Sofya Smirnova’s Novels

• In Event: 19th-Century Russophone Women Writers III: Tragicomedy and the Khvoshchinskaia Sisters, Sofia Smirnova, and Anastasiia Verbitskaia

Abstract

Sofya Smirnova began her literary career at age 19 with a big novel, The Flame (1871) in Otechestvennye zapiski, which came out at the same time as Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia’s magnum opus Ursa Major (1870-71). Both featured young populist noble heroines against the backdrop of financial fraud. By the end of the decade, Smirnova would write four more sharp, topical, witty novels that caught the attention of Dostoevsky, Khvoshchinskaia, Leskov, and Chekhov. In the 1890s, she returned to writing plays, tales, short stories, and legal, literary, and political journalism. Through her entire career, she kept a journal that functioned as her creative laboratory, totally 33,000 pages. This paper gives an overview of the novels.

Author

• Hilde M. Hoogenboom, Arizona State U