This article reviews the evolution of toska in eighteenth-century literary discourse to demonstrate this sentiment's profound connection with notions of femininity. That century's use of toska culminates in Aleksandra Xvostova's then popular Otryvki (Fragments, 1796), the emotional emphases of which were one of the reasons for its success. In fact, we argue that Russian women's writing contains a tradition of emotional expression that is lexically distinct from the male tradition. Xvostova’s emphatic and reiterative use of toska participates in a larger debate about gender and the 'ownership' of personal emotions and it was relevant to literary arguments about "feminization" that involved writers such as Nikolaj Karamzin and Vasilij Zukovskij, but also a number of women authors (e.g. Ekaterina Urusova, Anna Turčaninova, Elizaveta Dolgorukova, Anna Volkova), whose work asserts the right of the female subject to both suffer strong emotion and to express it.
University of Genoa, Italy - ORCID: 0000-0002-8333-0528
Titolo del capitolo
Aleksandra Xvostova, Nikolaj Karamzin and the Gendering of Toska
Autori
Sara Dickinson
Lingua
English
DOI
10.36253/978-88-6655-822-4.03
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Anno di pubblicazione
2015
Copyright
© 2015 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Titolo del libro
Melancholic Identities, Toska and Reflective Nostalgia
Sottotitolo del libro
Case Studies from Russian and Russian-Jewish Culture
Curatori
Sara Dickinson, Laura Salmon
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Numero di pagine
194
Anno di pubblicazione
2015
Copyright
© 2015 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Editore
Firenze University Press
DOI
10.36253/978-88-6655-822-4
ISBN Print
978-88-6655-821-7
eISBN (pdf)
978-88-6655-822-4
eISBN (xml)
978-88-9273-384-8
Collana
Biblioteca di Studi Slavistici
ISSN della collana
2612-7687
e-ISSN della collana
2612-7679