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 ...
Anna Ivanovna V el' jaševa-Volynceva , next on our list, was born in 1755. She thus belongs to an era subsequent to that of Mavra Šepeleva , so we'll flag her with an asterisk (*) as we take this opportunity to indulge in a little chronological change of pace . Anna Ivanovna ' s literary activity overlapped with that of her sister Pelegeja Ivanovna , who will be the subject of our next post . Golicyn furnishes two distinct entries for Anna (46-47) and for Pelegeja (47), without explicit ly indicat ing that they were related, although the sisters’ unusual last name and matching patronymics suggest a familia l connection that is borne out in other sources. As was the case with most of the women writers who managed to publish their work in eighteenth-century Russia , the Vel ' jašev a -Volyncev a sisters belonged to a literary family . Their father, notes Golicyn, was a " general major of the artillery and writer " by the name of Ivan A...
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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