Foreign Literature Studies ›› 2021, Vol. 43 ›› Issue (6): 79-93.

• Russian Literature Studies • Previous Articles     Next Articles

The Golden Age of Women's Liberation Novels in Russia: Another Landscape of Literature in the Silver Age

Lin Jinghua   

  • Online:2021-12-25 Published:2022-01-03
  • About author:Lin Jinghua is a professor and Yanjing Scholar at the School of Literature, Capital Normal University (Beijing 100089, China), Distinguished Professor at the Russian Research Center, East China Normal University (Shanghai 200241, China) and Beijing International Studies University (Beijing 100024, China). His research is focused on Russian literature and comparative literature. Email: linjinghua2002@hotmail.com
  • Supported by:
    “Translation and Research of Cambridge Russian Literature (Nine Volumes)” (14ZDB089) sponsored by the National Social Science Fund of China; Visiting Scholar Program of the European Centre for Humanities at Oxford University.

Abstract: By the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Tsarist Russian Empire's “1861 reform” had gone on for 40-70 years and the Empire reached its peak. Soon, the Empire suddenly disintegrated and lost its power to the Soviet regime, which seemed to favor the grassroots in ideology, but in essence maintained or even expanded the territory of Russian Empire and opposed the West. This kind of contradiction was not just a result from the political changes because the high-speed urbanization could not bear the burden of the Empire, but rather because the modernization shifted people's concepts while facilitating material progress. The changes of concepts included the ideas that the Empire could not tolerate, such as sexual liberation and women's increasing awareness of self-independence. This new trend, which deviated from the Orthodox tradition, became a hot topic for literature during the period, prompted novelists to think more about the public concern, and encouraged a large number of women to take on literary writing, hence transforming women's novel into one of the most popular literary genres at the time. Women's liberation is not only part of the discourse of the Bolshevik revolution, but also one of the connotations that embodied the superiority of the Communist system in Soviet Russia. In this context, the significance of the works on women's liberation in the Russian Silver Era went far beyond the scope of bestsellers and, later on, gave a great impetus to the development of women's course in Soviet Russia.

Key words: Russian Silver Age, literature of women's liberation, women's writing, popular literature

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