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 ...
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...
Elizaveta Michajlovna Frolova-Bagreeva (1799-1857), born Speranskaja, is next. Since her birthdate was missing from the NEWW list that provides most of our names, she was assigned "1700" as a default, putting her smack in the middle of the eighteenth century, though her rightful place is much later – in the middle of the nineteenth century. So we find her name out of chronological order (hence the "*" by her number), another look ahead at women's writing a few generations after the empress Elizaveta Petrovna (which is where we left off with our historical progression). Frolova-Bagreeva is a very interesting case, and one not selected for inclusion in the 1994 Dictionary of Russian Women Writers. Indeed, she illustrates several ways in which women writers can slip through the cracks of the canon and all but disappear. Although her life was not as dramatic as Ksenija Borisovna Godunova's ( see our last post ), it had some very sharp ups and dow...
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