of a society past its prime.

The atmosphere in the house is poisoned by the mutual hostility resulting from a lack of understanding on all sides. So strong was the evil feeling pervading the family that the girl recalls staying awake for hours, fearing that her father “would strangle her mother, then walk upstairs and strangle her.” However, next to this picture of the father as monster Phillips places the daughter's unexpected confession, which allows us to see the family drama in a new light, suggesting that all three of its players were in fact also its victims: “I believed we were guilty: we had done something terrible to him.”

As in other stories from Black Tickets, Phillips does not explicitly point out the reasons behind the drama in “Home,” leaving them entirely to the reader's imagination. This refusal to comment is part of the author's strategy, aimed at engaging the reader by presenting a cluster of emotionally charged images as ambiguous as life itself. Imperceptibly, though, she dissuades the reader from believing that there is only one solution, implying not so much a multitude of answers as a multitude of circumstances, each contributing to the sorrowful outcome of the story.

The girl's immature consciousness has reacted defensively to a painful situation. Forced to choose between her parents, she condemns her father, oversimplifying a set of extremely complicated relationships. Yet the young woman does not feel that her mother, with whom she has sided, is completely right either. The daughter's consciousness is torn by contradictions that underscore the ambivalence inherent in the situation. As if in retaliation for her unhappy childhood, she sentences her mother to carry the burden of family chores alone.

It appears, however, that her condemnation of her mother has another explanation of which the young woman is unaware. Phillips's portrayal of the protagonist's relations with her parents has obvious Freudian implications. These appear most obviously in the young woman's retelling of the dream, itself a reflection of subconscious drives, in which her father comes to her bed, half naked and sexually aroused, urging her to engage in sex. The dream shows that the threat she felt from him as a child is still present, with sexual assault substituting for her former fear of strangulation. But we can also interpret her animosity toward her father as an expression of suppressed desire, thwarted by the prevailing cultural code of her society, whose moral authority she unconsciously recognizes while revolting against it on the level of consciousness and behavior.

The latter interpretation is supported by her erotic fantasies, inspired by the story she reads before going to sleep, which in turn inspires the dream of her father. With the use of the story-within-the-story device, Phillips touches upon important moral and cultural issues directly related to sexual behavior. In her imagination the young woman transforms the simple, even simplistic and didactic story from Reader's Digest, with its cheap dramatic effects, into a humorously obscene anecdote. There is a marked parallelism between dream and story—both deal with violations of ancient taboos—but while the rendering of the dream treats the theme seriously, the story-within-a-story provides an ironic commentary on its subject. Its central episode, the abduction of a teenage girl by a bear, is a travesty of ancient plots such as the rape of Europa or the tale of “Beauty and the Beast,” enhanced by biblical allusions (“Sharon, his rose”). This juxtaposition of diverse elements from classical Western traditions helps draw the cultural boundaries of a modern civilization, vacillating between remnants of veneration for traditional values on the one hand and parody and ridicule on the other.

At the same time, by introducing an irony not present in the original into the heroine's musings over the “love story of a bear,” Phillips indirectly exposes the mechanism by which sanctimonious conventional morality exercises its controls. As the description of the girl in the love story shows (“a good student loved by her parents, an honest girl loved by her boyfriend”), by making some superficial concessions to changing public mores, the story evades more profound transformations.

The norms of traditional morality have lost all spiritual meaning for the heroine of “Home”; they are nothing but standards of conformity society imposes on the individual. Rejecting them as false and restrictive, yet equally distrustful of the whole sphere of the spirit, she seems to find solace only in the physical side of love. Even her mother deems her a lighthearted seeker of amorous adventures and an advocate of free sex. But though her behavior and manner of speaking do indeed give the impression that the young woman is uninterested in anything but sex, Phillips delineates her inner drama as a function less of sexual dissatisfaction than of the historical traumas inflicted upon the social consciousness of the era which continue to victimize the younger generation.

The major instance of these traumatic events is Vietnam. In introducing this theme, still painful for America in 1979, Phillips carefully avoids inflated rhetoric about the atrocities and consequences of the war, instead using her heroine to convey how damaging the experience was for the nation. It is obvious that both the young woman's lovers are war victims: Jason, her first teenage love, goes insane from fear after his brother is killed in Vietnam; Daniel, wounded and badly burned in combat, has for years gone from one hospital to the next, a living embodiment of the physical and spiritual suffering the war caused. Though the young woman never speaks, like her mother, about “doing her duty,” mentioning only in passing how she took care of Daniel in the hospital, she too has every right to be proud. Yet unlike her mother, she has gained neither satisfaction nor peace of mind from the experience—another mark of the difference between the generations. The sight of Daniel's suffering does not destroy her love for him, but it does paralyze her physically, making impossible the healthy and joyful relations of which she dreams, the harmony of the physical and the spiritual. Sharing the fragmentation to which modern man is doomed, she comes to believe that in the contemporary world there are on the one hand love and spiritual communion and on the other physical intimacy, and that the two are now irreconcilable. She settles for the latter, hoping to find in it oblivion, although she fully realizes that she actually needs something quite different; as she admits to her mother, “I can't be physical, not really.”

The picture that unfolds in “Home,” as in others of Phillips's stories, is grim and hopeless. Here is a world of endless evil and vice, dominated by dark desires and vile passions, a world beyond redemption, stretching from the infinite past into the infinite future, from the fall to complete disintegration. Here, virtually everyone is doomed. If there are exceptions, they are rare, and the hope is not so much to escape the common lot as perhaps to retard its process and, if only for a moment, to experience the closeness of the other.

“Home” ends with one of these rare moments. The women stand close together, the daughter holding her mother. The image could serve as a metaphor for Phillips's understanding of modern man's predicament. The words the women say, born of anger and frustration, continue to hurt, suggesting the failure of language as a means of communication. But the estranging effect of words is countered by a gesture, bringing through touch the saving grace of love.

It should be emphasized that Phillips's style is characterized by the absence of even the slightest trace of didacticism. She does not make judgments or preach but rather delves into the essence of the phenomena she chooses to represent in her artistic world. She strives for an emotional, psychological effect, founded on a combination of narrative objectivity and a remarkable ability to immerse herself in her subject. This paradoxical effect accounts for the unique double focus of her writings. The characters are drawn from both within and without, with an immediacy and spontaneity marked by the whimsical interplay of fleeting impulses, unexpected bursts, and sharp swings of emotion.

The closing scene of “Home” may serve as an example. This episode brings together in counterpoint words, actions, and emotions. The kitchen where the mother and daughter find themselves is literally full of “the sound and the fury”—the steam, the noise of hot water, the clatter of dishes, and above all the bitter words the two exchange. By contrast, when the theme of love is introduced, it is characterized by silence. Through understatement, Phillips makes her characters and the situation as a whole absolutely convincing, achieving artistic mastery rare in a writer of her age.

Artistic principles similar in many ways to Phillips's form the basis of Elena Makarova's fiction. Makarova too tries to achieve maximum effect by combining narrative objectivity with an accurate recreation of the internal states of her characters. “Needlefish,” which appeared in her collection of stories and novellas Overfilled Days (Perepolnennye dni, 1982), is a striking example. Although the story is told in the third person, unlike the first-person narration of “Home,” it is written from the point of view of the teenage protagonist, Alka. This device allows Makarova to narrow her focus, concentrating on the emotions and insights of an adolescent, without necessarily feeling compelled to narrow the range of issues the story deals with.

Alka's views are permeated with typical adolescent extremism, and as a result she is merciless. There is no denying her powers of observation, yet she is incapable of understanding much of what she sees around her. Nevertheless, she condemns everything and everybody, separating herself from them. This attitude is felt in the intonation of the opening sentence. The action of the scene unfolds on a dance floor, where, forbidden by her mother to appear, Alka can watch the dancers only in secret. Hurt by being treated as a child, she observes them with scorn; the dance floor becomes an “open-air cage” where dancers did not dance but only “jerked, shook, tossed loose hair.”

As the opening passage makes clear, Alka feels powerless and dependent, estranged from the world and the people around her. Yet though adults deprive her of freedom, she believes that she alone is really free. Her bondage is that of the body, her freedom that of the spirit. With the people around her, on the contrary, the body is free but the spirit is in bondage. Taking her revenge on them, she mentally encloses them in a cage.

Her only means of doing so is through language. Alka is not interested in words as a means of communication. Like the characters in Phillips's stories, she feels the failure of language to effect communion with others. Rather, as the episode with the deaf-mute later in the story shows, Alka trusts the nonverbal communication of eyes and gestures—the movements and poses, colors, lines, and sounds that her imagination has revealed to her. What attracts her is the invocatory power of the word, and her greatest joy comes in using language in this way.

One of the most striking instances of this tendency is her use of imagery. Just as the dichotomy of body and spirit is basic for the story, so the imagery of the body is essential for conveying narrative meaning. In relating to those she regards as antagonists, Alka verbally exaggerates the physical aspects of their appearances and behaviors, representing them as grotesquely deformed. Like the young woman of “Home,” she is least lenient with her own relatives. Watching the dancers, she looks critically on her sister Inka. Paired with “some glossy guy,” Inka becomes a “clod,” a “cow,” “clumsily shifting from one foot to another.” A wave of nausea sweeps over Alka when, lying in bed, she imagines her sister returning home, preparing for bed, her “fat, unbridled flesh” fully exposed.

Alka has similar feelings toward her mother, whom she condemns, like her sister, for maintaining artificial relationships with men—first with Inka's father, then with her own, whose place has now been taken by a new lover. Neither woman, Alka believes, follows her genuine feelings—the sister because, accepting philistine morality, she exchanges real emotion for the “titillation” of the flesh while awaiting marriage; the mother because her change of partners is, from her adolescent daughter's point of view, proof of “false” feelings.

Like the central character in “Home,” Alka has grown up in a family where traditional ties based on love, care, and understanding have been broken. The family itself no longer exists, and an anonymous lover has usurped the father's position. The girl easily reconstructs the course of events in her life as she observes her sister's daily ritual of returning from the dance as well as the changes in the family situation. But what gives these events meaning and color are Alka's hurt feelings, envy, and resentment. From her surroundings she perceives only hostile signals, to which she reacts with a concomitant hostility, regarding whatever adults do as an encroachment on her rights and freedoms—on her very identity. Trying to defend herself from the aggressive world she rejects, Alka escapes from reality into an imaginary world. There she feels not only safe, but superior to those who in real life, she believes, force her into submission. Thus, in her imagination she dances better than her sister, better even than all the adults on the dance floor. She alone understands the secret meaning of events invisible to others, burdened as they are by petty daily worries. She sees and hears what others do not. With all her being she feels the invisible pulse of life, while they, it seems to her, have long ago grown internally paralyzed.

In her childish egoism Alka places herself in the center of the world, omnipotent. There she observes from a distance the actions of adults, which seem to her no more than trivial bustle. But in fact, this egoism, together with inexperience, prevents her from penetrating below the surface of reality. Her wild imagination helps her to fill the vacuum of understanding in accordance with her own moods and emotions. But this pattern only intensifies her feeling of alienation from those around her.

Estrangement, then, dominates Alka's relations to her mother and sister, but perhaps most revealing in this regard are her relations with the deaf-mute whom she sets out to draw. She is attracted by his picturesqueness, the very coarseness and primitivism that seem to her a sign of an authenticity which her mother and sister lack. This perception in a way establishes some kind of inner connection between her and the deaf-mute, allowing him to enter her ordinarily closed-off world. But in becoming part of this private world, he seemingly takes upon himself, in Alka's mind, the obligation to break his ties with the ordinary world. When she goes to see him for the second time to capture his authenticity on paper, she realizes that he has seen his wife, who now has a lover. She takes this event quite literally as a betrayal, regarding his feelings towards his wife as a breach of the secret agreement that has tacitly existed between him and Alka since their first meeting. From this instant she banishes the deaf-mute from her world of chosen people. He returns to the contemptible world of everyday life, and she loses all interest in him.

If Alka's imagination only aggravates her feeling of alienation from others, it helps her overcome that estrangement in the world of nature. Makarova endows her heroine with the imagination of an artist. The natural world is no longer simply an environment for her; it comes to life, gaining the authenticity people irreparably lack. Entering this world, she feels herself transformed, changed first into a tree, then into a needlefish cutting through the resistant water, then into a line in the air that has caught the fleeting movement. Makarova is remarkably expressive when, with masterful impressionistic touches, she depicts Alka's immersion in the world of elements which makes the girl feel herself a part of infinite, immortal nature. In some of the most powerful descriptions in the story, Alka dissolves into the world of color and sound, which break out of their earthly shell and become something unknown and fantastic, like a three-dimensional abstract painting, its fourth dimension a symphony of sounds. All these effects—sounds, colors, and lines, conglomerations of life's overflowing energy—stir the girl to rapture.

The creative energy so strongly awakened in Alka is the symbol as well of the awakening woman in her. But her new feelings leave her confused and fearful. She reacts so enviously to the “feminine” nature in her mother and sister precisely because she herself is, for the first time, discovering and displaying her own. Her desire for self-affirmation leads her to a kind of annihilation of the feminine in other women—sister, mother, deaf-mute's wife. Frustrated at her inequality with the grown women who continue to treat her as a child, she takes imaginative revenge on them, thereby, as she believes, restoring justice. In her mind they exchange places: Alka is the only true woman, who has grasped the mystery of love. All the rest become grotesque figures, governed by repulsive, “inauthentic” feelings: Inka with her lusty movements on the dance floor and her philistine calculations about getting married; her mother, smiling in the same way, taking in the different men who come to possess her body, which, lacking the redemptive grace of love, is dehumanized, leaving “a seal's silhouette in space.”

As all these events make clear, “Needlefish” is an initiation story. On the brink of discovering the world, Alka confronts her feminine nature, her artistic nature, and the possibility of self-affirmation in an adult world in which she will be an equal member. Because of the alienation governing this world, however, self-affirmation proves impossible. And her experience of her feminine and artistic identities only increases her feelings of estrangement, widening the abyss between her and her family.

In this context the concluding episode in the forest acquires a special meaning. Erast, who is also an artist, has already “captured” Alka, not only because she has fallen in love with him but, more importantly, because in drawing her he has grasped that inner self the secret of which she believes she alone possesses. The image of the forest symbolically reinforces the theme of initiation. At first everything appears rather innocent: Alka and Erast pick berries, walking through velvety moss. But even here the imagery prefigures sexual consummation, particularly the stains of red berry juice on their bodies, with its evocation of the bloodshed inevitably associated with the initiation process. The further they go into the woods, the more sensual the description becomes. Sexual images come to the foreground, occupying an important place in the story's structure: Alka and Erast “swam into moss,” and the references to scarlet juices occur repeatedly. Finally, the needlefish which Alka has earlier imagined herself to be, and which gives its name to the story, “entered her body,” “tore through her.” But its meaning has changed. Moving away from a representation of Alka's freedom and power, imaginary though they may be, it now signifies the sexual power of the other over her. In a broader sense, the association of sexual initiation with pain (“tore through her”) turns the event into a symbol for any traumatic transition experience.

Makarova's associative style corresponds to the perceptions of the heroine whose point of view the story adopts, allowing the author to present accurately and with a certain delicacy the inner world of a teenage girl whose lack of sexual knowledge necessarily makes her transform sexual experience into metaphor. The style of narration also accords with Makarova's presentation of Alka as an artist for whom metaphoric, associative thinking is a natural element. Not least important, the indirection of metaphor allows Makarova to avoid an explicitly naturalistic description of Alka's and Erast's relationship, especially in the scene in the wood—description that at the time would have made publishing the story difficult. The literary mores in the former Soviet Union did not condone an interest in private matters, to say nothing of sex, even in the most liberal times. Moreover, the episode in the forest contains one of the most delicate moments in the story. Erast is much older than Alka; she thinks of him as “a man.” Thus, according to Soviet mores, a realistic description of the scene would have required of the author a more direct expression of moral indignation than Makarova, who did her best to avoid didacticism, desired to provide.

The narrative style based on implication rather than on direct statement and straightforward description permits Makarova once again to separate Alka from the world around her. For the heroine, her own imagination and the world of others are juxtaposed as high and low, and any transition from one to the other seems impossible. At the end she becomes even more convinced of her superiority to those around her. They are ordinary, she is “extraordinary.” She dismisses the remarks of her mother, who has noticed a change in her, as insignificant and annoying, something that could issue only from small-mindedness. Alka feels no need to be near any of her family; she no more seeks to be understood by them than she seeks to understand them, for she is sure that she can reach heights of which ordinary people dare not even dream. Her notions are confirmed by the image of flight with which the story ends, a symbol which also signifies her transcendence of the fear and confusion caused by sexual awakening.

In effect, the introduction of the flight image makes the story's conclusion resonate with optimism. Flight represents the young girl's soaring hopes, but it reflects the author's views as well. In fact, there is here virtually no distance between Makarova and her heroine. Since Makarova fails, or does not wish, to maintain the distance between them, she tends to romanticize and glamorize sex as a liberating force. As a result, her portrayal of the heroine and the situation is, in both substance and tone, opposite to that in the stories of Phillips, with whom Makarova has otherwise much in common. Her optimistic, affirmative ending, like her use of the sexual theme, challenges the prevailing modes of Soviet literary expression.

“Needlefish” does not contain explicit social overtones; its impact depends entirely on the accuracy of psychological nuances. But what in one cultural situation may be taken as a given can in another stand for artistic innovation or political comment. Indeed, Makarova's very failure to introduce a social context had in itself a certain political resonance at the time the story was written. She openly challenges the conventional notions associated with the dogmas of Socialist Realism. This doctrine, prescriptive by its very nature, claimed that there could be only one ideologically correct interpretation of reality, conveyable by ideologically correct artistic devices. Everything outside these prescriptions was labeled subversive, and those found guilty of violation could suffer the most serious consequences.

As her subject matter and artistic form suggest, Makarova chose artistic freedom. She was not, of course, the first to do so. But each period dictates its own conditions and finds its own ways of establishing the independence of artistic individuality. Perhaps it was her understanding of the significance of the artist's task that made Makarova represent the protagonist of her story as an artist. In any case, the concentration on the psychological, intimate, erotic experiences of her characters, which she shares with Phillips, was the form of rebellion Makarova chose in order to affirm her creative freedom. In this sense, both women have been able to disclose certain crucial truths about human experience.