ABSTRACT

In readership and critical response, Valeriia Narbikova, Nina Sadur, and Liudmila Petrushevskaia were amongst the most prominent writers of the decade from the mid-1980s onwards. Their prominence can be explained by various factors, including the fact that each appeared to articulate the social anxieties of the transition to post-communist Russia of the end of the 1990s, particularly in their shared preoccupations with interrogating prescribed boundaries of identity. By formally working within the tradition she revealed its epistemological foundations from within, and demonstrated both thematically and structurally the ways in which naturalism creates a contract based upon the expectation of revelation of truth and knowledge between reader and text. This so-called movements explicit claim to innovation and rejection of all previous tradition were made on the basis of a derogation of women and the female. Viewed through the prism of identity, then, each writer examined in this study occupies very different positions.