No Good without Reward Selected Writings: A Bilingual Edition

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 womens estate in the early nineteenth century. Krichevskaya intriguingly combines Sentimentalist preoccupationssensibility, virtue, and mens moral reformation through confrontation with exemplary womens passive pietywith the uncontrollable passions and volatile hero popularized by the Byronic strain of Romanticism. Her gynocentric texts poignantly convey the stringent limitations imposed upon womens 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