Mariya Zhukova and Patriarchal Power

Abstract

In a sense even more fundamental than is the case for her younger contemporary, Elena Gan, Mariya Zhukova’s life¹ and works have been ‘hidden from history’. Where Mirsky makes a few rather condescending remarks about Gan, he is completely silent on the subject of her more prolific fellow writer. The situation is no better in the much more recent Cambridge History of Russian Literature of 1989 which also has not a single reference to Zhukova, although a number of minor male prosaicists of the period feature. (Richard Stites also fails to mention her.) Finally, however, this silence is ending. Zhukova’s major works have recently been republished in Russia² (rather more extensively than those of Gan, in fact), while a lengthy section on Zhukova is to be included in Catriona Kelly’s forthcoming Russian Women’s Writing 1830–1990: A History.