In the context of Russia’s current war against Ukraine, a war that for many people has trampled hope for a progressive post-Soviet Russian state, this talk examines the ways that various stakeholders in both Russian and Ukrainian writing cultures feel and think about contested space in eastern Ukraine. This contemporary “literary war” pits officially supported Russian rhetoric against non-official Russian writing, while Russian-Ukrainian and Ukrainian-language writing offer geo-emotional sensibilities strikingly different from the Russian ones. Drawing context from my book, Shredding the Map: Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia (2024), I compare patterns of imagined geography on the borderlands between Russia and Ukraine in two turbulent times, the revolutionary era of a century ago and the Ukrainian war of independence in our own time. Focusing on the steppe region where the heaviest fighting persists, I investigate whether and how those perceptions of place have developed and changed—which perceptions live on, and which are fresh and new. This discussion will bring into relief the deep contrast of perceptions between contemporary “neo- tsarist” Russian imagined geography and the visceral energy of Ukrainian writing about being “in their place.” The stakes could not be higher. We are watching a nation long suppressed now effectively asserting its voice and its place.

Edith W. Clowes (PhD, Slavic, Yale U.) is the Brown-Forman Professor Emerita in the Humanities at the University of Virginia and Professor Emerita at the University of Kansas. At both universities she taught Russian and Czech language, literature, and culture. Her research interests span intellectual history, utopian thought, and literary cartography. She is the author, co-author, or co-editor of sixteen books, multi-authored volumes, special journal forums, translations, and the major website and database, “Mapping Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia (1914–1922).” Her recent book, Shred- ding the Map: Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia, 1914–1922 (2024), deploys digitally generated maps and graphs to analyze patterns of place identity among revolution-era writers.

This introduction to the cluster “Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya in Her Third Century” takes stock of Khvoshchinskaya’s status as she enters her third century. It begins with a brief overview of her biography and literary career, drawing attention to the complicated issue of naming for a woman who used nineteen different signatures—both male and female—across her lifetime. Having established how highly she was regarded by her contemporaries, the introduction then explores the reasons for Khvoshchinskaya’s virtual disappearance from literary history and the process of rehabilitating her legacy that is currently underway. The introduction closes with an overview of the three articles included in the cluster, each of which addresses a different aspect of Khvoshchinskaya’s writing career: her novella written in Onegin stanzas, the creation of her literary persona in the French press, and her relationship to money in both her life and works.

Anna A. Berman is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare College. She is the author of The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800–1880 (2022) and Siblings in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: The Path to Universal Brotherhood (2015), and editor of Tolstoy in Context (2022). She is currently on a Leverhulme Mid-Career Fellowship working on the first biography of Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya (1821–89).

This essay compares Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya’s 1853 Onegin-stanza novella A Country Incident (Derevenskii sluchai) with Alexander Pushkin’s 1823–31 Evgenii Onegin. Using formal poetics analysis and tools laid out by Mikhail Gasparov and Michael Wachtel; drawing on scholarship on gender, genre and narrative arc by Diana Greene, Monika Greenleaf and others; and juxtaposing the two texts with close readings, I argue that Khvoshchinskaya’s novella pays the necessary toll of tribute to secure the right to deploy the Onegin-stanza form but ultimately uncouples that form from its semantic aura. The resulting counter-narrative is full of innovations: a chatty narrator whose gender is indeterminate, an implied reader whose gender is either indeterminate or female, and a female hero who first reads and then talks her way into prevailing. Thus, Khvoshchinskaya, the only woman poet to write an Onegin-stanza text, re-shapes a poetic form with a more woman-friendly narrative.

Romy Taylor wrote her dissertation on Golden Age poetry, which was followed by publications on the nineteenth-century writers Karolina Pavlova and Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, as well as on teaching Eugene Onegin to undergraduates. A recipient of SSRC, ACTR, Wilson Center, and NEA grants for her poetry work, she is also working on a second project on African Americans in Stalin’s Soviet Union, which is supported by a Fulbright research year in Moscow. She teaches secondary math in Los Angeles.

This article traces the publishing history and critical reception of the first French translations of Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya in the 1880s. It examines how her authorial identity was constructed in France through the work of translators, critics, and publishers—particularly Victor Derély and the Plon publishing house. By situating this reception within the broader rise of Russian literature in France, prior to the dominance of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the study highlights the aesthetic and gendered stakes of literary mediation. Drawing on press reviews and editorial strategies, the article shows how Khvoshchinskaya’s image was shaped, disseminated, and integrated into debates about French Naturalism, revealing a broader process of “making the foreign writer.”

Polina de Mauny is a comparative literature scholar specializing in Franco-Russian literary history and cultural transfer. She received her PhD from Sorbonne Nouvelle with a dissertation on the editorial strategies of Ivan Turgenev, Marko Vovchok, and Pierre-Jules Hetzel. She is an associated researcher at Eur’Orbem (Sorbonne Université) and founder of Éditions Tourgueneff, an independent press dedicated to Russophone literature in exile and literary translation. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century literary circulation, women’s writing, translation networks, and the sociology of literature. She has published articles on Franco-Russian literary relations and is currently working on the reception of Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya in France.

Money is a fascinating and underexplored topic in Russian literature; it exists both everywhere and nowhere. Lev Tolstoy touched on the paradoxes of money in his diary early in his career: “It’s strange that we all conceal the fact that one of the mainsprings of our life is money, as though it were shameful.” Tolstoy’s most fraught money matters concerned his income from publications and land, which was inextricably connected with serfdom. These particular money matters linked the lives, works, and characters of many Russian writers—most of whom were hereditary nobles—whether or not they owned serfs. When we examine the network of money, publications, land, and serfdom in the fiction by Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, they serve as a window onto this essential yet shadowy background to Russian literature and literary life. Indeed, Khvoshchinskaya treated noblewomen (as well as men) extensively in these financial networks, exposing not only their selflessness and vulnerability, but also their financial treachery and tyranny, especially within families. Throughout her career, Khvoshchinskaya painted a complex moral picture of the responsibilities of Russia’s service nobility, including women, at the helm of a serf economy before and after the limited emancipation of the serfs in 1861.

Hilde Hoogenboom of Arizona State University is an expert on Catherine the Great’s memoirs, which she co-translated from French (Modern Library, Penguin Random House, 2005); they have sold over 17,000 copies. Her publications include Noble Sentiment and the Rise of Russian Novels: A European Literary History, supported by the National Humanities Center and Social Sciences Research Council; with Anna A. Berman and Nora Favorov, a co-edited translation of Khvoshchinskaya’s The Brother at Oxford World’s Classics (2026) and a forthcoming volume, The Khvoshchinskaya Sisters; their archival letters (2001); and an edited volume (2008) and over two dozen articles on Russian women writers.

In the history of Russian poetry the rise of the Symbolist movement in the 1890s is often seen as a watershed representing a break with the dominant utilitarian and sentimentalist trends of the 1870s and 1880s, of which Semën Nadson was a leading proponent. Symbolism’s rediscovery of worlds beyond day-to-day reality, informed not only by French models, but also by German idealist philosophy and the ideas of Nietzsche, is seen to exercise a new and profound influence across the entire literary space and prepare the ground for a vibrant and evolving modernism. Certainly, Symbolist theories and practice led to a major revalorization of poetic language, which was a secondary focus for many poets of the 1870s and 1880s, and Symbolist writers later often denounced the shortcomings of their predecessors. However, taking the last quarter of the nineteenth-century as a whole, it is possible to discern marked thematic and compositional continuities between writers of different orientations. These include a firm belief in the role of the poet as leader and educator, a neoromantic emphasis on personal emotion and self-discovery accompanied by the projection of personal experience on to a universalist plane, and the continuation of certain literary models and tropes.

David N. Wells has written widely on Russian and English-language verse, with a particular interest in Symbolist and Post-Symbolist aesthetics and poetic practice. His publications include Anna Akhmatova: Her Poetry (Berg, 1996) as well as articles on Merezhkovskii, Bal′mont, Bely, and the Australian poet A.D. Hope. An additional interest in cultural relations between Russian and Japan has produced two major outputs: Russian Views of Japan, 1792–1913 (Routledge, 2004) and The Russian Discovery of Japan, 1670–1800 (Routledge, 2019). Until 2024 he was Deputy Director at Curtin University Library in Perth, Western Australia

Nikolai Leskov (1831–95) is generally counted as a writer belonging to the literary tradition of realism, but what are we to make of all the references to the divine, spiritual, and supernatural found in his 1873 short story “The Sealed Angel”? Leskov’s story, especially with its peculiar denouement that famously frustrated his co-religionist Fyodor Dostoevsky, can be read as a candid exposition of the paradoxes inherent to the realist genre, which supposedly strives for objectivity but inevitably always falls short of it. Due to their very nature, objects of religious faith are particularly sus- ceptible to manipulation via forgeries, self-interest, and credulity. In this realist tale about an angel icon and its mystification, Leskov is in fact demonstrating a method for differentiating legitimate objects of faith from their false surrogates. Concentrating on three pairings of objects of religious faith found in the story—canonical and schismatic communities of belief, bodiless and embodied angels, and explicable and inexplicable miracles—this article argues that the theology and history of icons in Orthodox Christianity serve as a potent hermeneutical key for solving some of the most puzzling riddles Leskov leaves his readers in “The Sealed Angel.”

Melvin Thomas is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. His research interests include the intersection of Russian Orthodoxy and Russian literature and poetry, Slavophilism, and Eurasianism. He is writing a dissertation examining the development of “religious patriotism” in the thought of Viacheslav Ivanov and Georges Florovsky amid their respective experiences of emigrating to the West after the fall of the Russian Empire.