The University of Wisconsin Press

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Russian & Slavic Studies / Literature & Criticism / Women’s Studies

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The Prose of Life Russian Women Writers from Khrushchev to Putin Benjamin M. Sutcliffe Voted one of the Outstanding Academic Titles of 2009 by Choice magazine “Sutcliffe lifts women’s writing out of a category to which it was long consigned and shows how their works, grounded in everyday life, address larger issues in Soviet and post-Soviet society that transcend the gender divisions within Russian and Soviet literature.” —Adele Barker, University of Arizona Both before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, everyday life and the domestic sphere served as an ideological battleground, simultaneously threatening Stalinist control and challenging traditional Russian gender norms that had been shaken by the Second World War. The Prose of Life examines how six female authors employed images of daily life to depict women’s experience in Russian culture from the 1960s to the present. Byt, a term connoting both the everyday and its many petty problems, is an enduring yet neglected theme in Russian literature: its very ordinariness causes many critics to ignore it. Benjamin Sutcliffe’s study is the first sustained examination of how and why everyday life as a literary and philosophical category catalyzed the development of post-Stalinist Russian women’s prose, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union. A focus on the representation of everyday life in women’s prose reveals that a first generation of female writers (Natal’ia Baranskaia, Irina Grekova) both legitimized and limited their successors (Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Tat’iana Tolstaia, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and Svetlana Vasilenko) in their choice of literary topics. The Prose of Life traces the development, and intriguing ruptures, of recent Russian women’s prose, becoming a must-read for readers interested in Russian literature and gender studies. Benjamin M. Sutcliffe is assistant professor of Russian at Miami University, Ohio. For more information regarding publicity and reviews contact our publicity manager, phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu Of related interest: Beyond the Flesh Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation of Sex Jenifer Presto "An entirely new and highly productive approach to the study of Symbolist mythologies."—Catherine Ciepiela, author of The Same Solitude: Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva

April 2009 LC: 2008039543 PG 224 pp.  6 x 9 Paper $26.95 s ISBN 978-0-299-23204-7 e-book $16.95 s ISBN 978-0-299-23203-0   Adobe Digital Edition (PDF) About our e-books Printing and cut/paste allowed, access on six different devices. ADD TO CART       Click here for a further explanation of the shopping cart feature. “A significant contribution to Slavic women’s studies. Sutcliffe’s nuanced chronological overview is unmatched for this topic, and his excellent close readings yield many valuable insights.”—Natasha Kolchevska, University of New Mexico   MELLON SLAVIC STUDIES INITIATIVE This book is the first to appear in a five-year initiative for publishing first books by scholars in the fields of Slavic and Eastern European Studies, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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