Women and Russian culture : projections and self-perceptions / edited by Rosalind Marsh

incl. bibliographical references and index

Acknowledgements -- Note on the Text -- Introduction / Rosalind Marsh -- Part One: Theoretical Perspectives : 1 An image of their own?: feminism, revisionism and Russian culture / Rosalind Marsh -- 2 Reading the texts - rereading ourselves / Adele Barker -- Part Two: Women and Russian Culture: from the Nineteenth Century to the Revolution : 3 The benevolent matriarch in Elena Gan and Mar'ia Zhukova / Joe Andrew -- 4 Mid-nineteenth-century domestic ideology in Russia / Diana Greene -- 5 Criticism and journalism at the turn of the century on the work of Russian women writers / Irina Kazakova -- 6 Actresses, audience and fashion in the silver age : a crisis of costume / Catherine Schuler -- Part Three: Women Writers from the Revolution to the Present : 7 The art of suggesting more : Akhmatova and the diaphoric manner / Sheelagh Graham -- 8Under an unwomanly star : war in the writing of Ol'ga Berggol'ts / Katharine Hodgson -- 9 A difficult journey : Evgeniia Ginzburg and women's writing of camp memoirs / Natasha Kolchevska -- 10Women memoirists on Pasternak / Neil Cornwell -- 11 Iuliia Voznesenskaia : a fragmentary vision / Julie Curtis -- 12 The other woman : character portrayal and the narrative voice in the short stories of Liudmila Petrushevskaia / Monika Katz -- 13 Contemporary women poets in the metropolis and diaspora / Marina Ledkovsky -- Part Four: The Image of Women in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature : 14 Gaps in the cosmogony : witchcraft imagery in Andrei Bely's Kotik Letaev / Peter I. Barta -- 15 The romantic presentation of the heroine in selected works of Aleksandr Grin / Anna Darmodekhina -- 16 Is village prose misogynistic? / David Gillespie -- 17 Real and unreal women in the works of Chingiz Aitmatov / Natal'ia Zhuravkina -- 18 The image of women in the prose of Sergei Dovlatov / Boris Lanin -- 19 In the shadow of a prominent partner: educated women in literature on the shestidesiatniki / Svetlana Carsten -- 20 Russian women in Anatoly Kurchatkin / Arch Tait -- Notes of Contributors -- Index

"This collection of essays by leading Western and Russian specialists contains new insights into and updates previous research on the role of women in Russian culture in the last two centuries, and contributes to two exciting and growing research areas: the feminist critique of work by Russian male authors and the study of Russian women writers. Moreover, whereas most previous studies have concentrated on the aesthetic qualities of works by women writers, this collection includes both close textual analysis and the discussion of biographical, historical, and political questions relating both to the representation of women and women's culture. The aim is not to present a unified manifesto, but rather to bring together a spectrum of approaches and positions within their common focus on the relationship between women and culture in Russia." --Book cover