Russian literature. A short introduction

autobiography or fictionalized autobiography). Newly discovered or rediscovered writers included Karolina Pavlova, the early nineteenth-century poet Anna Bunina, the twentieth-century lesbian poet Sofiya Parnok, and the nineteenth-century prose writer Nadezhda Durova, author of the transvestite memoir The Memoirs of a Cavalry Maid. The priorities of gender criticism also inspired important re-readings of established writers, especially Tsvetaeva, who emerged as a pioneer of writing by Russian women about the female body.

At times, to be sure, a new kind of critical elision took place, this time of writers who could not easily be presented as proto-feminist rebels. A case in point was Rostopchina: one American feminist critic, for example, wrote of her ‘inordinate preoccupation [with] parties and dancing’ and her frivolous attitude to literature (‘writing for her [ . . . ] had the appeal of an agreeable hobby’). Yet there are grounds for arguing that Rostopchina’s pose of female dilettantism and modesty was in fact a way of facilitating entry to the potentially ‘immodest’ world of writing. In circumstances where the publication by women of literary work (as opposed to the production of poems, stories, and memoirs for circulation among close family and friends) was seen as tantamount to sexual exhibitionism if not prostitution, the adoption of a modest mask (a mask that was sometimes misleading in terms of a writer’s actual character) was a form of social insurance, and one that could sometimes allow women to write with impunity on ‘unfeminine’ subjects.

At the same time, the historicist argument should perhaps not be pressed too far: a critical reading that limits itself to working within the intellectual universe of a given literary text as consciously expressed, rather than attempting to explore deeper shades of meaning and nuance, can turn into a tautologous paraphrase and runs the risk also of smoothing out aberrant or dissonant elements. If one sees Rostopchina’s ‘Pushkin’s Notebook’ as nothing more than a docile recognition of feminine inferiority (albeit one that was expedient,