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4.6 - The Russian Woman

from History 4 - Heroes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2024

By
Anna A. Berman
Edited by
Simon Franklin ,
Rebecca Reich  and
Emma Widdis
Simon Franklin
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Rebecca Reich
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Emma Widdis
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

This chapter traces the evolution of a specific character type that began with Aleksandr Pushkin’s Tatiana Larina in Eugene Onegin. In the hands of future authors such as Ivan Turgenev and Fedor Dostoevskii, Tatiana came to represent an ideal for the Russian woman based on soulfulness, fidelity, and self-sacrifice. Russian women writers, too, used Tatiana as a model for their heroines. With the rise of the ‘woman question’ in the 1860s, the Russian woman was redefined to reveal her new potentials in a shifting society, with Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s Vera Pavlovna as a new ideal. In the Soviet period, she was rethought yet again to respond to shifting political mandates, variously downplaying or emphasising her maternal, caregiving side. The faithful, all-enduring Tatiana took on a new form in Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem and continues to evolve in contemporary feminist writing.

Keywords

Eugene Oneginwoman questionIvan TurgenevWhat Is to Be Done?Lev TolstoiFedor DostoevskiiDoctor ZhivagoFedor GladkovAnna AkhmatovaLiudmila Petrushevskaia
Type
Chapter
Information
The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature , pp. 772 - 787
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Andrew, Joe, Women in Russian Literature, 1780–1863 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gasiorowska, Xenia, Women in Soviet Fiction: 1917–1964 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968).Google Scholar
Hasty, Olga, Pushkin’s Tatiana (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Heldt, Barbara, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).Google Scholar
Hubbs, Joanna, Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
Kelly, Catriona, A History of Russian Women’s Writing: 1820–1992 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Marsh, Rosalind (ed.), Women and Russian Culture: Projections and Self-Perceptions (New York: Berghahn Books, 1998).Google Scholar
Stephan, Sonia (ed.), A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

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