Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Lives and Culture

The essays in this collection are thoroughly researched and clearly written; they are, moreover, accessible to the non-specialist . . . these articles are an excellent introduction to the experience of women in nineteenth-century Russia.

Dedicated to the task of recovering the lives and, where possible, the voices of ordinary women in imperial Russia, this collection cannot help but reflect the diversity of women's experiences. Peasants and townswomen, actress and Mary the Mother of God, rape victims and professional musicians, dutiful women and those who defied gender conventions - all stride across its pages, creating a colourful if at times crowded landscape. The individual articles that comprise the volume testify to the high-quality scholarly work that is now being done in Russian women's studies.

This volume will be useful to both specialists in Russian women’s history as well as non-specialists, including students, as it reveals many of the complexities of this period with regard to women. One of the great benefits of this collection is the way that many of the articles inform and enrich one another by referencing each other, pointing to important connections between the subjects, and indicating the usefulness of interdisciplinary scholarship.

— Laurie Stoff, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 55 (March-June 2013)

— Jacqueline Mullhallen, Counterfire, 19 April 2012

— Benjamin M. Sutcliffe, Slavic and East-European Journal, 56.4 (Winter 2012)

Wendy Rosslyn is Emeritus Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Nottingham, UK. Her research on Russian women includes Anna Bunina (1774-1829) and the Origins of Women’s Poetry in Russia (1997), Feats of Agreeable Usefulness: Translations by Russian Women Writers 1763-1825 (2000) and Deeds not Words: The Origins of Female Philantropy in the Russian Empire (2007).

Alessandra Tosi is a Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge. Her publications include Waiting for Pushkin: Russian Fiction in the Reign of Alexander I (1801-1825) (2006), A. M. Belozel’skii-Belozerskii i ego filosofskoe nasledie (with T. V. Artem’eva et al.) and Women in Russian Culture and Society, 1700-1825 (2007), edited with Wendy Rosslyn.

Contributors:

Rosalind P. Blakesley is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art and a Fellow of Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge. Her publications include Russian Art and the West (co-editor, 2007); The Arts and Crafts Movement (2006); An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum (co-editor, 2003); and Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century (under her maiden name of Rosalind P. Gray, 2000). She has curated exhibitions in London, Moscow and Washington DC, and is now working on a new book on Russian painting from 1757 to 1873.

Philip Ross Bullock is University Lecturer in Russian at the University of Oxford and Fellow in Russian at Wadham College. He has published widely in the fields of modern Russian literature and music and has a particular interest in the theory and practice of gender studies. He is the author of The Feminine in the Prose of Andrey Platonov (2005) and Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century England (2009), the editor and translator of The Correspondence of Jean Sibelius and Rosa Newmarch, 1906-1939 (2011) and the editor (with Rebecca Beasley) of Russia in Britain, 1880-1940: From Melodrama to Modernism (2013).

Julie A. Cassiday is Professor of Russian at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Her book, The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen (2000), examines the theatricality of show trials in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as their roots in avant-garde theatre and cinema. She has published scholarly articles on Russian theatre of the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Stalinist film, and the cult of personality surrounding Vladimir Putin. She is currently writing a monograph on early nineteenth-century theatre and theatricality, which investigates the role of gender performance in the construction of Russian national identity, as well as an article on Russia's participation in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Barbara Engel currently holds the position of tutor at the University of Surrey within the Department of Nutritional Sciences. She previously held the position of Distinguished Professor and member of the history department of the University of Colorado, Boulder. A recipient of support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, among others, she is the author of Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth Century Russia (1983); Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family in Russia, 1861–1914 (1995) and Women in Russia: 1700–2000 (2004), and most recently, Breaking the Ties that Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia (2011), as well as of numerous articles. She has made more than a dozen trips to Russia and the former Soviet Union.

Sibelan E. S. Forrester is Professor of Russian and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. She is co-editor of two volumes, Engendering Slavic Literatures (1996) and Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures through an East-West Gaze (2004). She has published translations of a number of Russian women poets, including Anna Bunina and Evdokiia Rostopchina.

Marianna Muravyeva is currently Professor at Oxford Brookes University. Previously she worked at the University of Helsinki as a senior researcher and head of the Department of the Russian Law program. She teaches courses in human rights of women, gender and law and history of crime and political and legal theories in Russia and Europe. She is a member of several editorial boards and treasurer of Russian Association of Women’s and Gender Historians. She has published extensively in the fields of the history of women, gender, family and crime in Russia and Europe between 1600 and 1900. Her recent publications include: Vina i pozor v kontekste stanovleniia evropeiskikh gosudarstv novogo vremeni (2011); Cultural History of Sexuality (2010); Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (co-edited with Raisa Maria Toivo, 2012).

Arja Rosenholm is Professor in Russian Literature and Culture and Director of the Russian Studies programme in the School of Language, Translation and Literary Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. Her expertise encompasses various aspects of Russian and Soviet literature and culture, especially women’s writing, popular culture and media and ecocritical reading of Russian literature. Her publications include Gendering Awakening. Femininity and the Russian Woman Question of the 1860s (1999); and a number of co-edited works including: with S. Autio-Sarasmo, Understanding Russian Nature: Representations, Values and Concepts (2005); with A. Litovskaia, I. Savkina and E. Trubina, Obraz dostoinoi zhizni v sovremennikh rossiiskikh SMI (2008); with A. Nordenstreng, and K. and E. Trubina, Russian Mass Media and Changing Values (2010).

Irina Savkina is Lecturer in Russian Literature at the Department of Russian Language and Culture, University of Tampere, Finland. Her fields of interest include Russian literary history, gender studies and popular culture. She is author of Provintsialki russkoi literatury (zhenskaia proza 30–40-kh godov XIX veka) (1998) and Razgovory s zerkalom i Zazerkal’em: Avtodokumental’nye zhenskie teksty v russkoi literature pervoi poloviny XIX veka (2007).

Vera Shevzov is Professor of Religion at Smith College. She received her B.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. Supported at various stages by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the National Endowment of the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council, her research has focused on Orthodox Christianity in Russia and has explored issues related to the notions of sacred community and collective religious identity, lived religion, women and religion, religion and visual culture and historical memory and national identity. Her book Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (2004) was awarded the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History. Currently, she is writing a book on the image of Mary in modern and contemporary Russia. Recent publications include contributions to volume six of A People’s History of Christianity (2007); Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia (2007) and Letters from Heaven: Popular Religion in Russia and the Ukraine (2006).

Christine D. Worobec, a Board of Trustee Professor and Distinguished Research Professor at Northern Illinois University, is the author of Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period (1991) and Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia (2001). She is also co-editor with B. Evans Clements and B. Alpern Engel of Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation (1991) and co-editor with M. Zirin, I. Livezeanu, and J. Pachuta Farris of Women and Gender in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia: A Comprehensive Bibliography (2007). Worobec is currently working on a history of Orthodox pilgrimages to holy sites in Russia and Ukraine as well as to shrines in the Holy Land and Mt. Athos from 1700 to the present.

Some rights are reserved. This book is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. This license allows for copying any part of the work for personal and non-commercial use, providing author attribution is clearly stated.

Wendy Rosslyn and Alessandra Tosi, Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Lives and Culture. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2012, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0018

– Jacqueline Mulhallen, Counterfire, 19 April 2012

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