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Concluding Possibilities IN CONCLUDING, I will return to the three theoretical concerns outlined in the introduction: Russian writing, Russian women’s writing, and (very briefly) feminist criticism of women’s writing in cultures other than Russia. This book raises as many questions as it resolves, and I will end by discussing some of these. Although this is an unusual way to end a study, it is fitting both as a tribute to Krestovskii and because scholarship, especially at this early stage of exploring Russian women’s writings, should be as much an opening out as a summation. Examining the work of Tur, Krestovskii, and other Russian female authors forces us to expand many of the common paradigms and motifs through which the nineteenth century has usually been written. It offers new perspectives on familiar figures such as superfluous men and fallen women, and it presents female protagonists who are very different from, and, I have argued, more complex than, the more familiar heroines of necessary and new women. Krestovskii’s and Tur’s writings also indicate the limitations of traditional periodizations. As Catriona Kelly has pointed out, the usual division of Sentimentalism-Romanticism-Realism does not reflect the patterns of Russian women’s writing.1 Similarly, studying the works of Krestovskii and Tur indicates that defining the development of Russian letters through the periodization of “the forties” and “the sixties,” or by reading it through the influence of the Natural School and the debates between the radical and aesthetic critics, as many have done, traces the literary history of certain groups of men, rather than allowing for anything like the full range of reading and writing in Russia in the nineteenth century. Throughout, I have worked mainly on two overlapping levels: examining the writings of Tur and Krestovskii as women writers and explicating what these texts signify for the study of Russian literature in general. For example, in my discussion of how the two authors contributed to the literary construction of the social (chapters 5 and 6), I show how taking these works into account reveals the limitations of the usual definitions of the “social.” Tur’s fiction creates female-centered worlds, fantasy scripts, and 186 alternative possibilities for women; Krestovskii’s fiction recuperates the dispossessed , primarily old maids, fallen women, and seminarians. Similarly, in regard to their criticism (chapters 3 and 4), it is important to establish that nineteenth-century Russian women were published critics, since this information is largely unknown. But it is equally important to investigate the significance of their criticism, that is, to explore the question : what cultural work is accomplished by this criticism? Both authors made major contributions to debates that are widely considered definitive, such as the woman question. Krestovskii and Tur include —in fiction and criticism—a running discourse about female emancipation , rejecting “radical” critics’ understanding of this issue and focusing on the dangers of emancipation for women in the program of the “radical” critics. Their work also indicates the importance of noncanonical debates, such as that around Zhadovskaia’s A Backward Woman, for example, or Turgenev’s On the Eve rather than the canonical debate around Fathers and Children. These noncanonical debates point to the importance, even in Russia, of the middle ground. It is efficient to focus on the canonical: it is, after all, impossible to know everything and it is probably necessary to have certain things in common in order to define a field. But it is also essential to repeatedly push at those canonical limits and to recognize what else was happening—or the canon will become a less accurate and increasingly narrow indicator of the field of, in this case, Russian literature. Moving to Russian women’s writing in particular, we find that Krestovskii ’s and Tur’s works and biographies demonstrate the range of women’s prose. Tur was a belletrist more briefly than Krestovskii; she invested much of her literary energy in hosting a salon, in criticism, journalism, and fiction for children. Krestovskii, on the other hand, was primarily a belletrist and poet who also wrote splendid critical articles. Tur’s elaborations of the society tale show one of the major trajectories of women’s writing in Russia; Krestovskii’s multidirectional fictional worlds demonstrate another. Tur and Krestovskii both negotiated the common and powerful cultural splitting of woman and author by a series of refusals and complicated ambivalences. Krestovskii handled the female/author divide by becoming her male pseudonym and refusing to be a female authoress...

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