When the Westernization of Russian culture began in the seventeenth century, women’s writing was restricted to private correspondence, but in the following century women began to feature in the cultural landscape. Accordingly, it is our aim to trace women’s literary history of the nineteenth century as a unity with differences. A third group chose a border existence, while a fourth spoke from the female margins which they recreated, renamed and revized into a space of innovative possibilities.
If some tried to adopt and adapt literary imagery and topoi which were considered conventionally male, others created an alternative space for women in their own right within, but separate, from the male world. We also recognize the differences among the authors’ positions on literary creativity. Instead, we would like to pay attention to diversity of genre, different types of protagonists and the differences between ideas and themes and narrative strategies. We do not see the women authors as a homogenous group. This short reflection on literary practices of Russian women writers in the nineteenth century seeks to depict and analyse strategies of women’s creative ‘nomadism’, the ways of writing and finding one’s own place within a strange cultural territory and to name some of the innovative approaches which helped women to write themselves for themselves and for the history of literature. 3 In our reading of women’s literature we will bear in mind the ‘double-voiced discourse’ 4 of women in culture, and pay attention to the means and ways by which women writers approach their cultural border existence and to how they negotiate their positions within the dominant patriarchal discourse and its ideological binaries.
1 We can also look for the specificity, originality and independence of women’s creativity and discuss women’s writing within various models, which follow not the paradigm of struggle, but rather the ‘model of connection and development’, as suggested by Jehanne Gheith 2, or fall within the ‘pattern of forgetfulness’, as proposed by Catriona Kelly. We can add women writers into literary history, or we can try to write a separate women’s history with the aim of identifying fields and genres where women’s presence seems to be obvious, as did Barbara Heldt.
#Storywriting gan how to#
The question of how to write about women in Russian literature of the nineteenth-century can be solved in various ways. ‘How Women Should Write’: Russian Women’s Writing in the Nineteenth Century Arja Rosenholm and Irina Savkina
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