No Nastas’ias on the Volga: Soviet Women Veterans and Folkloric Self-Representations

Abstract

“No Nastas’ias on the Volga: Soviet Women Veterans andFolkloric Self-Representations” investigates how the Sovietwomen pilots of the 46th Guards Regiment who served in WorldWar II employed folkloric imagery to represent themselves inwartime poetry and in memoirs published between 1960 and 2002.The article argues that the women’s employment of this imagerygives insight into how they constructed their collective identity,how they negotiated shifting expectations for gender, and how, inthe twentieth century, they interpreted folkloric images theyinherited from the past. The author’s approach bridges disparatebodies of scholarship in the fields of folkloristics, gender studies,and history. The author analyzes the meanings of both the imageswhich the pilots appropriated—the bogatyr’ [the male knight],witch, and to a lesser extent, the eagle and swallow—as well as akey folkloric personage whom memoirists ignored: the polianitsa[woman knight]. In a broader context, this article elucidates how amarginalized, silenced cohort used its cultural heritage to create aunified identity, carve a place for itself in a larger collectivememory, and how its utilization of cultural tools evolved with thepassage of time.