The Woman of Modernity: Gender in Russian Culture 1890–1930 (Zhenshchina Moderna)

The period from the 1890s to the 1930s in Russia was a time of fundamental transformation, from the social and political structure to aesthetic attitudes in art. This affected both the social status of women and the forms of their representation in literature. Art Nouveau culture actively experimented with gender roles and the concept of androgyny, and the number of female authors who emerged in the early 20th century is incomparable to previous periods in the history of Russian literature. This collective monograph focuses on a turning point in art history, when the representation of feminine and masculine as normative canons of the established gender order coexisted with a shift beyond these canons and the destruction of this order. The articles included in the monograph offer an examination of Russian modernism in a gender dimension, still new to Russian scholarship. They raise questions about the phenomenon of female authorship, the male perspective on the “women’s question,” and the transformation of female and male images in works of art in the context of changing boundaries of gender norms.