Russian literary history through the lens of gender book review: Eugenia N. Stroganova. Classics and female contemporaries: gender and the 19th century Russian literary history. Moscow: Litfact Publishing House, 2019. 400 p

Eugenia N. Stroganova is among the first scholars in Russia that turned to the gender studies of literature. The key category in the present book is the gender understood as a representation of socio-cultural ideas of sexes, relations between the two sexes and assymetry of sociocultural roles ascrided to males and females. The above mentioned approach defines both the content and the structure of the book that contaiuns 6 parts and 26 articles, devoted not to the 19th century literary celebrities - Ivan Goncharov, Nikolay Nekrasov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Leo Tolstoy, but to their less known female contemporaries - Elena Gan, Elizaveta Salias de Turnemir, Nadezhda and Sofia Khvoshchinsayas, Аnna Lachinova, Ekaterina Novosil’tseva, etc. The articles show that the routine practices of pushing female writers ad marginem of literary life is explained by deeply routed patriarchial stereotypes and not by their modest literary endowment. The usual blame that the female writers tend to pay too much attention to the everyday routine, smaller details and the trifles of life can be viewed as a merit, not a drawback. The books contributes to the contemnporary studies by offering a new attitude to the literary history - this change in perspective consitsts in the idea that literary history is not just a rigid set of canonical and marginal texts, but a flexible, dynamic field of literary and human contacts and mutual influence. The present book is a good example of the successful application of the categories of gender studies in the study of Russian classical literature.