The Wives - Softcover

Popoff, Alexandra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 160598504X ISBN 13: 9781605985046

Publisher: Pegasus Books, 2013

Synopsis

Muses and editors, saviors and publishers: the women behind the greatest works in Russian literature.

A Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year

 Many readers are aware that writers such as Fitzgerald, Joyce, and Lawrence used their marriages for literary inspiration. In Russian literary marriages these women did not resent taking a secondary position, although to call their position secondary underscores the vital role these women played in the creation of some of the greatest literary works in history. From Sofia Tolstoy to Vera Nabokov and Elena Mandelshtam and Natalya Solzhenitsyn, these women ranged from stenographers and typists to editors, researchers, translators, and even publishers. Living under restrictive regimes, many of these women battled censorship and preserved the writers’ illicit archives, often risking their own lives to do so. They established a tradition all their own, unmatched in the West. 

About this title

About the Author

Alexandra Popoff is the author of the award-winning biography Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography and The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants, a Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year. She lives in Canada.

From Booklist

Popoff convincingly argues that Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Osip Mandelstam, Nabokov, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Solzhenitsyn married literary wives who were profoundly absorbed in their husbands’ art and willingly assumed secondary roles. Sacrificial and suffering, they devoted their lives to persecuted, demanding, and even tyrannical husbands. But most of these familiar and derivative stories have been told much better in major biographies: Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky; A. N. Wilson’s Tolstoy; Popoff’s own Sophia Tolstoy, Brian Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov, Stacy Schiff’s Véra, and Michael Scammell’s Solzhenitsyn. Popoff tends to whitewash the marriages, quoting, for example, Anna Dostoyevsky’s “I would not wish to change anything in it,” which ignores her husband’s epilepsy, gambling, and poverty—and their dead infant. The author also minimizes Tolstoy’s sexual revelations, fanatical religion, irresponsibility with money, intense jealousy, and final flight from Sophia. The Russian-born Popoff tends to be descriptive rather than analytical, and her English is often awkward and unclear. All the wives survived the writers and became keepers of the flame, who “wrote with one hand and wiped tears with the other.” For libraries striving to maintain extensive collections of literary biography. --Jeffrey Meyers

About this edition

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 160598504X
• ISBN 13: 9781605985046
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 400