and postcolonial studies—many previously unknown women writers
have become “known,” appearing on course reading lists, in anthologies,
and as the subjects of journal articles, dissertations, and panel discus-
sions. In the West, starting in the 1970 s, Slavic scholars, inspired by the
recovery of women writers in other literatures, began to recover Russian
women writers. In the Soviet Union, from the mid- 1980 s, and perhaps
in response to the Western women’s movement, Russian literary schol-
ars began to publish anthologies of Russian women’s writing (see end
of note 17 ), as well as separate editions of individual women writers’
works and scholarship about them—although, as we have seen, with-
out a feminist critical context. As a result of this work Pavlova, Ros-
topchina, and to a lesser degree, Zhadovskaia and Teplova are now
“known.”^30 Such expansions of literary canons suggest that we need not
dismiss writers out of hand simply because no one until now has ex-
amined their work.
It is worth considering the bases on which literary scholars have chal-lenged the canon of known writers. Some have questioned the assump-
tion that literary canons embody universal, ahistoric values that are
passed down intact from generation to generation. Rather, these schol-
ars argue that standards of literary excellence are like gender—not es-
sential, but “socially constructed” and political in the sense that they are
used as instruments of power. Thus canons constantly evolve, reflecting
cultural biases and ongoing literary political struggles. Indeed, some
believe canons to be the means by which people in aesthetic power—
the above-mentioned literary gatekeepers—keep out differing interests,
values, and views of the world.^31 So, in regard to nineteenth-century
American literature, Nina Baym writes of “the biases... in favor, say, of
whaling ships rather than the sewing circle as a symbol of the human
community” (Women’s Fiction, 4 ). Certainly, the canon of nineteenth-
century Russian literature generally reflected the views of upper-class
men.
Other scholars have gone even further in deconstructing the as-sumptions behind literary canons, raising very provocative questions.
Paul Lauter writes that canonized works and the standards of literary
excellence that we extrapolate from them validate the experience of men
rather than of women, the experience of whites rather than those of
people of color. He reminds us that the “formalist virtues: economy,
irony, well-articulated structure... complexity... emotional restraint,
and verbal sophistication” were only promulgated in this century. One
must ask, he writes, “where standards come from, whose values they
12 Introduction