Women's Works in Stalin's Time

Ò . . . impressive, eloquently written . . . [Holmgren] provide[s] an integrated comparative study of two very different female survivors of the Stalinist night.Ó ÑCaryl Emerson, Princeton University Ò . . . a bold scholarly act. . . . The writing is excellent throughout.ÓÊÑBarbara Heldt, University of British Columbia Focusing on the works of Lidiia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelstam, Beth Holmgren reclaims the extraordinary roles that women writers played as conservators of culture and memory in Stalin's time. Holmgren argues that during the Stalin era, the domestic sphere offered a haven for dissident acts of resistance and cultural survival. She examines literary texts by such writers as Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Pasternak, and especially Anna Akhmatova that variously scripted women's unofficial roles. She then traces how Chukovskaia and Mandelstam reclaimed and revised these scripts, evoking their own creative models. This fresh and original approach to the culture of the Stalin era illuminates Russian cultural and literary history with insights from feminist theory and recent writing on women's autobiography and on the theme of history and memory.