Золотая ручка: дамская литература XVIII-XIX вв.

N. N. Golicyn (231-33) lists Carevna Sof'ja Alekseevna (1657-1704) , daughter of tsar Aleksej Michajlovič and elder half-sister of Peter the Great, as one of the earliest female authors in Russia. In his very brief outline of Sof'ja Alekseevna's dramatic biography, Golicyn notes that she ruled with Peter from 1682 to 1689, became a nun under the name of “Susanna” in 1698, and died, a nun of highest rank, in Moscow's Novodevičij Convent, where she was buried.[1] Golicyn skips over many well-known details: Sof'ja Alekseevna was the regent of Russia during the early years of young Peter's reign and entered into open (and armed) conflict with him in an attempt to become sovereign herself. The Carevna's defeat in 1689 was followed by her incarceration in the Novodevičij Convent; she took monastic orders only a decade later in 1698 -- in the wake of an unsuccessful rebellion by the Strel'cy (members of the musketeer regiments that constituted Russia...

According to Prince N. N. Golicyn  (272-73), the first Russian woman writer was Marusja Čuraj.[1] Marusja, whose creative talents flourished in the midst of 17th-century struggles for independence, has since become a Ukrainian folk heroine; in 2000, she was featured on a Ukrainian postage stamp:[2] In Golicyn's synopsis, Mar'ja Gordeevna "Marusja" Čuraj was born in Poltava in 1628 and died at some point after 1648. She was "the daughter of a Cossack officer of the Poltava regiment, who was burnt at the stake in Warsaw" and though sentenced to death herself in 1648, she was subsequently pardoned, the story goes, "for the sake of her sweet songs". In short, Marusja was an "improvisor of Ukrainian songs and one of the best singers in Ukraine at that time". Golicyn goes on to list the titles of six of her songs, some of which are in Ukrainian and some in Russian. Golicyn's sources are three: (1) "Marusja Čuraj, Malorussian ...

One thread featured on this blog will be The Golicyn History. In 1889, the Prince N. N. Golicyn published an extremely useful and remarkably comprehensive Bibliographic Dictionary of Russian Women Writers (Библиографический словарь русских писательниц , СПб., Тип. В. С. Балашева, 1889).  The enormous task of transforming that text – whose dates are sometimes missing or wrong – into a chronological list was begun by Hilde Hoogenboom, and is available to the public on the ever-evolving  NEWW Women Writers Virtual Research Environment , run by Suzan van Dijk, et al. While the project of carefully reviewing and updating that list may be awaiting the energy of an inspired student, the list ‘as is’ does offer a detailed and roughly chronological outline of Russian women writers. The Golicyn History thread on this blog will attempt to tackle these writers one by one – in the order in which they were listed on the NEWW site when this project began – and to raise issues ...

The name of this blog is a pun. "Zolotaja ručka" means both "the golden pen" and the "little golden hand." The pen's "golden" quality lends our title some historicizing coloration, a suggestion of the previous centuries that are our focus, while the association between "pen" and "little hand" recalls the ostensibly delicate hand of the ostensibly feminine writer -- what society would like her to be in the era in question. At the same time, Zolotaja Ručka, Little Golden Hand, was the nickname of a famous Russian thief, Sof'ja Ivanovna Bljuvštejn (née Solomoniak, 1846-1902) who became a folk legend. We take her to represent the kind of transgressive empowerment that women's writing often constituted in the period examined here. Further information on our protectress, Son'ka Zolotaja Ručka, will come to light, we hope, in a future student thesis . Our subtitle, "Damskaja literatura", conta...

This blog is part of an ongoing project to engage interested readers, and especially students, with texts written by Russian women from the early 18th century to World War I. It includes commentaries, translations, illustrations, and suggestions for further research. The genesis of this project was a course on  Russian women's writing that I taught at the University of Genoa several years ago that quickly became, for  want of available translations,  a course in reading historical literary texts. My three excellent students (Giulia Bisogni, Noemi Liberi, and Martina Morabito) rose to the challenge with enthusiasm and perseverance, encouraging me to rethink an idea that I had been mulling over with Carolina Ardini, a former student, namely that of  publishing translations online.  What better way to make up for the glaring absence of women's texts (evident not only in the lack of Italian translations, but also in Russian literary history in general) than t...