K.V. NAZARYEVA’S LITERARY DEBUT AND THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY REPUTATION

Abstract

Kapitolina Valerianovna Nazaryeva was a well-known writer of the second half of the 19th century, a typical representative of the “Women Prose”. Her first novella “The Specialist (A Page from a Life of a Woman)” was published in 1979 in “Vestnik Evropy”, one of the most prestigious and oldest literary and political magazines of the Russian Empire. Meanwhile, in the future, despite Nazaryeva’s literary productivity, the leading solid periodicals were not interested in her works, and the attitude of literary critics towards her was mostly negative. The article examines the point, that the main reason for the success of Nazaryeva’s debut novella and the subsequent publication in “Vestnik Evropy” was due to the topical theme of this work, which coincided with the all-Russian political agenda of the time, one of the essential tendencies of which was feminism. The “Specialist” deals with the divorce proceedings, the legal and bureaucratic circumstances of this case are reproduced with documentary accuracy, and the fate of a woman, her social drama, is at the center of the story. The analysis involves archival materials and epistolary sources.