Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
The idea that women had a significant and specifically feminine contribution to make to Russian poetry was a recurring theme among early twentieth-century literary critics. One of the most striking claims came from Nadezhda L'vova, a poet herself, who predicted that “the twentieth century will probably be known to history as the ‘women's century,’ the century which saw the awakening of woman's creative self-awareness.” Indeed, by about 1910 women poets had begun to win recognition from both readers and reviewers on an unprecedented scale. The early 1920s in particular were a time of considerable achievement and promise. Women who had already established their reputations before the 1917 October Revolution were publishing some of their best work, and had been joined by talented newcomers. Judging by the amount and quality of poetry by women being published towards the end of the 1920s, however, things were starting to look rather different. Some women had stopped writing poetry altogether, and turned to other fields such as journalism or translation. Some had emigrated. Many found that they were no longer able to publish their work, and fell silent, or wrote “for the desk drawer.” Almost a quarter of a century later, at the time of Stalin's death in 1953, few of the women who had emerged onto the scene before the late 1920s had managed to publish significant amounts of their work in the Soviet Union.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.