Золотая ручка: дамская литература XVIII-XIX вв.

We are now going to work through a rough patch in our list. Our project, it will be recalled, is to discuss the individual women writers treated in  N. N. Golicyn  in chronological order, which is to say according to the order of their birth dates as indicated on the NEWW Women Writers VRE . But what to do when the dates don't match the name?  NEWW's number 4 woman bears the dates 1693-1740, for example, but these don't correspond to the name listed with them, that of "Anna Ivanovna  Vel' jaševa-Volynceva ", a woman writer from the second half  of the 1700s . Why the error?  Well, there would seem to be some confusion between  Vel' jaševa-Volynceva and another  " Anna Ivanovna " , namely the   Empress  Anna I vanovna, better known as  Anna I oannovna (her father, Tsar Ivan V, who co-ruled with Peter the Great, was known as "Ioann", an older form of "Ivan"), who was indeed born in 1693 and died in 1740. Anna Ioannovna (...

Natal’ja Alekseevna (1673 Moscow — 1716 St. Petersburg), younger sister of tsar Peter the Great, is so far the first Russian woman writer whose literary activ ity we can confirm.  While we don't know exactly what she wrote, we do know that it was for the stage. Indeed, it turns out that Natal'ja Alekseevna effectively led Russian drama for an entire decade: from 1707 until her death in 1716, she ran two different theaters and supervised the production of numerous plays, some of which she seems also to have written. Golicyn's brief article (178) on Natal'ja Alekseevna takes up again the problem of literary history erroneous ly tangling her biography with Sof'ja Alekseevna' s . As noted in the previous post, the former's literary and theatrical activity has sometimes been erroneously credited to her elder half-sister, Sof'ja Alekseevna, who was Russia's regent from 1682 to 1689. The cultivation of theatrical interests would have conflicted ...