Canadian Slavonic Papers

The Cavalry Maiden: Journals of a Russian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars by NadezhdaDurova; Mary Zirin FlemingReview by: Linda EdmondsonCanadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 31, No. 3/4 (September-December 1989), pp. 343-344Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40869095 .

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Vol. XXXI, Nos. 3-4 Book Reviews | 343

equation since Israel's interests are often at variance with those of Jews in their countries or residence. The author fails to explore this problem, possibly because the common belief in the State of Israel as the "natural" representative of Diaspora Jewry may be too deeply rooted in this Israeli author.

The book offers food for thought and comparison for today's reader. It is a useful and convenient reference tool which occasionally reads like an overgrown encyclopedic entry - a well documented and balanced account but hardly a novel

interpretation of Soviet Jewish history. Yakov M. Rabkin Université de Montréal

Nadezhda Durova. The Cavalry Maiden: Journals of a Russian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars. tr. and intro. Mary Zirin Fleming, Blooming- ton and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1988. xxxvii, 242 pp. $25.00.

Even a few years ago a translation of Nadezhda Durova's memoirs would have been noted as a curiosity - the wayward testament of an eccentric and privileged misfit - and quickly relegated to the shelf marked 'miscellaneous ephemera.' Now Durova can be read in the context of a growing literature about women in various

epochs and in widely differing cultures who felt their ascribed role in society to be so constricting that it impelled them to risk life, limb, and public ridicule in pursuit of an autonomous existence. Amongst the options chosen was Durova's: assuming the persona of a Russian nobleman and the uniform of an officer, she served in the light cavalry during the Napoleonic Wars and saw combat in the 1807 and 1812-14 campaigns.

According to her own memoir ("My Childhood Years," included as an apt preface to The Cavalry Maiden) Durova was destined for an unorthodox life. Her mother had defied paternal authority by eloping with a hussar captain at the age of sixteen. She took an instant dislike to Nadezhda, her firstborn and the wrong sex, who spent much of her earliest years in the care of her father's orderly. Despite her mother's later endeavours to instill feminine virtue and submissiveness, and despite her own marriage and the birth of a son (both of which she omitted from the memoirs) Durova was irresistibly drawn to military life and determined "to part company forever from the sex whose sad lot and eternal dependence had begun to terrify me" (p. 15). One fine night in 1806 she crept away from her parents' house and rode off on her "priceless steed" to join the army.

The journals are her record of a free existence beyond the horizons of a no- blewoman's constricted life. For her freedom she endured cold, rain, hunger, thirst, wounds, toothache, craving for sleep, homesickness, grief and moments of terror. Durova's secret was discovered by the Tsar but never divulged to her comrades, who continued to accept her masculine persona even when they guessed her true sex. In 1816, by now an aging "young man" for whom there was no prospect of promotion

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344 I Canadian Slavonic Papers September-December 1989

or status, Durova resigned from the cavalry and spent most of her remaining fifty years in provincial retirement.

Mary Zirin's translation is a delight from start to finish, a lively idiomatic ver- sion of Durova's "brisk, impulsive style." She provides explanatory footnotes as needed, never burdening the text with scholarly excess. Her introduction is a model of lucidity, recording the history of The Cavalry Maiden, Durova's brief literary career in St. Petersburg in the late 1830s, the long years of retirement in Elabuga and her posthumous reputation. Zirin considers Durova's place in the autobiograph- ical tradition, disentangles truth from fiction in the memoirs, and assesses Durova's ambivalent relationship towards her own sex. Zirin notes that translation loses the 'female voice' of the Russian text, which reminds the reader "in virtually every sen- tence of the anomaly of a woman acting out the life of a male persona" (p. xxxi). The English translation can be quite as disconcerting, however, so often conveying the sense of having been written by a man (particularly in scenes of action) that it is something of a shock to visualize the young woman on horseback, recording her

experiences for posterity and confounding her society's expectations of a woman's

capacities and desires. Linda Edmondson University of Birmingham, England.

James W. Long. From Privileged to Dispossessed. The Volga Germans, 1860-1917. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. xv, 337 pp. $29.95.

Little effort has previously gone into charting the experience of Germans who began entering the Russian Empire in the 1760s when the Volga provinces of Saratov and Samara became available for settlement. Thankfully, James Long has now recorded

part of this fascinating story. He is to be commended for skilfully weaving together information from zemstvo and state documents, oral interviews, and secondary ma- terials into an informative and highly readable study. By doing so, he has revealed

developments within the German settlements of the Volga, as well as their multi- faceted relationship to Russian neighbours and Imperial authorities.

Long first presents a thematic study of Volga Germans from 1860-1905. Suc- cessive chapters discuss the changing administrative ties with St. Petersburg, internal social developments, agriculture, the search for more lands to meet population growth, and the steadily expanding cottage industry, especially in Saratov province. But the finest chapter is clearly Long's description of the active German involvement in the

zemstvos, which corrects previous underestimates. Overall, Long introduces the reader to a people that walked a fine line between

assimilation and separateness. On the one hand, Volga Germans developed a regional identity that was at least partially defined by being "German" and not "Russian." On the other hand, they came to experience the very same difficulties and frustrations as did their Russian peasant neighbours. By 1900, their sense of cultural distinctive-

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