Authors

Discussion

The prominent place of women in Russia’s revolutionary movement, military forces of the First and Second World Wars, and during the Civil War is widely recognised, as is the role of women in Soviet propaganda of WWII. This paper asks what aspects of the literary representation of women committing acts of violence can be identified as continuities across the revolutionary divide and between different genres of early Soviet literature. It examines the numerous examples of memoir literature of the 1920s, such as in the journal Katorga i ssylka, and novels set in the period of Civil War such as Dmitrii Fermanov’s Chapaev (1923), Fedor Gladkov’s Tsement (1925), and Mikhail Sholokhov’s Tikhii Don (1928-32). In particular, it asks what impact the translocation of fighting women from the context of clandestine terrorism and political violence to open warfare had on their literary representation. It also considers the roots of the tropes of the woman warrior in socialist realist literature in other contemporary genres.