7. Writers from Romanov Territories

This chapter reviews 24 women writers, 1776-1848, from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine: one way or another, the territories of the Romanov tsars throughout most of this period. This was an empire doomed to dissolution within a century, and again, few of these writers outside Russia wrote in Russian to any meaningful degree. They wrote instead in their emergent national languages, rejecting the language of the hegemon. These women wrote in verse, in prose, in dialogue for the theatre; they include duchesses and revolutionaries, sometimes in the same person.