Abstract
The tragedy experienced by women poets of the World War 1 period makes Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem of March 1915 seem prophetic. Tsvetaeva herself was to live through emigration and exile, the death of one child in infancy and the arrest of another for espionage. Her husband, whom she had had to support through years of exile in France, persuaded her to return with him to Russia, only to fall a victim to Stalin’s purges. A few year after his execution in 1941, Tsvetaeva committed suicide, unable to go on.
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Notes
Marina Tsvetaeva, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Minsk: Mastatskaia litaratura, 1984) pp. 24–5.
An exception is the recent Russian anthology of women’s poetry: V. V. Uchenova (ed.), Tsaritsy muz. Russkie poetessy XIX—nachala XX vv. (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989). I have quoted from this book wherever possible, since it is more accessible than original publications.
L. Bryant, Six Months in Russia (London: Heinemann, 1919) p. x.
Compare the glowing 1932 account of women’s position in the USSR by F. W. Halle, Die Frau in Sowjetrussland (Berlin—Wien—Leipzig, 1932)
with the far more critical recent voices of Russian women themselves in T. Mamonova (ed.), Women and Russia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984).
See S. Karlinsky, Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, her World and her Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985);
S. Poliakova, Zakatnye ony dni (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1983);
From Chukovskii’s account of his meeting with Oscar Wilde’s friend and executor, Robert Ross, it is clear that he simply could not understand what he called the ‘fuss’ about Wilde’s homosexuality: see K. Chukovskii, Chukkokala (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979).
V. Figner, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4 (Moscow, 1929).
See R. Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978) pp. 247–50.
See J. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985) p. 4.
N. Ia. Abramovich, Zhenshchina i mir muzhskoi kul’tury. Mirovoe tvorchestvo i polovoi vopros (Woman and the World of Male Culture: The Art of the World and the Sexual Question) (Moscow, 1913) pp. 7–8.
See A. Holt (ed. and transi.), Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai (London: Allison & Busby, 1977);
B. E. Clements, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1979);
B. Farnsworth, Aleksandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik Revolution (Stanford, Conn.: Stanford University Press, 1980);
C. Porter, Aleksandra Kollontai: A Biography (London: Virago, 1980).
Maria Botchkareva, Yashka (London: Methuen, 1919).
English translations: Selected Poetry, trans. E. Feinstein (London, Hutchinson, 1981); for critical studies in English, see S. Karlinsky, Marina Cvetaeva: Her Life and Art (Berkeley, Cal.: Berkeley University Press, 1966)
also published as Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, her World and her Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); E. Feinstein, A Captive Lion: The Life of Marina Tsvetaeva (London: Hutchinson, 1987).
See B. Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987) p. 131.
This and the next three poems are translated from M. Tsvetaeva, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (New York: Russiaca Publishers, 1980). Page numbers are in square brackets after each poem.
In Uchenova (ed.), Tsaritsy Muz, p. 384. See also S. Ia Parnok, Sobranie stikhotvorenii (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1979).
For Akhmatova’s work in translation see Poem without a Hero, trans. C. R. Proffer and A. Humesky (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1973); Anna Akhmatova: Selected Poems, trans. R. McKane (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1969). For a critical study see A. Haight, Anna Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
This and subsequent poems by Akhmatova are translated from Anna Akhmatova, Uznaiut golos moi: Stikhotvorenia. Poemy. Proza. Obraz poeta (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1989). Page numbers are in square brackets in the text.
In V. Khodasevich, Voina v russkoi lirike (Moscow, 1915). Cf. F. Sologub’s A Wife’s Words’, in which a male poet speaks in a woman’s voice. In Voina i zhenshchina (Petrograd, 1914) p. 15.
A. M. Kriukova (ed.), Perepiska A. N. Tolstogo, (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1989) vol. 1, p. 295.
Z. Gippius, Kak my voinam pisali, i chto oni nam otvechali: Kniga- podarok (Moscow, 1915).
Reprinted in Z. N. Hippius, Collected Poetical Works, ed. T. Pachmuss vol. 1: 1899–1918 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1972).
The poems have been translated from Z. N. Gippius, Poslednie Stikhi, 1914–1918 (Petersburg, 1918); reprinted in Hippius, Collected Poetical Works, vol. 1.
Z. Gippius, Siniaia kniga: Peterburgskii dnevnik, 1914–1918 (Belgrade, 1929) p. 10.
A. Radlova, Soty (Petrograd, 1917) p. 45.
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Howlett, J. (1993). ‘We’ll end in Hell, my passionate sisters’: Russian Women Poets and World War 1. In: Goldman, D. (eds) Women and World War 1. Insights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22555-2_5
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