Our Name

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", contains similar irony. This phrase, which literally means "ladies' literature", refers in contemporary Russian to low-brow mass market romances aimed at a female readership. We hope to recover some dignity for that term here by linking "ladies' literature" to the work of female authors from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

 NOTES:
The photo is from the English Wikipedia article on "Son'ka, The Little Golden Hand".

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