Anna Mar’s Violent Dialogues

• In Event: Documenting the Violence: Minoritized Identities and Trauma in the Works of Russian and American Writers

Abstract

Anna Mar’s 1916 novel Woman on the Cross (Zhenshchina na kreste) was a publishing sensation—the original print run of 2,500 copies was sold out in ten days, and a second run of 5,000 was printed. Yet critics hated the novel—it received more than fifty reviews, almost all of them negative. In this paper, I read Mar’s Woman on the Cross in dialogue with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novel Venus in Furs and Mar’s journalistic column “Intimate Conversations” to explore narratives of violence, submission, gender, and erasure both on and off the page.

Author

• Erica Stone Drennan, Amherst College