Russian Women

OpenBooks sent me an advance blurb of the new book, a collection of essays edited by Wendy Rosslyn (Nottingham University) and Alessandra Tosi (Cambridge) 'Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Lives and Culture'. 

I look forward to reading it, not least because I am familiar with Rosslyn's previous works on Anna Akhmatova and on women in Russian literature of the 18th Century, an obscure but incredibly fascinating subject, considering that Russia had four empresses in that one century. Three of them, including Catherine the Great, were incredibly successful in building a great and dynamic country. It would be interesting to see what Rosslyn and Tosi have to say on women of the 19th (and the beginning of the 20th).  

The blurb says:

Russian women of the nineteenth century are often thought of in their literary incarnations as the heroines of novels such as Anna Karenina and War and Peace. But their real counterparts are now becoming better understood as active contributors to Russia’s varied cultural landscape.
This collection of essays examines the lives of women across Russia – from wealthy noblewomen in St Petersburg to desperately poor peasants in Siberia – discussing their interaction with the Church and the law, and their rich contribution to music, art, literature and theatre. It shows how women struggled for greater autonomy and, both individually and collectively, developed a dynamic but often overlooked presence in Russia's culture and society during the long nineteenth century (1800-1917).

Other works by Wendy Rosslyn:

- Anna Bunina (1774-1829) and the Origins of Women's Poetry in Russia (Studies in Slavic Language and Literature) (on Amazon)

- The Prince, the Fool, and the Nunnery: The Religious Theme in the Early Poetry of Anna Akhmatova (on Amazon)