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

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Abstract: For the third year running, we are organizing a stream dedicated to nineteenth-century Russophone women writers as we seek to liberate the Russian canon. An international group of dedicated scholars and translators are working to restore the legacy of the three Khvoshchinskaia sisters and to bring the “Russian Brontës” the attention they deserve. A burst of activity got underway to honor the 200th anniversary of Nadezhda’s birth. Liberals, pacifists, and contrarians on the “woman question,” they defied preconceptions about women writers by taking on Russia’s cursed political and social issues, from serfdom, government, and the role of the nobility, to education, the family, and women’s emancipation. But they are only some of the over 400 professional women writers in the nineteenth century. The absence of these women writers from today’s canon (both in Russia and the West) belies the popularity and prominence they enjoyed among their contemporaries. By the end of the nineteenth century, women made up about fifteen percent of the country’s professional writers, but every one of them was edited out of literary history in the twentieth century when the Bolsheviks nationalized the works of fifty-seven writers—all men—for publication in greater quantities than Soviet literature. These panels explore a wide range of writers and topics, from poetry and plays to translations, the diaries of Dostoevskaia and Tolstaia, and fiction, including detective novels, not to mention the spiritualist writings of Madame Blavatsky, who was Elena Gan’s daughter.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 19th Century

Chair

• Maude Meisel, Columbia U

Papers

• Sex or No Sex: Discussions of Sex in Sofiia Tolstaia’s and Anna Dostoevskaia’s Autodocumentaries - Irina Reyfman, Columbia U

• Liberation of Body, Soul, and Writer in Sofya Tolstaya’s Prose - Ingeborg Jandl-Konrad, U of Vienna (Austria)

• Birthing a New World?: On Midwives and Personal Freedom in the Fiction of Aleksandra Shabel’skaia - Melissa Lynn Miller, Colby College

Discussant

• Muireann Maguire, U of Exeter (UK)