Presenze Femminili Nella Letteratura Russa

Emilia Magnanini, ed. Presenze femminili nella letteratura russa (=Eurasiatica 57: Quadernidel Dipartitnentodi Studi Eurasiaticidel UniversitA degli Studi Ca' Foscari di Venezia). Padova: CZEUP, 2000. vii, 192 pp. Paper.Eurasiatica has again pleasantly surprised Western readers with this very enlightening volume dedicated to a sorely neglected topic in Russian literary and cultural history, namely nineteenth and twentieth-century women's writing.Nineteenth-century Russian literature has successfully inscribed itself into the European heroic cultural pantheon as an equal cultural partner, despite the absence of the Russian equivalents of Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters or Mrs. Gaskell. Nevertheless, Russian women writers did exist. They have left for posterity imaginative poetry, elegant short prose, sophisticated essays on various topics, and voluminous commentaries on history, culture, philosophy and music in the form of diaries, letters, autobiographical and biographical writing, and standard memoirs, most of which has been either unjustly marginalized or lost in the historical narrative. This collection of twelve well-researched essays (7 in Italian and 5 in Russian), carefully and thoughtfully selected by Emilia Magnanini, herself also a contributor, will help to correct this historical omission. The volume not only contributes substantially to the now popular area of women's studies, but to Russian literary criticism and to European cultural and literary history. Thanks to the typology and approach adopted by Magnanini, one is simultaneously exposed to the evolution of feminist writing and to the entire Russian literary and cultural panorama over the expanded period of nearly three centuries, covering the Russian Imperial/tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet literary and cultural phases.This exciting journey into the unknown begins with a most enlightening and well-researched essay by Christiana Cipollini, Una revista al femminile: il 'Damskii Zurnal (pp. 1-24), which addresses the conditions for Russian women writers even as far back as the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, sketching the rise of female intellectuals in Russia, underthe inspiration of the influential cultural policies of Catherine the Great, and finally depicting the history of the now obscure feminist literary journal Damskii Zhurnal Ladies Journal). The story of this journal captures ten important years (1823-33), during which it had the moral support of such notables as Karamzin, Chaadaev, Makarov and Saltykov, all ardent proponents of female emancipation, in spite of the patronizing attitudes of Pushkin and Baratynskii. She includes interesting new facts about the famous Princess Zinaida Volkonskaiia (1789, Dresden-1862, Rome), one of the most prominent contributors to the journal, whom Pushkin immortalized in his poem Tsygane (The Gypsies). Among the less known contributors were Princess Sachovskaiia, Baroness Sofia Ivanovskaiia, Lizaveta Perovskaiia, Zoya Alekseeva, Mariia Lisitsyna, Nadezhda Teplova, Ol'ga Kriukova, Liubov' Krisevskaiia, Anna Volkova, Anna Bunina, and Elizaveta Kul'man. The essay returns their names to Russian literary history, thereby refreshing Russian collective cultural memory.Johanna Spendel's essay L'India di Elena Petrovna Blavatskaiia (pp. 183-92) honors the memory of a somewhat eccentric but very original Russian religious thinker, psychologist and writer, known to intellectual history as Madame the founder of the renowned Theosophical Society who was destined to become the leader of the Theosophical movement in the USA and Canada. Elena Blavatsky (1831, Ekaterinoslav-1891, London) was a daughter of the well-known Russian writer Elena Gan who published under the pseudonym Zenaida R-va. Blavatsky, prior to her emigration from Russia, regularly contributed to various publications in Moscow, Tbilisi and Odessa. Her spiritual search took her to India, Egypt, Tunis, Tibet, Nepal and Palestine, and led to the compilation ofher famous doctrine, which she later transformed into Theosophy. …

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