Beth Holmgren

"... Holmgren gives a superb comparative analysis of the literary legacy of the two memoirists." —Times Literary Supplement "Beth Holmgren's book is a highly original and very productive critical appraisal of the work of Likiia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelstam." —The Russian Review "This fine book, with its copious, informative notes and good bibliography, will interest students of 20th-century literature and theorists of autobiography, feminist criticism, and gender studies."Â —Choice "... a fascinating book that provides a powerful testament to the strength and endurance of women in a particularly ghastly period of history." —Signs "... impressive, eloquently written... an integrated comparative study of two very different female survivors of the Stalinist night." —Caryl Emerson "... a bold scholarly act.... The writing is excellent throughout." —Barbara Heldt Two extraordinary women writers are evoked as models of women's heroic roles in preserving Russian culture in Stalin's time. A fresh and eloquent approach to the literature of the Stalinist age.

On Lidiia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelstam

Women's Works in Stalin's Time

Helena Goscilo

Een aantal essays over de culturele bijdrage die Russische vrouwen geleverd hebben aan de Russische beschaving. De volgende bijdragen zijn opgenomen: The second fantasy mother, or all baths are women's baths / door Nancy Condee; Keeping a-breast of the waist-land: women's fashion in early-nineteenth-century Russia / door Helena Goscilo; Female fashion, Soviet style: bodies of ideology / door Ol'ga Vainshtein; Getting under their skin: the beauty salon in Russian women's lives / door Nadezhda Azhgikhina en Helena Goscilo; Domestic porkbarreling in nineteenth-century Russia, or who holds the keys to the larder / door Darra Goldstein; The ritual fabrics of Russian village women / door Mary B. Kelly; Dirty women: cultural connotations of cleanliness in Soviet Russia / door Nadya L. Peterson; Women on the verge of new language: Russian salon hostesses in the first half of the nineteenth century / door Lina Bernstein; Stepping out/going under: women Russia's twentieth-century salons / door Beth Holmgren; Pleasure, danger, and the dance: nineteenth-century Russian variations / door Stephanie Sandler; "The incomparable" Anastasiia Vial'tsva and the culture of personality / door Louise McReynolds; Flirting with words: domestic albums, 1770-1840 / Gitta Hammarberg; Gendering the icon: marketing women writers in fin-de-siècle Russia / door Beth Holmgren; Domestic crafts and creative freedom: Russian women's art / door Alison Hilton.

Russia--women--culture

The “important . . . meticulously researched” prize-winning biography of the pre-eminent Polish star of the nineteenth century global stage (CosmopolinReview.com). In reintroducing “a little-remembered actress to a new American audience” biographer Beth Holgram delivers a revelatory portrait of Helena Modjeska—from unparalleled European success to her reign as the most acclaimed, and most recognized female celebrity in the late nineteenth-century United States. In 1876, Poland’s leading actress, Helena Modrzejewska, accompanied by her husband, the self-stylized Count Bozente, emigrated to southern California to give up her career and establish a utopian commune. In light of its failings, it hardly fulfilled the real dreams of Madame Helena. Within a year, she changed her surname to Modjeska, and made her American debut at San Francisco’s California Theatre. Godmother to Ethel Barrymore, and sharing the Shakespearian stage with such luminaries as Otis Skinner, Edwin Booth, and Maurice Barrymore, Helena Modjeska became the leading star in the United States, where she reigned for the next thirty years. In this “Impressive . . . achievement,” Holmgren traces Modjeska’s fabulous life and career from her illegitimate birth in Krakow, to her successive reinventions of herself as a trans-continental diva, and finally to her enduring legacy (Women’s Review of Books). All in all, Starring Madame Modjeska “makes for great drama” (NewPages.com).

On Tour in Poland and America

Starring Madame Modjeska

Women in Modern Polish Culture

Poles Apart

The essays in this volume seek to appreciate the literary construction of the memoir, with its dual agendas of individualized expression and reliable reportage, and explore its functions as interpretive history, social modelling, and political expression in Russian culture. The memoirs under scrutiny range widely, including those of the private person (Princess Natalia Dolgorukaia), sophisticated high culture writers (Nikolai Zabolotskii, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky), cultural critics and facilitators (Lidiia Ginzburg, Avdot'ia Panaeva), political dissidents (Evgeniia Ginzburg, Elena Bonner), and popular artists (filmmaker Elidar Riazanov). It examines each memoir for its aesthetic and rhetorical features as well as its cultural circumstances. In mapping the memoir's social and historical significance, the essays consider a wide range of influences and issues, including the specific impact of the author's class, gender, ideology, and life experience on his/her witnessing of Russian culture and society.

History and Literature

The Russian Memoir

This book examines recent innovations in Polish film. The authors analyzes the ways in which Polish directors challenge revered images of national and gender identity, the country's historical martyrdom, the benevolent family, and the status of the influential Catholic Church.

A Bold New Era in Film

Polish Cinema Today

In this ground-breaking book, Beth Holmgren examines how—in turn-of-the-century Russia and its subject, the Kingdom of Poland—capitalism affected the elitist culture of literature, publishing, book markets, and readership. Rewriting Capitalism considers how both “serious” writers and producers of consumer culture coped with the drastic power shift from “serious” literature to market-driven literature.

Literature and the Market in Late Tsarist Russia and the Kingdom of Poland

Rewriting Capitalism

Mark Lipovetsky

Yana Hashamova

Investigating the genesis of the prosecuted "crimes" and implied sins of the female performing group Pussy Riot, the most famous Russian feminist collective to date, the essays in Transgressive Women in Modern Russian and East European Cultures: From the Bad to Blasphemous examine what constitutes bad social and political behavior for women in Russia, Poland, and the Balkans, and how and to what effect female performers, activists, and fictional characters have indulged in such behavior. The chapters in this edited collection argue against the popular perceptions of Slavic cultures as overwhelmingly patriarchal and Slavic women as complicit in their own repression, contextualizing proto-feminist and feminist transgressive acts in these cultures. Each essay offers a close reading of the transgressive texts that women authored or in which they figured, showing how they navigated, targeted, and, in some cases, co-opted these obstacles in their bid for agency and power. Topics include studies of how female performers in Poland and Russia were licensed to be bad (for effective comedy and popular/box office appeal), analyses of how women in film and fiction dare sacrilegious behavior in their prescribed roles as daughters and mothers, and examples of feminist political subversion through social activism and performance art.

Beth Holmgren

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