Women’s Writing

Polish and Russian Women’s Writing in Transformation:
Generation, National Identity and the Body

Research project funded by the Emil Aaltonen Foundation (2007-2010)

University of Tampere, School of Modern Languages and Translation Studies,
Russian Language and Culture

Since the social and political transformations of the last two decades in Central and Eastern Europe, women’s writing has become a significant cultural phenomenon in both Poland and Russia. The objective of this project is to scrutinize what kind of differences and similarities are connected to women’s writing in the two former socialist states. The project contemplates transformation, lived experience, difference and similarity in women’s writing through the concepts of body, generation and national identity.

Themes
East European cultural identities and comparative approach; construction of female identity and culture in two of the former socialist countries; “East” and “West” in Poland and in Russia; methodological challenges of scholarship on women’s writing and women’s literary history.

Members of the Project and Titles of Research
Urszula Chowaniec, Poland: Ruined Bodies: Polish Women’s Writing and
Feminist Cultural Pessimism (1930s and 1990s)
contact: ursula.chowaniec at uta.fi
Nadezhda Pavlova, Russia: Women’s Novel of the 1870s-90s in Russia
contact: nadezhda_pavlova at mail.ru
Kirsi Kurkijärvi, Finland: Russian Women’s Writing on the Second World War
contact: kirsi.raisala at uta.fi
Marja Rytkönen, Director of the Project, Finland: Generation and Memory in Russian Women’s Writing of the 1990s-2000s
contact: marja.rytkonen at uta.fi

Research team
Arja Rosenholm, Co-director, Professor of Russian Language and Culture,
University of Tampere, Finland
Evgenia Stroganova, Professor of History of Russian Literature,
University of Tver’, Russia
Irina Savkina, Docent, Lecturer in Russian Language and Culture,
University of Tampere, Finland
Jerzy Jarzebski, Professor of Polish Literature, Jagiellonian University,
Krakow, Poland
Grazyna Borkowska, Professor, Institute of Literary Research,
Polish Academy of Science
Małgorzata Anna Packalen, Professor of Polish, University of Uppsala,
Sweden
Ursula Phillips, School of Slavonic and East European Studies,
University College London