Nadezhda Durova, Female Soldier
'The Cavalry Maiden' was Russia's female soldier of the Napoleanic Wars.
Nadezhda Durova joined the Russian army in the 19th century and lived her life as a man. In her fiction, she explored gender roles and broke societal norms.
Nadezhda Durova was a writer of fiction and memoirs, was a Russian soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, and a woman who posed as a man. Her diary, published in a book called The Cavalry Maiden is the story of her unique refusal to adhere to gender norms in 19th century Russia.
The Cavalry Maiden poses some problems for the modern scholar, because the history is not completely correct and the point-of-view not always clear. For example, Durova excludes in her memoirs the fact that she had once been married – in the tale of her life as a soldier, she tells of her situation as a runaway (directly from her parents’ home in Ukraine). She also reportedly bore a son in 1803. In any case, The Cavalry Maiden is the story of a woman whose troubled relationship with societal norms caused her to hide her identity as a woman and act, for all intents and purposes, as male.
Veiled text within The Cavalry Maiden alludes to the idea that Durova’s secret was known, especially by the women she encountered while a part of the Russian cavalry. Despite Durova’s questionably successful cross-dressing, the reader is left unsure of her sexual orientation – while there are clues in the text, Durova remains reticent about her own sexual feelings towards women versus men.
Durova’s fiction explores gender roles and confusion. Her characters start out as one gender and, through sometimes surprising circumstances, end up as the other. In Nurmeka, a mother shields her “daughter’s” face from the world, yet is uncomfortable with the close relationship “Nurmeka” has with another female of the same age. In the end of the story, “Nurmeka” is discovered to be male, and the female friend and the former Nurmeka are free to marry.
Durova’s literary leanings may not have been so well known throughout Russia had it not been for Pushkin, who published Durova’s account of the battle of 1812 in a magazine in the mid 1830’s. Copies of The Cavalry Maiden sold out once they were published. However, Durova was not able to achieve success with her fictional tales, no matter how rare and unique they might have been for 19th century Russia. Most of Durova’s retirement was spent at her childhood home, where she maintained a male guise.
Durova was buried with military honors in 1866 at the age of 83. In retirement, she was somewhat of a novelty, and was treated as such. However, even towards the end of her life, she was concerned with the role of gender. An unpublished article in the last decade of her life outlined her insistence that women play a larger role in the affairs of Russian society.
References
Durova, Nadezhda. The Cavalry Maiden. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Marsh-Flores, Ann. "Coming out of His Closet: Female Friendships, Amazonki, and the Masquerde in the Porse of Nadezhda Durova." The Slavic and East European Journal 47, No. 4, 2003 609-630.
