Gender Poetics of O. Mirtov’s Novel Apple Trees Are in Bloom

Abstract

The article examines a novel Apple Trees Are in Bloom by O. Mirtov (pseudonym of writer Olga Emmanuilovna Negreskul-Rozenfeld) in the context of gender representations of modernism era. The novel Apple Trees Are in Bloom was published in the leading literary and political journal Russian Thought from April to December 1911 and, on the whole, was an ideological continuation of the literary and gender discourse begun by the author in the novel Dead Swell in 1908. O. Mirtov’s second novel is a kind of literary and artistic manifesto of the author, part of her myth-making, which has absorbed the main gender-aesthetic views and spiritual throwing of a female author writing under a male pseudonym. The gender poetics of the novel is built on the basis of basic principles in constructing feminine and masculine imagery, closely related to the modernist concepts of the turn of the century. The novel contains direct references to the theory of gender dualism, Solovyov’s concept of “all-unity”, Berdyaev’s provisions on Kingdom of the Spirit, mystical world comprehension, and the foundations of sex metaphysics. In the novel, Nietzschean motifs coexist with the ideas of “creative love” and the infernal feminism nature. Apple Trees Are in Bloom fits into a successful literary and gender experiment, denounced in a novel form, well fitting into the context of fashionable philosophical trends that have developed by the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century.