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 Writing 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 essential goodness of the 'eternal feminine' and reduced to immanence. Understanding Russian thought, culture, and politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries requires a thorough comprehension of both the idealistic and the modernist paradigms in a variety of dialectical permutations. Ambitious, well researched, and elegantly written, Eakin Moss’s book is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the complexity and range of Russian ideas." —Lina Steiner, author of For Humanity's Sake: The Bildungsroman in Russian Culture
