ABSTRACT
Around the mid-nineteenth century, a number of Russian women writers made the Russian landscape figure prominently in their works and placed heroines in the country. In digressions on the countryside, in plots, and especially in choosing provincial heroines to be writers, poets, and narrators, they represented themselves as provincial women writers. This phenomenon, which has been dubbed “the provincial tale” (Kelly 1994: 60), cannot and should not simply be explained as a question of provenance. Although most began their lives in provincial towns and cities, at least half later lived and wrote in either Moscow or St Petersburg, often moving back and forth between city and country. This subtle dissonance between these writers’ actual as opposed to literary lives, aside from once again reminding us not to read writers’ (especially women’s) lives directly into their works, reveals two things: the constructed nature of their self-representations and, indirectly, the pressing problem for Russian women writers of how in fact to formulate their literary identity.
