Russian literature. A short introduction

‘paraliterature’. For example, Lidiya Ginzburg’s authoritative study of nineteenth-century Realism, On Psychological Prose (1971), contrasted the talented writing of the political thinker and memoirist Aleksandr Herzen with the talented personality of his wife Natalya (also the author of autobiographical writings, but ones, Ginzburg apparently considered, of documentary rather than literary value).

The assumption of a hard-and-fast distinction between ‘literature’ and ‘everyday language’, ‘literature’ and ‘paraliterature’, effaced from view, in Formalist and post-Formalist criticism, the importance of mixed-genre texts in the work of women writers, such as the diary in verse (to be found in Rostopchina’s work as well as that of Akhmatova), and the significance in women writers’ work of paraliterary citations, such as references to everyday speech (for instance, the mundane comments of an unfaithful lover in Akhmatova’s early poetry). And, while Formalist critics’ disdain for biography was helpful to the study of women’s writing in some ways (Eikhenbaum’s brilliant 1923 study of Akhmatova, for instance, eschewed clichés about ‘feminine poetry’ in favour of a close reading of literary devices in her work), it meant that women writers could not be studied as women. Therefore, questions about whether literary devices had a different resonance when located in a text that was linguistically marked as feminine (by the use of feminine adjectives and verbal forms, say) remained unasked. Equally, the importance of biographical realia for many women writers (and indeed for male writers such as Blok and Mayakovsky, for whom the tortured masculine self was a major theme) was ignored. Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero, her great retrospective narrative poem about the ‘start of the twentieth century’ in 1913, is quite incomprehensible without some knowledge of the personalities in the poet’s circle, and the poet’s own experience, just as is Tsvetaeva’s Poem of the End; both Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva maintained personal cults of Pushkin not only as artist, but also as man, producing vehemently subjective and partisan accounts of his marriage to Natalya Goncharova. It is interesting to note as well that Tsvetaeva, in her essay ‘The Poet and the Critic’, mounted