Syncretic Feminisms, Dangerous Spiritualities: Soul-Echoes of Women Writers in Poland and Russia after 1979

Abstract

This Ph.D. dissertation listens to echoes of “spirituality” among eccentric women writers from Russian and Polish culture. In the transitional period of the late 1970s into the 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe, a volatile spiritual seeking emerged in artistic circles: alongside the ghostly presence of communist atheism were waves of Christian revival and opposition, plus an intermingling of Western discourses of the New Age and the occult, where “mysticism” took on idiosyncratic definitions. Considering the lives of several eccentric women writers as vitas — as trajectories of persons that became both witnesses to and agents of history — this dissertation sifts through many contexts to understand these women’s encounters with both spirituality and “feminism,” an unstable signifier, one which emerged in waves in the United States and in Western Europe under different historical conditions. Chapter One introduces the Russian Orthodox theologian Tatiana Goricheva, a prolific writer whose religious conversion and subsequent writings found expression across several genres (diaries, philosophical writings, familiar correspondence, and dialogues). Chapter Two navigates the early works of Polish prose writer and feuilletonist Manuela Gretkowska, whose spiritual path reflects neither a religious conversion nor a “deconversion,” but an extended movement — a journey towards restoration. Finally, Chapter Three considers the soteriological horizons of the figure of the witch and weaves together two larger constellations of women writers surrounding Goricheva and Gretkowska — Izabela Filipiak, Natalia Malakhovskaya, and Ursula Małgorzata Benka. Each of the three chapters begins with an attunement: a longer introduction to persons and questions that help situate this comparative analysis in the global context of women’s intellectual history.