No Good without Reward: Selected Writings: A Bilingual Edition (Volume 13) (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series)

A female contemporary of Alexander Pushkin, Liubov Krichevskaya makes her Anglophone debut in an excellent translation of her fiction, drama, and poetry, which deftly capture women’s estate in the early nineteenth century. Krichevskaya intriguingly combines Sentimentalist preoccupations—sensibility, virtue, and men’s moral reformation through confrontation with exemplary women’s passive piety—with the uncontrollable passions and volatile hero popularized by the Byronic strain of Romanticism. Her gynocentric texts poignantly convey the stringent limitations imposed upon women’s agency by a society that paradoxically credited them with the seemingly limitless capacity to exert a civilizing influence as icons of probity. Readers acquainted with Rousseau, Richardson, and Goethe will discover familiar feminized turf, but cultivated in a Russian vein. —Helena Goscilo Chair and Professor of Slavic, The Ohio State University This English and Russian volume presents selected works of Liubov Krichevskaya (b. 1800), arguably the first professional woman of letters in Ukraine. At times hopeful, at times despairing, her literature explores themes of women's agency in society, both reflecting on and exploring women's opportunities and limitations and referencing women authors of her time. Including dramas, novellas, lyric poetry, and an epistolary novel, her oeuvre offers critical observations that reflect the philosophy of Sentimentalism. "[Krichevskaya's] texts poignantly convey the stringent limitations imposed upon women's agency by a society that paradoxically credited them with the seemingly limitless capacity to exert a civilizing influence as icons of probity. Readers acquainted with Rousseau, Richardson, and Goethe will dis-cover familiar feminized turf but cultivated in a Russian vein." - Helena Goscilo, Chair and Professor of Slavic, The Ohio State University Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State Unievrsity, where he teaches in the master's and doctoral programs in translation. He has published widely on issues of gender and sexuality in Russian culture and has translated literary and scholarly works from Russian by such authors as Sergei Dovlatov, Mikhail Zhvanetsky, and Yuri Lotman. Cover Title Page Contents Acknowledgments Introduction The Other Voice The Historical Context Biography and Works Analysis of Krichevskaya’s Works Conclusion Preface To My Readers [Foreword to My Moments of Leisure] Several Excerpts from a Journal Dedicated to My Friends My Comments A Plan for a Temple of Love in the Heart Thoughts Blind Mother, or The Reward of Virtue Tested; A Drama in Three Acts No Good without Reward; A Comedy in Three Acts Two Novellas Corinna Emma Count Gorsky, a Novel Selected Poetry To Rtishchev (1817) To a Frame without a Picture (1817) A White Sheet of Paper (1817) On the Militia of 1812 (1817) The Dniepr. May 25, Evening (1817) To Gr——ry F——ch Kv——ka in Answer to His Verses of September 17 (1817) Another Song (1817) Truth (1817) In Answer to the Question: Why Do I Sleep So Much? (1817) From the Banks of the Ternovka (1824) Bibliography Index