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The Maiden-to-Mother Plot: The Construction of a Female Socialist Realist Plot in Fedor Gladkov's Cement and Elizar Mal'tsev's Heart and Soul.
Sarefield, Stella
Sarefield, Stella
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Between 1925 and 1958, eminent Soviet author Fedor Gladkov released thirty-six revised editions of his novel Cement. In his establishment of the positive hero and the model novel formula, Gladkov fundamentally shaped all novels that would be released under the rigid Socialist Realist doctrine. Elizar Mal’tsev’s 1949 novel Heart and Soul built on Cement as a foundational text, and provides the same narrative arc. Using Katerina Clark’s “master plot” as a theoretical foundation, this thesis explores the systematic construction and institutional reworking of the “New Soviet Woman” archetype in Socialist Realist literature. Through a comparative textual analysis of Fedor Gladkov’s Cement (1925/1939) and Elizar Mal’tsev’s Heart and Soul (1948), I identify the “maiden-to-mother plot.” This female’s narrative demonstrates how the radical social and sexual autonomy originally envisioned for Soviet women was progressively sublimated into a state-sanctioned maternalism. The research highlights how mandated editorial revisions, particularly in foundational texts like Cement, eroded female independence to align with evolving Stalinist ideology and the “Great Retreat” toward traditional nuclear family models. By drawing on theories of gender performativity from Judith Butler and Simone de Beauvoir, the study argues that the Socialist Realist heroine functions not as an autonomous subject, but as a “narrative instrument” used to consolidate the authority of the male “positive hero.” Ultimately, the paper reveals how the “maiden-to-mother” narrative served as an ideological mechanism to neutralize female agency, returning women to the domestic sphere as reproductive anchors for the state while simultaneously shouldering the “double burden” of public and private labor.
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2026-04-23
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German, Russian, and Hebrew
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History