ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a typology of translations by Russian women, viewing them as a professional activity that appeared in a specific cultural context. It highlights the further development of Russian women's writing as a distinctive professional activity, tying the fate of Russian women writers of later periods to the works and fates of their eighteenth-century predecessors. For the majority of educated women in eighteenth-century Russia, translation proved to be the shortest and often the only way into literature hence becoming the only possible form of literary activity. Translation was regarded both by society and by translators themselves as a female "leisure" activity alongside a number of obligatory pastimes of educated women, the list of which was rather rigidly defined by their domestic and social duties. By turning to translation, however, educated women acquired the opportunity to escape this "vicious circle," entering the male-dominated literary society of the time, thus considerably changing their status in their own and in society's estimation.
