RUSSIAN WOMEN’S PROSE AT THE TURN OF THE 20TH–21ST CENTURIES: MAIN TRENDS, ISSUES, AND POETICS

Abstract

This article examines Russian women’s prose at the turn of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries as a dynamic literary field shaped by late-Soviet legacies, post-Soviet social transformation, and the reconfiguration of authorial subjectivity. The study treats “women’s prose” not as a narrow thematic label, but as a set of recurrent narrative strategies through which female authors articulate experience, memory, and ethical choice under conditions of cultural instability. The analysis highlights how the period’s prose expands the repertoire of the everyday, turning domestic space, family narratives, bodily experience, and routine labor into sites of historical reflection and social diagnosis. Particular attention is paid to the poetics of intimacy and testimony: first-person narration, confessional tonality, fragmentary composition, and the deliberate inclusion of private speech genres that blur the border between fiction, autobiography, and documentary writing. The article argues that women’s prose of this era intensifies interest in trauma, vulnerability, and the politics of memory, while simultaneously resisting reductive victim narratives through irony, self-distance, and complex moral optics. The transformation of genre models is traced through the hybridization of short prose, family saga, psychological novel, and essayistic forms, as well as through the rise of urban narratives that register new patterns of mobility, precarity, and consumer culture. The research also considers the changing literary infrastructure of the period, including the diversification of publishing, the emergence of new readership communities, and the impact of prizes and media on canon formation. The article concludes that Russian women’s prose at the turn of the centuries constitutes an important laboratory of post-Soviet sensibility, producing distinct aesthetic solutions for representing identity, history, and everyday life in a time of accelerated change.