Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"A female contemporary of Alexander Pushkin, Liubov Krichevskaya makes her Anglophone debut in an excellent translation of her fiction, drama, and poetry, which deftly capture women's estate in the early nineteenth century. Krichevskaya intriguingly combines Sentimentalist preoccupations—sensibility, virtue, and men's moral reformation through confrontation with exemplary women's passive piety—with the uncontrollable passions and volatile hero popularized by the Byronic strain of Romanticism. Her gynocentric texts poignantly convey the stringent limitations imposed upon women's agency by a society that paradoxically credited them with the seemingly limitless capacity to exert a civilizing influence as icons of probity. Readers acquainted with Rousseau, Richardson, and Goethe will discover familiar feminized turf, but cultivated in a Russian vein."
* Helena Goscilo, The Ohio State University *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
The Other Voice 1
The Historical Context 3
Biography and Works 8
Analysis of Krichevskaya’s Works 12
Conclusion 35
Preface 38
To My Readers [Foreword to My Moments of Leisure] (1817) 41
Several Excerpts from a Journal Dedicated to My Friends (1817) 42
My Comments 44
A Plan for a Temple of Love in the Heart 46
Thoughts 47
Blind Mother, or The Reward of Virtue Tested; A Drama in Three Acts (1818) 49
No Good without Reward; A Comedy in Three Acts (1826) 84
Two Novellas (1827) 117
Corinna 117
Emma 141
Count Gorsky, a Novel (1837) 165
Selected Poetry (bilingually, on facing pages) 268
To Rtishchev (1817) 269
To a Frame without a Picture (1817) 269
A White Sheet of Paper (1817) 271
On the Militia of 1812 (1817) 273
The Dniepr. May 25, Evening (1817) 275
To Gr——ry F——ch Kv——ka in Answer to His Verses of September 17 (1817) 275
Another Song (1817) 277
Truth (1817) 277
In Answer to the Question: Why Do I Sleep So Much? (1817) 279
From the Banks of the Ternovka (1824) 279
Bibliography 280
Index 283
