Finding the Middle Ground

Though among the most prominent writers in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century, Evgeniia Tur (1815-92) and V. Krestovskii (18207-89) are now little known. By looking in depth at these writers, their work, and their historical and aesthetic significance, Jehanne M Gheith shows how taking women's writings into account transforms traditional understandings of the field of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Gheith's analysis of these writers' biographies, prose, and criticism intervenes in debates about the Russian literary tradition in general, Russian women's writing in particular, and feminist criticism on female authors and authority as it has largely been developed in and for Western contexts. Both Krestovskii and Tur published criticism as well as fiction. They were, however, very different in their writing, and, considering their work together, Gheith is able to offer a complex and nuanced view of the scope of women's fiction and criticism in nineteenth-century Russia. Her attention to the two authors' biographies - as strikingly similar as their writing is different - reminds us of the creative relationship of life to literature even as it reveals the character and significance that this relationship assumed in the case of women writers in mind-nineteenth-century Russia. With great clarity, thoroughness, and authority, Gheith's book illuminates the creative worlds of Tur and Krestovskii, their contributions to debates about the connections between society and literature, their challenges to more familiar male portrayals of the ""social,"" and their proper place in any assessment or understanding of nineteenth-century Russian literature.