Authors

Veselina Dzhumbeva¹;  ¹ Queen Mary University of London, UK

Discussion

According to Denise Riley, a dichotomy existed in the approaches toward the woman’s position in interwar societies, with one strategy ‘insisting on [the women’s] differences from men’ and the other presenting ‘an egalitarian emphasis, which defused difference to seek parity’¹. These two approaches are best represented in the Parisian diaspora by Zinaida Gippius and Ekaterina Bakunina. The former was fundamental in untangling the image of the woman from that of the muse during the Silver Age and thus, affording the woman a position amongst the poets. Yet, in her later years, she completely distanced herself from what she considered to be ‘women’s writing’. Bakunina, on the other hand, engaged extensively with gender topics in her poetry and prose which were highly subjective, written in the first person and featured a woman narrator, yet her works often fell into the pit of generalizing the woman’s experience. In this paper, I will be exploring Gippius’ and Bakunina’s opinions on general topics such as motherhood, women’s sexuality and equality as well as on issues particular to their time, e.g. the question of readership or each other's works with the aim to determine which of the two authors deserves the title ‘the first feminist’ of the First Wave of émigrés.

1. Denise Riley, Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1998), p. 59.