Putting Herself Forward: Naming and Performance in Sandra Birdsell's the Russlander

Abstract: Sandra Birdsell's The Russlander portrays Mennonite world in Russia at end of imperial era when Mennonites--as actors and spectators enjoying their own society--liked to display effects of their material ambitions and inheritances. Personal names--suggesting aspirations, enacting control--became part of their Birdsell's protagonist, young Katherine (Katya) Vogt, indulging in childlike pleasures but growing self-conscious upon experiencing impact of social class, discovers that her gentle inscriptions of her mark her identity in terms of a debilitating class structure that understands itself in commodity terms. Birdsell, in one strand of her rich novel, also carries her investigation of naming and into Mennonites' changed social conditions in post-war Russia and, finally, Canada. ********** the movement of his hand across paper was not an embellishment but rehearsal of his name --Patrick Friesen (1) In The Russlander (2001), Sandra Birdsell's beautiful and haunting new novel about Mennonites in Russia during period 1910-23, (2) opening lines of Chapter 1 invite readers to enter subjective realm of protagonist Katherine Vogt, or and observe enchantment and power that she recalls having felt when, as a young child, she first wrote her own name. Simultaneously, Birdsell invites us to understand Katya's experience in terms that exceed Katya's conscious intention, and that focus on Katya's activity as though it might well be regarded as a performance of her very identity. Thus, first sentence of Chapter I introduces a lyrical meditation on deeply configured interweaving that occurs between personal identity and performance of one's name: She [Katya] would always remember awe, swelling in her breastbone when she'd first seen her written, Lydia guiding her hand across a slate (5). Exquisitely, deliciously, name--rendered visible here--gives confident shape to personal identity and in turn takes on shape of that identity. In Katya's case, her parents bestowed on her a culturally fluid name. They were signalling to their Mennonite community something of their fantasy of their daughter's future role in that community's ongoing performance. When Katya was born in early 1900s, name's overtones looked boldly to imperial center, particularly recalling Catherine Great of Russia, empress who in 1780s invited Mennonites into Russia in first place. And they looked also, through Katya, to contemporary styles revealing a Mennonite inclination for fashionable flirting with neighboring Russian identities. (3) Katya's innocent preoccupation with her name, along with what are for her its gently intoxifying effects, continues in second sentence: When she had learned to make her she began to herself forward, traced K.V. in lemon polish on a chair back, through frost on a window, icing on a cookie. K.V. Which meant: Me, I. Which was: Her. A high-minded child, body small for her age, and so alive.... She'd been a tiny yeasty and doughy person going to and fro with a huff and a puff, as though day was all she had, and at same time, thinking day would go on for good. As though she were living in eternity (5). We encounter here a protagonist whose delicately budding sense of self excites and engages our sympathy toward her and her gentle-hearted ambitions. We readily indulge her innocent feeling that her soft reiterations of her provided her with a means of gaining some control over her place in her social world, a means to put herself forward within social context in which she has begun to enwrap herself. Even when, a few lines later, narrator takes us out of solipsistic delights that child imagines for herself (4)--delights, to be sure, made worrisome for reader by narrator's ominous use of conditional--we still cling to feeling that Katya's lively spirit will provide prevailing narrative energy of novel. …

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