Yashka, a highly-mediated text, not only sketches a Russian woman soldier’s life but also
reveals a cultural history of World War I in which social and political discourses intersected and competed with one another during wartime; multiple interventions in the process of producing the memoir inevitably complicates the interpretation of her life as a woman soldier. Before
Yashka was officially issued as a memoir in 1919, the story made its debut in the November
1918 issue of a “leading pictorial periodical,” The Metropolitan Magazine, three months after Bochkareva visited the White House (Levine 54).89 The story was installed for seven consecutive issues until May 1919. Levine recalled that after a luncheon at the residence of Theodore
Roosevelt, editor of Metropolitan, in 1918, Bochkareva signed a contract with the magazine to serialize her story, which Levine had edited. Releasing the story in series certainly benefited both the Russian woman soldier and the editor. Since 1914 when he launched his editorial career in
Metropolitan, Roosevelt had contributed to the magazine vigorously in voicing fierce criticism
against the neutral policy of President Wilson and his administration. During World War I,
Metropolitan under Roosevelt’s leadership as editor was well-known for its political stance
against German and against Bolshevist Russia. So controversial was his pro-Allies’ denunciation
that the March 1918 issue of this magazine was involved in a scandal of delivery suspension by the Post Office.90 While Wilson proposed peace agreements in his famous Fourteen Points in January 1918, Bolsheviks controlled Russia and signed the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty in March 1918 with Germany. Although Bolshevik Russia sought to call a truce in the Great War, civil wars ran rampant after the November Armistice. Roosevelt knew well that, with a series
featuring a Russian female hero struggling against Germany and Bolsheviks after the end of the Great War, Metropolitan would re-capture the attention of the public to an ongoing war in Russia. Likewise, this magazine offered Botchkareva a powerful instrument to publicize the war against the Bolshevists after the disbanding of her battalion. As the Great War ended but
revolutionary wars in Russia persisted, Bochkareva had just escaped from the hunt of Bolsheviks and wished to continue a patriotic battle after her women’s battalion was defeated and dissolved in summer 1918. At a time when the government and the public in the States were occupied by issues of postwar peace, the publication of her war stories in a series of seven issues allowed her to secure a lasting readership whose attention might well have translated into aid in all forms from the U.S. government.
Since this magazine served as a political arena for recounting a Russian woman soldier’s tale in a highly sensational manner, the ways in which these seven stories were presented imply how the editor “portrayed” the war heroine for the magazine’s postwar readership. The
conflicting images of photographic and pictorial representations of this female soldier, the layout of magazine pages, and the design of verbal and visual messages all offer suggestive messages of how this American magazine sought to picture a foreign war heroine. Metropolitan hired a frontier painter, W. H. D. Koerner, to illustrate the seven issues of Botchkareva’s stories,
90 Roosevelt wrote a public letter to protest against the Post Office’s illegal suspension of delivering the March 1918 issue of Metropolitan. See “Magazine” 4.
whereas Scientific America advertised the Metropolitan serial by showing a photograph of this woman soldier.91 Despite dissimilar forms of representation, both American magazines chose to present this woman in a less confrontational manner than the way in which another American women’s magazine, The Delineator, introduced Botchkareva to its readers earlier in that same year. In its October 1918 issue, Scientific America posted a blurb topped with a photograph showing Botchkareva in uniform. This uniformed female soldier in the magazine advertisement, however, bears no likeness to the same Russian woman in uniform represented in the photograph that appeared at the beginning of William Shepherd’s article in the March 1918 issue of The
Delineator. The picture in Shepherd’s article interestingly reminds one of the photograph
originally taken by Harper but later posted by Christabel Pankhurst on the cover of the 3 August 1917 issue of Britannia. Like the front cover picture of Britannia, the photograph in The
Delineator also portrays Botchkareva as a Slavic woman soldier with no hair, in uniform and
army cap, staring dauntlessly back at the audience with her hands folded.92 While the suffragette journal sought to celebrate the subversive femininity conveyed in the forceful look of
Botchkareva, The Delineator nevertheless employed a similar image featuring Botchkareva’s mannish look to deride her and her battalion. Despite its focus on social reform, The Delineator was known for upholding the morale of American middle-class women because of its “female middle-class readership,” and the magazine never swayed away from themes of domesticity (Bland 165).93 As Botchkareva’s photograph in The Delineator article suggested her strong
91 W. H. D. Koerner was famous for his frontier paintings and illustrations of the American west for The Saturday Evening Post (or The Post).
92 For further details about the photographic image that Britannia featured on August 3, 1917, see de Vries 82-83.
93 Although The Delineator published about women’s involvement in public issues, it focused more on women’s roles as mothers, housekeepers, or care takers. See, for instance, the
connection with radical suffragism, Shepherd further ridiculed this Russian woman’s practice of commanding a girls’ legion by comparing her army to nothing more than “a suffrage parade in the bad old days” (6). Hence, with its association with suffragettes, Botchkareva’s masculinity implies radical militancy that both The Delineator and Shepherd conceived of as dangerous to American women. Moreover, Shepherd juxtaposed good soldiers with bad ones by arguing that only “girls who were not ‘sexy’” and were good girls “in the moral sense” made good solders (56). In his criticism of Botchkareva for being a failed leader, Shepherd suggested her “peasant’s mind,” and “her strong peasant’s frame and muscle” accounted for her failure as a commander (7). Meanwhile, he presented another “quiet, gentle little Russian woman” commander, “dressed in black skirts and white shirt-waists,” as a successful leader (56). Besides the risk of violence, therefore, Botchkareva’s masculine look also denotes the threat of social differences and gender differences that undoubtedly challenge conventions of domestic femininity supported by the women’s magazine. Apparently, Shepherd intended to assure the magazine’s female middle- class readership that a foreign woman like Botchkareva made a “bad” soldier who would eventually fail and could only serve as a counterexample for American woman. Given the connection between Botchkareva’s disturbing image in Britannia, as well as in Delineator, and the intricate issue of women’s suffrage in wartime America, the advertiser in Scientific America preferred a less threatening way to promote the Russian commander’s war stories. By contrast, the woman soldier advertised in Scientific American wears short hair, has round cheeks, and gazes upward in an expression that is not challenging at all. As the magazine advertiser
acknowledged the severe criticism about Botchkareva’s masculinity, Scientific America carefully
Dreiser (Bland 179). While the magazine published articles both for and against women’s suffrage to maintain a nonpartisan position, its editors never showed support for this issue. On the child-rescue campaign, see Bland 177-180; for suffrage-related discussions in Delineator, see Bland 174-175, 181.
selected a photographic representation of a soldier heroine whose seemingly submissive look showed signs of domestic wellbeing. The magazine showed a nonthreatening look of
Botchkareva in order to market the foreign war heroine more effectively to the American audience.
Likewise, Metropolitan decided to downplay the potential impact of the Russian woman soldier’s story on its challenge to conventional femininity. Instead of producing Botchkareva’s image through photography, the literary magazine chose to represent the Russian woman in illustrations that could appeal to readers’ imagination. In the magazine stories, the heroine is painted like a beautiful American frontier woman struggling in the Wild West. Those
illustrations, therefore, sketch a fictional picture of a true Russian woman soldier that invites the audience to imagine her outside the realm of the reality her photographs have shaped. Without showing Botchkareva’s actual photos, the magazine published the text accompanied by
illustrations of W. H. D. Koerner, a prominent illustrator highly acclaimed later for his frontier painting. W. H. Hutchinson explains that “the mass-circulation magazines were the television screens of their day” (3). Koerner’s illustrations in Metropolitan, therefore, function as a series of images that visualize for magazine readers a vivid picture of Bochkareva. In other words, Koerner produces for the magazine audience a sit com series featuring Bochkareva and her fights against evil enemies. Koerner would become known for his painting of the American West after the First World War in Saturday Evening Post and Harper’s, but he had started his career as a magazine illustrator at the turn of the twentieth century (“Koerner” 88). He produced more than western paintings, and before his focus on the west, he had created pictures featuring exotic
scenes.94 Yet, because in magazines, artistic and literary renderings of the western territories grew more popular in the first decades of the twentieth century, the mythic American frontier remained particularly significant to Koerner while he did illustrations about foreign countries. His drawings of women in distant land were inevitably marked with stereotypical traces of westering American women. Besides, Koerner was engaged in a project of illustrating a romance novel set in the frozen land of Northwestern Canada while he worked on the illustrations of scenes from Botchkareva’s stories for Metropolitan.95 Koerner often read the stories he would illustrate beforehand and painted in terms of what he had conceived from his reading. Hence, Koerner’s reading of an American heroine struggling in the northern frontier might fuel his imagination of Botchkareva fighting for survival in Russia, a territory that he fancied as exotic as Canada, as distant as the American frontier. Unsurprisingly, the Russian female heroine is
portrayed like the “Madonna of the Prairie,” the American frontier woman on canvas whom Koerner imagines waiting to settle after the hardships of life in the Wild West, which in his mind was as foreign as a distant country.96
This Russian woman soldier in Metropolitan is represented in a romantic, fanciful style that meets the need of the American public to imagine Russia as an exotic country represented by an innocent girl growing into a voluptuous woman. The serial stories began, in the November
94 By 1910s Koerner had been a well-known versatile illustrator working for several popular magazines, such as The Post, McCall's Magazine, and Harper's Magazine. In 1916, he was commissioned to illustrate African scenes for “The Leopard Woman,” serialized in The Post. See Grover 13-14. For the theme of the American west and Koerner’s illustrations discussed in this passage, see Grover13-15.
95 In 1918, he did illustrations for the novel, The Peace of Roaring River, written by George Van Schaick. This is a romance novel about a girl working in New York but finding love in Carcajou, located in today’s Alberta, Canada.
96 “The Madonna of the Prairie” was one of Koerner’s best-known western paintings. It first appeared as one of the illustrations in Emerson Hough’s story “The Covered Wagon” for The
Post and was selected as the cover painting for the 1 April 1922 issue of the magazine. For the
1918 issue, under the title of “My Story, by Maria Botchkareva, Commander of the First Russian Women’s Battalion of Death” (11). This title implies an authentic tale narrated by the famous Russian woman commander herself. On the first page of the first story appear two huge illustrations: one on the top left with a depressed mother holding an infant and the other, covering nearly half of the first page, with a young girl tied on a pole while her drunken father holds a bottle on one hand and a whip in the other. Before readers start reading the text, they have been impressed with such a dramatic presentation of an impoverished girl suffering in the foreign land of Russia. As the story continues, another illustration covering an entire page appears. The illustration features an innocent beautiful woman helplessly standing next to a man in a bedroom with nothing but a bed sheet covering her half–naked body, suggesting her lost virginity. The storytelling in the second issue begins with a huge illustrated picture of a man carrying an unconscious woman wearing a dress and heels; the caption read, “I then had a sensation of being picked up by him and carried to his room” (14). We need to note that an impoverished girl would have no luxuries such as fancy dresses and shoes. Next follows another drawing of a helpless woman with a rope looped around her neck facing an angry man holding the rope and threatening to hang her. These striking images frame a visual narrative, suggesting a sensational dark romance, aside from Botchkareva’s war story. The drawing of her enlisting in the army at the headquarters also pictures a voluptuous woman dressed in the clothing of an American frontier woman. Koerner was known for his pre-Raphaelite style, and the heroine in the first two installments is painted as an innocent young farmwoman whose sexualized femininity and female endurance are foregrounded.97 As the series unfolds, the visual tale,
97 Botchkareva came from an ex-serf family, so Koerner’s drawings of her as an American farmwoman who fought as a pioneer woman in the frontier of war made it easier for the American audience to picture a Russian peasant woman.
shaped by Koerner’s illustrations, depicts a virtuous, affectionate, sexualized female character that represents for an American audience a conventionally gendered woman strikingly different from the “foreign” woman portrayed in Botchkareva’s actual photographs in Britannia: a masculine, female figure in soldier’s uniform.
Not only do illustrations of Bochkareva’s prewar life in Metropolitan accentuate the figure of an alluring woman, but drawings of her military career also show a woman whose female traits can hardly be obscured by her uniform or cropped hair. As the sketches of this female figure continue, so unwinds the same visual narrative in which Russia is epitomized by one heroic woman suffering from Bolshevist terror. Each of the four monthly publications other than the first and the last two installments is headed with an introductory note recapitulating the plot of its previous month and the current story.98 These headnotes unanimously stress that Botchkareva was “the only woman soldier” in the World War. Apparently, the editor’s emphasis on her singularity suggests his intention to distinguish this Russian woman from her death battalion members, who were heavily criticized in the U. S. in the press.99 Starting from the third issue in January 1919, Bochkareva is illustrated as a uniformed soldier wearing a cap and
holding weapons in hand. All the illustrations in the last five issues bring readers’ attention to the heroine’s female traits: her curves and her round cheeks. Pictures present this woman either carrying comrades she has rescued in No Man’s Land or standing and requesting earnestly to fight while soldiers threaten to mutiny. Illustrations also portray her either entertainingly
98 The first issue opened with Levine’s introductory passage where he stressed the truth of the story and expressed his observations of this woman soldier. The last two issues started with subtitles headlining the significant progress in each story. The April 1919 issue was subtitled “Sentenced to Death by the Bolsheviks,” and the May 1919 issue “Botchkareva Starts for America to Seek Aid for Free Russia”.
99 Although the receptions of Russia’s women’s battalion of death were mixed, Botchkareva’s battalion was particularly considered as a failure due to casualties of her women and mutinies of Russian troops. See Stoff, Shepherd, and Harpers.
unbuttoning her uniform to reveal her female body to a peasant woman she has just flirted with or confronting Bolsheviks while joining pro-government demonstrations. Whatever she seeks to achieve in the military, her face is either placed in the center of each picture or highlighted in pure whiteness and set in contrast to the dark blurry figures of male soldiers in the background. The most appealing pictorial illustration of Botchkareva as a soldier appears in the second to the last issue in April 1919. This issue displays a large image that depicts a gracious nun with slender fingers molested by a vulgar male Bolshevist soldier attempting to flirt. As this woman soldier has disguised herself as a religious woman, the newly acquired religious purity may seem to desexualize her female body. The dramatization, however, stresses her femaleness with her feminine facial features and her slender hands. This issue has a subtitle announcing, “Sentenced to Death by the Bolsheviks” (31). The catchy subtitle implies that the heroine in the picture is risking her life at the hands of the Bolshevist man and that Russia when controlled by Bolsheviks is in imminent danger. In Koerner’s illustrations, therefore, Botchkareva’s transformation from a farmwoman to a soldier erases nothing of her womanly features; rather, her femaleness is
highlighted and contrasted with masculine images of other male soldiers. Koerner’s drawings visualize for the American audience a uniformed woman whose femininity poses no challenge to “norms of heterosexual behavior” (Jensen, Mobilizing 70).
In addition to the competing visual narratives created by the press and serialized in
Metropolitan, the memoir text of Yashka also contains multiple conflicting chracterizations of
this Russian woman soldier as a result of various influences on the text. Isaac Don Levine, Bochkareva’s transcriber and Yashka’s editor, wrote introductions to the magazine series in 1918 and to the memoir, published in 1919. He nevertheless offers in his introductions two diverging representations of Botchkareva: one as a romantic woman struggling in an uncivilized kingdom
and the other as a true peasant soldier fighting in the war zone. As the serial began to run in
Metropolitan, Levine produced a short introductory note for “My Story” to share with the
audience his first-hand observation of this Russian woman. He describes her as “an affectionate sister, a stern warrior, a Goddess—all in one” who “symbolizes that inchoate, invincible, agonized, striving, rising colossus”; in other words, “She is Russia herself” (“My” 11). He presents an impression that this Russian woman, embodying a Russia that has been deeply involved in chaos, represents the primitive essence of humanity before civilization. She embodies affections, agony, and desire that emerge prior to rationality as if Russia had been undergoing drastic change before transforming into a democracy. She epitomizes traits that were associated with femaleness in terms of postwar American middle-class womanhood. Like
Koerner’s illustrations, Levine’s note romanticizes Botchkareva as a woman more than a soldier. Shortly thereafter, however, Levine sought to stress, in his longer introduction to Yashka, her role as a soldier in order to draw readers’ attention to ongoing civil wars in Russia that enthralled him and that he would later witness and cover with fervor (58). The introduction to Yashka