Only Among Womenreveals how the idea of a community of women as a social sphere ostensibly free from the taint of money, sex, or self-interest originated in the classic Russian novel, fueled mystical notions of unity in turn-of-the-century modernism, and finally assumed a privileged place in Stalinist culture, especially cinema.
Only Among Womeninvestigates the idea of women’s community—a utopian women’s sphere ostensibly free from the taint of money, sex, or self-interest—in Russian literature and culture from the age of the classic Russian novel to socialist realism and Stalinist film.
ANNE EAKIN MOSSis an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University.
Introduction
1. Rational
2. Organic
3. Inoperative
4. Erotic
5. Bolshevik
Epilogue: Traumatic
Notes
Bibliography
Index
“This book is a fascinating, mature, and thoughtful study of the ways in which women characters and women’s communities figure in the Russian imagination. It demonstrates how central women and the idea of women have been to the ways primarily male Russian writers, thinkers, and film directors have conceived of society across almost a century.” —Angela Brintlinger, author of W
riting a Usable Past: Russian Literary Culture, 1917–1937"This extraordinarily erudite and insightful book provides a new understanding of one of the crucial Russian cultural topoi. From Chernyshevsky and Tolstoy in the 1860s to Soviet cinema of the 1930s, idealized women’s community has often been viewed as an emblem of humanity and a paradigmatic embodiment of the so-called 'Russian Idea.' However, as Eakin Moss demonstrates, the age of modernism yielded an alternative vision of womanhood, one stripped of idealistic belief in the essenlƒƒ
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