Dostoevsky reading women writers

We’re used to thinking about how Dostoevsky read Pushkin, or Balzac, or Sand. But we hear less about what he made of Gan or Panaeva as writers. You can repeat this pattern for generations of nineteenth-century Russian writers. Russian men read Russian men, Western European men, and a handful of Western European women, but not—the pattern of academic inquiry implies—Russian women. Alexey Vdovin and Mariya Verbitskaya think this is partially wrong. Some women writers in nineteenth-century Russia really were marginalized in the sense that they didn’t influence their famous contemporaries, but Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya is an exception. She was widely read and taken seriously by critics, who put her in a class with Thackeray and Gogol, favorably compared her to Turgenev and Goncharov, or suggested that a character of hers anticipated Goncharov’s Olga (204–05). Vdovin and Verbitskaya (V&V) say the many connections between Khvoshchinskaya and the most canonical writers of her generation…