The Wives

Alexandra Popoff

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781639361328
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Literature

Many readers may know that such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence used their marriages for literary inspiration and material. In Russian literary marriages, these women did not resent taking a secondary position, although to call their position secondary does not do justice to the vital role these women played in the creation of some of the greatest literary works in history. From Sofia Tolstoy to Vera Nabokov and Elena Mandelshtam and Natalya Solzhenitsyn, these women ranged from stenographers and typists to editors, researchers, translators, and even publishers. Living under restrictive regimes, many of these women battled censorship and preserved the writers' illicit archives, often risking their own lives to do so. They established a tradition all their own, unmatched in the West.Many of these women, like Vera and Sofia, were the writers' intellectual companions and willingly contributed to the creative process—they commonly used the word "we" to describe the progress of their husbands' work. And their husbands knew it too. Leo Tolstoy made no secret of Sofia's involvement in War and Peace, and Vladimir Nabokov referred to Vera as his own "single shadow."

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• A Note on Russian Names
• Prologue
• CHAPTER ONE: Anna Dostoevsky: Cherishing a Memory
• CHAPTER TWO: Sophia Tolstoy: Nursemaid of Talent
• CHAPTER THREE: Nadezhda Mandelstam: Witness to Poetry
• CHAPTER FOUR: Véra Nabokov: Making a Single Shadow
• CHAPTER FIVE: Elena Bulgakov: Mysterious Margarita
• CHAPTER SIX: Natalya Solzhenitsyn: “Sister of My Work”
• Epilogue
• Endnotes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright Page