Mapping the Feminine

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright

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Contents

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Introductions

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pp. 1-

Introduction

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pp. 3-9

This volume honors the extraordinary life, path-breaking career, and pioneering scholarship of a truly modest woman - Professor Marina Viktorovna Ledkovsky, Barnard College emerita. Born into the old noble families of the Nabokovs, the Falz-Feins, the von Korffs, and the Fasolts, Marina Viktorovna grew up in Berlin, where, during...

Marina Ledkovsky at Columbia

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pp. 11-14

Marina Ledkovsky and I both came to the Slavic Department at Columbia in 1952 and still rejoice in it as emeriti. We rarely met, at first, because she was an undergraduate and I a graduate student, though she already knew most of the things I had come to learn. After completing school in the Lyceum Cecilienschule in Berlin, she had...

Marina Ledkovsky

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pp. 15-25

Vision and Revision

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pp. 27-

Female Voice and Male Gaze in Leo Tolstoy's Family Happiness

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pp. 29-50

Tolstoy's 1859 novella Family Happiness (Semeinoe schast'e) has not attracted much scholarly attention, perhaps because of its reputation as "an unexciting story of courtship, early married bliss, subsequent marital problems, and eventual compromise." Its content judged unremarkable, its form has also often been characterized...

Learning How to Look: Nastasia Filippovna in The Idiot

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pp. 51-69

Near the beginning of Dostoevsky's The Idiot (Idiot, 1868), Myshkin meets the well brought-up young daughters of his distant relative, Madame Epanchina At her easel in the women's drawing room and with paintbrush in hand, one of the Epanchin daughters, Adelaida, complains of not knowing...

Feminine Resurrections: Gendering Redemption in the Last Novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky

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pp. 71-90

Surprisingly, the literary importance of these two characters is far from a settled matter; many critics have dismissed them as ancillary to the action of their respective novels. Grushenka, for example, gets lumped in with the rest of Dostoevsky's women, who are said "not [to] have their own personal history," but instead "enter...

Nature and Culture

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pp. 91-

A Tale of Two Cities: Tolstoy's Gendered Moral Geography in Anna Karenina

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pp. 93-111

Tolstoy's misogyny in general, and in Anna Karenina in particular, was a commonplace of feminist criticism until Barbara Heldt, and then Amy Mandelker, challenged that idea. Most recently Helena Goscilo has reaffirmed Tolstoy's reputation as an all-out misogynist, basing these charges on Tolstoy's "visceral fear and disgust of...

Landscapes of Girlhood: Forest Space in A Russian Childhood and The Tragic Menagerie

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pp. 113-131

Over a generation ago, Ellen Moers helped to inaugurate the study of women's literary traditions by discussing the metaphors of space that were, as she saw it, distinctively female. Quoting Freud on the "complicated topography of the female genital parts" and their frequent representation as landscapes, Moers went on to claim...

Women's "Nature" and Creativity in the Silver Age

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pp. 133-148

This paper looks at women's perception of gender as a factor in their creativity during the period 1897 to 1914. It is framed by an examination of the views of the two leading female critics, Elena Koltonovskaia (1870-1952) and Zinaida Vengerova (1867-1941) . Koltonovskaia holds a unique position as the only woman critic of the...

Performance and Staging

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pp. 149-

Self-Presentation on Stage and Page in the Memoirs of Russian Women Performers

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pp. 151-166

Those of us who work with autobiographical writings would doubtless agree that the greatest initial difficulty in theorizing ab out the genre is defining it, and, because it can be understood to include so many different kinds of writing, formulations about it are often easy to contradict. In 1984 Domna Stanton surveyed previous attempts to...

Sister Acts: Autobiographies by Two Nineteenth-Century Russian Actresses in Cultural Perspective

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pp. 167-183

As historians seek ever more ingenious ways to flesh out the factors of nationality, class, and gender that make up the unique culture of a society, autobiographies have become an important, albeit tricky, source for the investigation of those elements in the lives of Russian women-and, in return, the effect of women's shifting roles on...

Dance as Metaphor: The Russian Ballerina and the Imperial Imagination

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pp. 185-208

Stagings of the imaginary geography of nationhood may take on particular resonance in situations when group identities are rendered vulnerable or contested by rapid social or political change or by encounters with outsiders. At such pivotal moments, dramatic spectacle may become a potent mechanism for working out in symbolic...

Exile and Return

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pp. 209-

Lidiia Ginzburg's Notes of a Blockade Person: Self and Others as Polyphonic Chorus

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pp. 211-229

Ginzburg's blockade memoir, Notes of a Blockade Person (Zapiski blokadnogo cheloveka), is part of a long list of Russian texts that document Russian experience under extreme conditions - civil war, the siege of Leningrad, state terror, prison and forced labor camps. Like many Russian women's autobiographical texts, Ginzburg's, too...

Aristocrats and Working Girls: Towards a History of Russian Émigré Women in the United States

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pp. 231-247

The published history of the post-revolutionary Russian emigration to the United States, the wave dubbed "first" by Russianists, has stalled for decades at the "Who's Who" phase, composed of snapshots of its rich and famous. Russian emigre history has drawn scant attention in American scholarship or the American press, marginalized...

Pseudonyms and Personae of Marianna Kolosova: Creating a New Feminine Voice in Emigration

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pp. 249-262

The woman who is the subject of this article never wrote using her own name: her given name appears to have been Rimma Ivanovna Vinogradova. Her tombstone in the Russian cemetery in Santiago, Chile identifies her by this name, with the dates May 26, 1903 to June 10, 1964, below which is inscribed...

Gender Politics and Canon

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pp. 263-

Poèt, Poètessa, Zhenshchina-Poèt: Job Titles and Comparable Worth

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pp. 265-280

This article contrasts the job titles that fourteen mid-nineteenth-century Russian women poets used to describe themselves with those applied to them by men reviewers of the time. As we shall see, nineteenth-century men critics assigned all women poets to a lesser professional rank than men poets, inscribing this division in...

The Non-Canonical Canon: From Nikolai Novikov's Historical Dictionary to Dictionary of Russian Women Writers

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pp. 281-300

With an international team of 3 editors and 101 contributors from the United States, Russia, and Europe, Dictionary of Russian Women Writers contains many writers who, though born in Russia, died in Asia, Europe, and America, and wrote in languages other than Russian. It makes two related arguments: for the inclusion of Russian women...

Contemporary Russian Women's Journals: A Case Study of We/Myi

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pp. 301-320

In his introduction to Literary Journals in Imperial Russia, Robert Maguire writes, "Of all the literary forms that the Russians borrowed from Western Europe in the eighteenth century, none has proven more durable than the journal." Elsewhere, Maguire describes Russian journals as universities: "And, just as universities...

Afterword

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pp. 321-338

Oh feminism! I don't know whether I am a feminist. In a way, yes. I think that women have been neglected. I mean women's intelligence has been neglected. Not throughout. You have some examples in the Middle Ages and even earlier, Roman times. But these are examples, these are exceptions. Well, you can...

Subject Index

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pp. 339-357

Back Cover

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