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.