St Petersburg полностью

The education level of Russian women was rising, and their economic independence was becoming stronger accordingly; this naturally led to an increase in the number of women as a significant segment of the reading public. And that trend was confirmed by various reader surveys: there were many women subscribers to public and private libraries and they were increasingly buying newspapers, journals, and books.

In Petersburg many magazines appeared that targeted a specifically female audience. Among them were Zhenskii vestnik (Woman’s Herald) and Damskii listok (Ladies’ Sheet). The weekly Zhenshchina (Woman), in content and form similar to the popular Ogonyok (with the subtitle Mother—Citizen—Wife—Housewife), had departments like Women in the Arts, Women’s Creativity, Famous Actresses, For Mothers About Children, Woman-Citizen, The Elegant Woman, Women of the World, Women in New Roles, Famous Contemporary Women, Women and Humor. The publishers may still have made sarcastic remarks about “reading ladies,” but they had to take the sizable group of potential customers into account.

One of the first and most striking examples of that audience’s economic power came in 1909, when The Keys of Happiness, a novel by the then little-known writer Anastasia Verbitskaya, sold thirty thousand copies in four months, creating the terms “women’s genre” and “women’s novel” in Russia. Verbitskaya, who had gone all the way from copy editor of a newspaper to author of the number-one best-seller, now wrote novels filled with vivid adventures of passionate and talented women of the artistic milieu.

Exalted in tone, Verbitskaya’s colorful potboilers, openly propagandizing leftist and feminist views, elicited extremely hostile reviews from the same critics who had patronizingly patted her on the back before the phenomenal success of The Keys of Happiness. In the newspaper Rech (Speech), the ubiquitous Chukovsky, admitting that “our young people are crowding after Mrs. Verbitskaya,” still proclaimed that this was literature “for urban savages.”40

Such scorn did not diminish Verbitskaya’s popularity—on the contrary. Her novels continued to sell in huge quantities and spawned numerous imitations. Verbitskaya, a socialist by conviction and a civic activist by temperament, became chairwoman of the Society for the Betterment of Women’s Condition and energetically helped other women writers. In the 1910s their position grew considerably stronger and women’s names ceased to be a rarity among best-selling authors. Eudoxia Nagrodskaya’s erotic novel, Wrath of Dionysus, with its typically “women’s genre” artist heroine and advocacy of free love, went through ten printings in just a few years. Lydia Charskaya and Klavdia Lukashevich (the latter became the newborn Dmitri Shostakovich’s godmother in September 1906 and inculcated a love of reading in little Dmitri) were among the most popular names in contemporary fiction. In the 1940s, when Boris Pasternak was working on his novel, Doctor Zhivago, he said that he was “writing almost like Charskaya,” because he wanted to be accessible and dreamed that his prose would be gulped down, “even by a seamstress, even by a dishwasher.”41

Russian women poets had reached a mass audience even earlier. After the Boer War of 1899-1902, organ grinders in every Petersburg courtyard played the touching song “Transvaal, Transvaal, my dear country, you are in flames!” The words of this moving, sentimental ballad, which became a folk song, were written by Glafira Galina, a thirty-year-old poet. Even now I can’t listen to it without the threat of tears. Another of her poems, “The forest is being cut down—the young, tender-green forest,” an allegorical description of the tsarist repressions of students, elicited “delight and tears,” Mikhail Kuzmin said, when it was read in public and prompted the authorities to exile Galina from Petersburg. So when her collection of poems, Predawn Songs, came out in 1906, it sold five thousand copies, a healthy sale for poetry.