Russian literature. A short introduction

who were close in one way or another to at least one of the group – for example, Vladimir Mayakovsky, a major influence on Tsvetaeva and the addressee of a tribute by Akhmatova. The association, then, is as much a matter of myth as fact, helped along by a line of Akhmatova’s, ‘There aren’t many of us, three or four, maybe’, and also, perhaps, by the musical parallels in this combination of two male and two female voices, all with their own distinct timbres – like a four-part ensemble in one of Mozart’s operas, with Akhmatova playing mezzo to Tsvetaeva’s soprano, and Mandelstam tenor to Pasternak’s bass-baritone.

Women writers, then, did not necessarily fit any better into the analytical paradigms of Formalism than they did into politically engaged perceptions of writers as ‘masters of minds’. Since Formalism was, from the early 1960s, once again to be the single most dominant trend in the serious study of Russian literature, among Western critics as well as Russian ones, the rise of gender-oriented criticism in Britain, America, France, and Scandinavia during the 1970s at first had little impact on critical practices or on university courses, even in the West. However, in the mid-1980s, a few Western Slavists, mostly in America, started to make a systematic attempt to recover work by women writers. Barbara Heldt’s Terrible Perfection (1987) contrasted male writers’ suffocating view of women’s innate moral superiority with women writers’ own struggle to represent a richer and more challenging understanding of female identity. The Dictionary of Russian Women Writers (1994), edited by Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal, and Mary Zirin, brought hundreds of forgotten authors back to scholarly attention. By the late 1990s, the work of these and other writers had managed to create something approaching an alternative canon of Russian literature, one made up of women writers and shaped by a strongly individualist stress on self-assertion and self-examination (that is, on various forms of