Emancipation as Liberation: An Educated Jewish Woman in Pre-1917 Russian Literature

• In Event: Metaphor, Representation, and Hidden Stories in the Russian Literary Tradition

Abstract

The research concentrates on the construction of Jewish femininity in Russian and Russian-Jewish literature, both in the works of male and female authors, and analysis of the representation of Jewish female protagonists in the works of Russian writers, both from the point of view of character description and the treatment of such topics as courtship, marriage and extramarital relations and motherhood.
The image of Jewish females in Russian-Jewish literature rethinks the traditional Jewish approach to femininity, mixing it with the influence of the female characters from classical Russian literature. As such, the achieved result is a unique construction of features, which later on will be partially adopted in Soviet literature and even in the early Hebrew literature created by the literary pioneers of the Second Aliyah.

Author

• Nelli Shulman, Hebrew U of Jerusalem (Israel)