The University of Wisconsin Press

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


 

The Prose of Life
Russian Women Writers from Khrushchev
to Putin
Benjamin M. Sutcliffe


“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, Chris Caldwell, phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu

 
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.

Of related interest
Beyond the Flesh
Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation of Sex
Jenifer Presto

Though the Russian symbolist movement was concerned with transcending sex, many of the writers exhibited an intense preoccupation with gender and the body. Beyond the Flesh documents the often unexpected form that this obsession took in the life and art of these two important writers.

Published January 2009
LC: 2008011968 PG   376 pp.  6 x 9   4 b/w illus.  
ISBN 978-0-299-22950-4   Cloth

The cover of Sutcliffe's book is a black and white photo of a woman before a typewriter, surrounded and pinned down by kids.

April 2009
LC: 2008039543 PG
224 pp. 6 x 9
ISBN 978-0-299-23204-7
Paper $26.95 s

This is our e-book logo. It is green and represents an open book, with an e rising from it. ISBN 978-0-299-23203-0
e-book $26.95 s





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“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

 

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Updated July 27, 2009

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