New books about what it’s like to be a woman – Weekend – Kommersant
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Barbara Engel Women in Russia. 1700–2000″
publishing house Bibliorossika
Translation Olga Poley
The American historian Barbara Engel sets herself a rather ambitious task: to briefly outline the history of Russian women over three centuries – from the era on the eve of Peter’s reforms to the present day. More precisely, yesterday: the English original came out in 2004 – before the feminist wave of the 2010s, and Russia here seems to be a territory that modern Western feminism has not quite reached yet. Engel presents the direction of his research as a shestory – history, rewritten so that the main characters are women. The plots here, in general, are clear: the arrival of European customs in Russia and their influence on the traditional way of life, women’s activism of the 19th century – from charity to terrorism, revolutionary emancipation of the 1920s and its conservative folding in the Stalin era, women of the colonial outskirts of the Russian-Soviet empire , the late Soviet crisis, perestroika perturbations, their impact on the gender policy of the state and the mores of society. This is not to say that Women in Russia is a particularly profound or groundbreaking study, but it is an intelligent compendium.
Kristin Sparrow “The Possessed”
publishing house UFO
Translation Alena Fomenko
Kristin Vorobets is a longtime co-author and colleague of Barbara Engel, but the fact that their books appeared in Russian almost simultaneously is an accident. The 2003 monograph Vorobets is dedicated to Russian hysterics – women possessed by demons. The first mention of them dates back to the 9th century, but hysterics became a truly mass phenomenon already in the modernizing Russian Empire. In contrast to the revered foolishness, frightening hysteria was precisely a female phenomenon. Sparrow avoids talking about him as a disease. Hypocrisy interests her as a kind of social drama, played out according to certain rules. In addition to the obsessed peasant women themselves, their loved ones, their persecutors and saviors, a variety of social forces take part in this drama: the state with its disciplinary apparatus, the church seeking to maintain power over spiritual life, ethnographers studying traditional beliefs, psychiatrists trying to redefine hysteria in in medical terms, and finally, Russian writers – Leskov, Dostoevsky and others – romanticizing obsession in their own way and translating it into the space of high culture. Despite the pathos of attention to women’s experience, Vorobets’ book is not without the exoticization of outlandish Russian life – but its material itself is certainly curious.
Nina Agisheva “Frankenstein and his women”
publishing house AST: Editorial by Elena Shubina
Nina Agisheva is a prose writer, theater critic, and author of a biography of Charlotte Bronte. Her new book consists of the lives of five English women of the Romantic era, whose fates are closely intertwined. This is the writer and thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the first European feminists, her daughter Mary Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein (most of the book is dedicated to her), Fanny Imlay, Mary’s illegitimate sister, who committed suicide at a young age, Harriet Westbrook – Percy’s first wife Bysshe Shelley, from whom he left for Mary, and Claire Clairmont, Mary’s half-sister, Shelley’s close friend and Byron’s lover. Frankenstein and His Women is written in a style reminiscent of Caravan of Stories, only for the more intelligent reader. Agisheva uses sources, but often gives free rein to her imagination: she writes letters and diaries for her heroines, reconstructs their feelings. She is interested in fatal passions, irresistible attraction, tragic doom and proud challenges to fate. The romantic era provides ideal material here, but her heroines in Agisheva’s description still look too modern people.
Paulina Bren “Barbizon”
publishing house RIPOL classic
Translation Anna Loginova
Paulina Bren’s book is a story about the social and cultural history of the last century through the fate of one building. The protagonist here is the New York Hotel Barbizon. Built in 1927, this hotel was intended only for young single women. Girls from all over America came here to conquer the metropolis – secretaries and models, future actresses and writers. Among the guests of the Barbizon were Sylvia Plath, Grace Kelly, Rita Hayworth, Molly Brown – the famous surviving passenger of the Titanic. However, Bren tells not only about them, but also about hundreds of unknown girls – who came and went, who lived in a hotel for several days or many years. “Barbizon” in her book is the stage on which the formation of the modern American woman unfolds. She traces the story from the Roaring Twenties, through the Great Depression, through the McCarthy reaction, all the way to the modern era, when the hotel has become an ordinary luxury residence, but a few rooms are still inhabited by emancipation veterans. Bren writes in a popular way, but without any vulgarity, which is not very common.
Milana Logunova “Fact”
publishing house individual
The book by journalist Milana Logunova is not only about women, but it presents a feminine, emphatically feminist view of sex. Logunova is interested in everything that is new and strange in sex. In terms of genre, “Fact” is something between an anthropological study, a brutal gonzo reportage about the life of various freaks, and a quivering auto-fiction prose dedicated to the study of one’s own sexuality. These seemingly polar ways of writing – supposedly “male” and supposedly “female” – successfully converge here. Logunova attends kinky parties and sits on all sorts of forums, gets a slave and goes to tantric massage, gets acquainted with adherents of Slavic polygamy and petplay (people whose main pleasure is to portray dogs), explores the world of polyamers and other new forms of cohabitation. In general, Fact is a hymn to sexual diversity and sex-positive culture. Logunova knows that her book comes out in dark times, when questions of carnal love experiments are far from being in the forefront. Nevertheless, she considers sexual emancipation to be one of the engines of social progress and sincerely believes in its transformative power.
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