Sex or No Sex: Discussions of Sex in Sofiia Tolstaia’s and Anna Dostoevskaia’s Autodocumentaries

• In Event: 19th-Century Russophone Women Writers II: Sex and Childbirth in Works by Dostoevskaia, Tolstaia, and Shabel’skaia

Abstract

I wish to investigate how mentions or discussions of sex differ between these two writers and how these discussions change as Sofiia and Anna turn from diaries to memoirs. Anna refers to sex in her diaries cryptically but regularly. However, mentions of sex disappear from her memoir. In contrast, Sofiia’s attention to the subject is less evident in her early diaries, but increases later on. Furthermore, in her memoir discussions of sex become not only frequent, but startlingly open. The differences, as I see them, can be explained, in part, by the degree of openness or closeness of their diaries to the external view and by different purposes of their memoir writing.

Author

• Irina Reyfman, Columbia U