Anna Karenina: #MeToo (recently published in KGBBarLit)

Note: Dmitry Merezhkovsky was a Russian thinker and critic.

Ah, Merezhkovsky: to you I was a mare
ridden badly by a man; and because of him,
his error, I had to be destroyed. And Lev, my dear:
You never gave me my own voice, you didn’t dare.
What did I talk about when I did talk, after all:
Abortion with Dolly? Every damn thing
Vronsky did, that I did better? The problem
was not that I was sexual (men, you
count on that). The problem was that
I was smart. But sexual women must be killed;
All the books attest to that.

Merezhkovsky permeates the consciousness
of Slavic scholars, is the Anna story, still,
but I fault you most, Lev. You knew, soon
that the problem was not one woman
and one man; it was all women, all men. You had
Vronsky climb in society, while I—damn, I even
knew more about horses than him!—I was
the scarlet woman, though our offence was the same.
Did I abandon my child? Or did a martinet
bar me from him? Ah, she holds Vronsky back!
Ah, the guilt!

Oh, there is no talking to you.
You sent me the dream
that haunted your ruling-class sleep,
a peasant with an iron,
the proletariat that said, fuck you
and your landlord’s way of life.
You killed me with the railroad that they built
for you. Because you “had to.”
Where was your Resurrection then?
You repudiated Karenina, it’s true,
but you abandoned me to my fate.
And so, Lev, I still struggle,
a century and a half later,
to have my story told.