The Black Archipelago of Russian Literature. Russian writers were also women

The Centre de Recherches Europes-Eurasie-CREE (Inalco) is pleased to announce the publication of Catherine Géry's L'Archipel noir de la littérature russe. Russian writers were also women published by Hermann.

Presentation text

The names Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov have long been familiar to readers around the world. But who knows that these "sacred monsters" of Russian literature rubbed shoulders with talented female writers who were famous in their own time and whose works interacted with those of their male counterparts? Who knows the names of Anna Bounina, Eléna Gan, Maria Joukova, Karolina Pavlova, Nadiéjda Khvochtchinskaïa, Nadiéjda Sokhanskaïa, Olga Chapir, let alone has read them? For in 19th-century Russian literature, there is a rich but barely explored textual space, a dark continent long ignored by historiography and almost all literary institutions. The Dark Archipelago of Russian Literature invites us to (re)discover this space by exploring another possible literary past.

The book is designed according to event-based and chronological sections that map the territory occupied by women authors who published in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, respecting the archipelagic (discontinuous) rather than continental (continuous) specificity of this territory. As much informative as critical, it also offers a reflection on the mechanisms governing the writing of literary history and the processes of canonization. The Feminine Text and the analysis of the grand narrative in Russian literature are, in fact, the two blind spots in French research on Russia: by bringing together gender studies and literary, cultural, social and material history, L'Archipel noir de la littérature russe fills both a publishing void and an unthought-of gap in French Russistics. The book is aimed at teachers of Russian literature and their students, but also at all those interested in the Russian literary "great century" and the forgotten cultural production of women.

Author

Catherine Géry is a professor of Russian literature at the Institut des Langues Orientales (Inalco), specializing in the XIX^e century. She is director of the Scientific and Pedagogical Council of the InIdEx "Cité du genre" and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Slovo (Presses de l'Inalco).