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
Chapter Title
Aleksandra Xvostova, Nikolaj Karamzin and the Gendering of Toska
Authors
Sara Dickinson
Language
English
DOI
10.36253/978-88-6655-822-4.03
Peer Reviewed
Publication Year
2015
Copyright Information
© 2015 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
Book Title
Melancholic Identities, Toska and Reflective Nostalgia
Book Subtitle
Case Studies from Russian and Russian-Jewish Culture
Editors
Sara Dickinson, Laura Salmon
Peer Reviewed
Number of Pages
194
Publication Year
2015
Copyright Information
© 2015 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
Publisher Name
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
Series Title
Biblioteca di Studi Slavistici
Series ISSN
2612-7687
Series E-ISSN
2612-7679