How Women Must Write: Inventing the Russian Woman Poet (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory) - Softcover

Olga Peters Hasty (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810140934 ISBN 13: 9780810140936

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2019

Synopsis

How Women Must Write studies how women who write poems were invented in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia by women poets themselves, readers who derived poets of their own design from women’s poems, and male poets who fabricated women and wrote poems on their behalf. These distinct vantage points on how the Russian woman poet is constituted foreground the complex interactions between writing women and their readers within ever-shifting social, political, and cultural power structures. 

Hasty’s exploration takes us from an emphatically male Romantic age to a modernist period preoccupied with women’s creativity but also its containment. Each chapter studies an episode from Russian cultural history. The first part explores the successes and vulnerabilities of Karolina Pavlova and Evdokiia Rostopchina, who lay the groundwork for women writing after them. The second part examines two women invented by men: Cherubina de Gabriak and Briusov’s Nelli, who reflect the establishment’s efforts to retain command over women’s writing in the Silver Age. Last, Hasty examines Marina Tsvetaeva’s and Anna Akhmatova’s challenges to male authority. 

Illuminating these writers and characters not as passive victims of gender-driven limitations and disincentives but rather as purposeful actors realizing themselves creatively and advancing the woman poet’s cause, How Women Must Write will appeal to the general reader as well as to specialists in Russian literature, women’s studies, and cultural history. 

About this title

About the Author

OLGA PETERS HASTY is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She is the author of Tsvetaeva’s Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the Word and Pushkin’s Tatiana and, with Susanne Fusso, of America through Russian Eyes, 1874–1926.

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810140934
• ISBN 13: 9780810140936
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272