W hile we're on the subject of Anna Ioannovna , w e might as well pause for a moment to take note of Mavra Egor o vna Š epeleva (1 708 -17 59 ), who would seem to be the next woman writer in order of birth date, although she has largely fallen between the cracks of literary history. Š epeleva is not mentioned in Golicyn , for example ( which I ' ve indicated by adding an "n" for "new" to her number ) , but she does appear a s the chronological successor to Natal'ja Alekseevna in Lurana O'Malley's review of eighteenth-century women 's dramaturgy (1 7 ) . Š epeleva left a more evident trace in socio - political h istory: her prominent career in elite circles began in 1719 with her appointment to the retinue of Anna Petrovna, a distant relation of Anna Ioannovna and daughter of Peter the Great . Most important , however, was Š epeleva ' s intimate friendship with Anna Petrovna ' s sister, Elizaveta Petrovna , who became Russi...
Pelegeja Ivanovna Vel'jaseva-Volynceva (1 773-1810) was 18 years younger than her accomplished sister Anna and thus , though sh e, too, managed to publish her first translation at age 9 , it appeared only in the 1780s. While we have no information about their mother – or perhaps they had two different mothers? – these two sisters and their younger brother Dmitrij certainly enjoyed a domestic climate that was conducive to literary activity. As Golicyn notes, Pelageja published two translations , both of them theatrica l and featuring her name squarely on the cover. Both were issued by Nikolaj Novikov at the University of Moscow P ress , the first was even printed at his expense ( Svodnyj katalog 1:130). Novikov supported a number of women writers and translators ...
According to Golicyn (109-110) , the Empress Elizabeth, known in Russian as Elizaveta Petrovna (1709-1761), who reigned from 1741 until her death in 1761, wrote three brief verses and part of an acrostic. Most literary historians have regarded this output as insufficient evidence that she was a bonafide writer and it has failed to secure her a place in literary history.[1] Nonetheless, even these few literary fragments – if they are really hers – arguably make Elizabeth a more prominent cultural actor than many of her peers: if she wrote less than her great aunt, Natal'ja Alekseevna , she perhaps wrote more than Sof'ja Alekseevna , or Peter the Great's semi-illiterate wife, Catherine I (author of a handful of letters), or the Empress Anna Ioannovna . But did she really write these texts or is Elizabeth's authorship merely, as Amanda Ewington (23) has suggested, the stuff of legends? Let's look at these verses in the next few posts. The first verse that Golic...
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