Russian literature. A short introduction

identify themselves with male predecessors, as well as female ones. ‘Monument’, interpreted as the testament of a beleaguered writer drawing comfort from the certainty of posthumous vindication, was a particular landmark for women poets who fiercely believed in their own unrecognized genius. (One such was Anna Akhmatova, as is shown by the passage from Requiem evoking her possible future monument that I quoted in Chapter 2.)

For all their aspirations to be treated as equals of their male contemporaries, however, it was still difficult for women writers to achieve elevation to the pantheon of literary greats, at any rate in critical commentaries with ambitions to evaluate the past rather than simply catalogue it. So, while women were well represented in bibliographies, and in the compilatory publications of positivist critics, such as V. V. Sipovsky’s two-volume History of the Russian Novel (1909), they (unlike minor male writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century) were largely excluded from the writings of the most brilliant group of early twentieth-century theorists, the Russian Formalists. The reasons for this lay in some of the Formalists’ governing assumptions about literary evolution, which they saw as driven by the efforts of a talented writer or writers. A gifted writer was sensitive to ‘automatization’, or the slide of literary techniques into cliché, at the very moment when it began happening; he (to use the appropriate pronoun) could raise what Tynyanov called ‘paraliterature’ (literaturnyi byt) to the level of real literature. Despite the Formalists’ own preferred term for their work, ‘descriptive poetics’, what they produced was really an interpretive poetics. Thus they were able to combine a detestation of biographical criticism (‘laundry list scholarship’) with reverence for the achievements of selected individuals – Derzhavin, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Tyutchev, Evgeny Baratynsky, and Konstantin Batyushkov (their main alteration to the canon of their own days at university was the admission of writers close to Pushkin, such as these last two). Women’s writing was not explicitly accounted for in any of the evolutionary models, but in practice it was usually assigned to the status of