Nadezhda Khvoschinskaya's "Ursa Major": Poetics and Reception

The present research belongs to studies of Russian women literature in the spheres of literary history and feminist literary criticism. It is aimed to investigating works excluded from Russian literary canon and history. Therefore, the general purpose of this paper is to describe and examine the poetics and reception of a forgotten novel Ursa Major (Bolʹshaia Medveditsa) written by a realist writer Nadezhda Khvoschinskaia (who wrote under the name “V. Krestovskii”). Khvoschinskaia’s dedication to realist gendered narration, and her partnership with Mikhail Stasyulevich enabled Ursa Major’s popularity in line with prominent political, social and aesthetic tendencies of the 1860s and the 1870s (especially with young radicals) and thus pushed her forward, a bit closer to the centre of the literary field, possibly for the first time in her career.