Russian literature. A short introduction

literature inside Russia, which had endured something of a conceptual stasis for the last two decades of the twentieth century, and as the spread of post-Modernist ideas made the expression of a particular and partial, eccentric and individual, perspective a reputable choice for all writers, not just biographically female ones, a greater tolerance for women’s ‘marginal’ explorations of the self became possible. Symptomatic was the appearance of a serious and careful discussion of Western scholarship on women’s writing in the liveliest Russian literary-critical journal, New Literary Review, in 1997. All in all, the posthumous monument for which generations of Russian women writers had longed, an intellectual rather than a stone one, was beginning to seem, for at least some of them, a real possibility. Unlike some of the critical approaches discussed in this book, gender-aware criticism had never pretended to be the only proper or legitimate approach to literary texts, to offer final answers. It did not rank writers in terms of their ‘progressivity’ in feminist terms. But it could reasonably claim to have raised a new and interesting set of questions, and to have demonstrated (something that writers themselves had always known) that masculine and feminine identity was no more obvious or easy to understand than any other aspect of the human self as reflected in literature.