Realist prose writers, 1881–1929

Women and Urban Culture

“…The founding of journals addressed to women (Zhenskoe delo, 1899-1900, Zhenskii vestnik, 1904-16 and Zhurnal dlia zhenshchin, 1914-26) and the rise of mass publishing by the turn of the century helped women to popularize their prose in 'thick journals' and turned their sensational novels into bestsellers. 116 Of the historical factors which increased women's literary activity and supported their artistic self-confidence, we should mention the fruitful inter-relationship, from the 1880s until 1917, 117 between the women's movement and various modernist movements, with their positive, if somewhat ambivalent influence. Fin-de-siècle aesthetics and philosophical movements defending individual and unconventional decisions in life, together with feminist ideas by the turn of the century, emphasized women's right to express themselves.…”

Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Lives and Culture

“…The linkage between the women's movement and the philosophical and aesthetic programmes that emerged with the advent of Modernism in the 1890s, the Silver Age, was complex and had great impact on women's lives. With Rosalind Marsh, 118 we argue that many women writers contributed to the women's movement through their fiction, translations, criticism and journalism, as well as through the new role-models they created, as did Sof'ia Vasil'evna Kovalevskaia (1850-91) for example, through her career as a mathematician and a writer of the popular semi-autobiographical novella, The Nihilist Girl (Nigilistka, 1892), or Mariia Konstantinovna Bashkirtseva (1858-84), an artist famous for her Journal (1887), who became the inspirational embodiment of all 'those Russian men and women who rebelled against pragmatic collectivist ideals and exalted impressionism and the autonomy of art' 119 at the end of the nineteenth-century Realist age.…”