10 - Anastasiia Verbitskaia reconsidered

Summary

At first sight, Anastasiia Verbitskaia (1861–1928) seems an unlikely candidate for rehabilitation. If she is mentioned at all in histories of Russian literature, she usually receives a critical reference as an exponent of ‘women's prose’ (zhenskaia proza), which has been characterized by both contemporary and later critics, in Russia and the West, as a literature of trivial or sensational themes, obsessed by sentiment and romance, and couched in a weak or hysterical style. In recent years, historians of Russian women's fiction have also generally accepted this view, arguing, for example, that ‘The prose of Anastasiia Verbitskaia at the turn of the century made the term “women's prose” derogatory.’ Why is it worth revisiting such a seemingly unpromising subject?

There are several good reasons for taking a fresh look at Verbitskaia's work. The first, general point is that a reassessment of Verbitskaia will contribute to the valuable feminist project of rediscovering and reinterpreting the lives and work of neglected Russian women writers, which is still in its infancy in comparison with the reclamation of English and American women's fiction initiated during the early stages of the secondwave feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Like feminist writings in English from the 1880s onwards, Verbitskaia's novels played a progressive role in the Russian women's movement, even if they were not ‘great art’; and her activities as writer and publisher rendered her an important role model for Russian women and an influential popularizer of contemporary feminist ideas.