Russia Through Women's Eyes: Autobiographies from Tsarist Russia (review)

Reviews 79 to obviously wrong modern readings, Waterhouse does accomplish a cogent analysis of the theme of cleansing and bathing in the Ufe of ^thelthryth, concluding that "attention to the microcontext of the discourse thus helps to balance and qualify a narrowly feminist reading that might see ¿Ethelthryth as merely being pejorated [sic] by the presuppositions encoded in the text" (342). Szarmach wraps up the volume with an intriguing analysis of "St. Euphrosyne: Holy Transvestite ," an anonymous life of a female saint who dresses as a man to pass as a monk for the rest of her life. Szarmach reads the story for its cultural meaning as weU as its literary style, particularly focusing on the themes of sexuaUty and wealth represented in this father-daughter story. As a study in gender representation in narrative lives, this essay is provocative and relevant to cultural studies beyond hagiography. Overall, then, this volume makes an exceUent contribution to both Anglo-Saxon studies and biography, intersecting at the point of interest in the historical and literary analysis of narrative Uves of saints. These dual interests contribute to some audience confusion: parts of the introductory essays are geared to those unfamiliar with AngloSaxon or hagiography, but the level of technical detail may quickly overwhelm such readers. One example of this problem is the inconsistent placement of translations from the Anglo-Saxon—sometimes in the body of the text and sometimes in the endnotes, even within one essay—making it unclear as to whether readers are supposed to be literate in Anglo-Saxon or not. Nor is this volume meant to be taken as definitive in the field of Anglo-Saxon prose saints' lives, since many of the expert authors caution that much technical work remains to be done, and the relationships among texts (particularly the Cotton Corpus Legendary so central to source analysis) remain problematic. Nonetheless, this volume is a giant leap forward in interpretive strategy because it clearly and forcefully condemns the "scissors and paste" view of so-called copying, and grants original creativity to the early medieval authors who constructed these texts. By placing these narratives in their appropriate historical and literary contexts and establishing the medieval authors' self-conscious use of sources, these scholars have elevated these biographies and the Uves they chronicle to a new level of meaning, contributing to our understanding of the way medieval Christians shaped the lives of those they sanctified and memorialized in their writings. Karen Louise Jolly Toby W. Clyman and Judith Vowles, eds. Russia Through Women's Eyes: Autobiographies from Tsarist Russia. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. 408 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-300-6753-4. Although personal writing by women has been attracting growing critical attention, nineteenth-century autobiographies by Russian 80 Biography 21.1 (Winter 1998) women have remained practically unknown to general Western readers as weU as to professional Slavists. They certainly have never been the subject of a major historical study. This book, an anthology of eleven previously untranslated texts, is therefore an important and timely first step toward securing a more prominent place for Russian women's autobiographical writing in a broader social-historical context. The substantial (46 pages) and highly informative introduction explains the editors' ideological approach to women's writing and presents a survey of nineteenth-century Russian autobiography. Clyman and Vowles describe their approach as "broadly feminist" in the sense that "the recovery of women's texts and an insistence on the significant role that gender and sexual difference play in writing have traditionaUy been feminist literary projects" (5). Their approach could also be called "feminist" because it assigns a significant role to sex and gender in writing. Like Sidonie Smith, whose Poetics of Women's Autobiography they quote, Clyman and Vowles believe that "any discussion of woman's autobiography must situate her selfrepresentational project in its cultural embeddedness. Most particularly , it must remain attentive to prevailing ideologies of women's sexuality and textual possibilities." Apart from these general feminist leanings, Clyman and Vowles are not ideologically doctrinaire and avoid the traps of partisan ideological criticism. They neither insist on the separation of the "Uterary" from the "political," nor do they pursue the farrdliar feminist power...