Lives in Transit: A Collection of Recent Russian Women's Writing - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0875011004 ISBN 13: 9780875011004

Publisher: Ardis, 1995

Synopsis

One of the most remarkable changes taking place in Russia after the break-up of the Soviet empire is the radical transformation of Russian women's culture. Despite a historically male-dominated culture, gender awareness has flourished in the 1990s, and is reflected in a new body of women's literature and a new concern for female experience. The prose and poetry included in this anthology examine essential issues in women's lives: women's sexuality, romantic love, motherhood, the economic and political life of women, their struggle to intergrate domestic and professional roles, new family structures, physical health, abortion, rape, and so forth.
The issues covered here are common to women everywhere, but the different historical experience of Russian women in the twentieth century has created distinct understandings and values. It was a time of terrible suffering and drudgery for Russian women, who endured decades of war, political and cultural repression, and poverty. Women were given more equality in the workplace, but, as these works show, they were still expected to maintain their roles as conventional wives and mothers.

About this title

About the Author

Helena Goscilo is chairman of the Slavic Department at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the leading scholars in the field of Russian women's culture. Her works include Fruits of Her Plume: Essays on Contemporary Russian Women's Culture; Balancing Acts; and Russian and Polish Women's Fiction. She is also co-editor of the anthologies Glasnost and The Wild Beach two collections of Russian prose from the 1980s.

Reviews

Although the 35 poems (by six poets) are unremarkable, the 23 stories in this anthology are astonishing for their lyrical imagery and wordplay, and for the breadth of their collective scope. There are stories about frustrated geologists, about cobblers with undying affections and about young women seeking elusive knowledge of love. In Nina Sadur's "Wicked Girls," an unnamed narrator solves (or claims to solve) the riddle of a friend's box of reappearing chocolates. Galina Shcherbakova's "Uncle Khlor and Koriakin," which teeters precariously between the treacly and the moving, tells of a widower who comes to share his stepdaughter with her biological father. Liudmila Ulitskaia's "Gulia"?about an elderly woman who seduces a younger man?is served by the gracious formality of its prose. Even the surreal is represented, in Marina Tsvetaeva's "Life Insurance," a playful tale of a Russian emigre family in France who receive a remarkable visit from an insurance salesman. Although there are several standout poems, including Olesia Nikolaeva's "The Shade," a stark rant that takes shots against the former Communist regime ("Behind every scribe, I sense the monstrous machine"), the verse here is not graced, as the fiction generally is, by equal parts of lyricism and zeal. Still, this is, overall, a sparkling collection?and that despite the editor's puzzling working definition of the word "recent": some of the pieces date from the late 1960s or early '70s, and one (Tsvetaeva's) was written in 1934. Footnotes.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ardis
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0875011004
• ISBN 13: 9780875011004
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 327
• Editor: Goscilo Helena