The 1980s witnessed the ascendancy of Russian women in multiple spheres of artistic creation, including literature, film, and painting. In a treatment of contemporary Russian women's creativity, this text approaches women's texts, films, and canvasses from a range of perspectives.

Helena Goscilo, currently the Chairwoman of the Slavic Department at the University of Pittsburgh, specializes in Romanticism, contemporary Russian literature and culture, and Slavic women's writing. Her publications include articles on Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoi, Bulgakov, and Tolstaia, as well as Russian and Polish Women's Fiction (University of Tennessee Press, 1985); Balancing Acts (Indiana University Press, 1989; Dell, 1991); Glasnost: An Anthology of Literature (Ardis, 1990}---with Byron Lindsey; The Wild Beach and Other Stories (Ardis, 1992}---also with Lindsey; Skirted Issues: The Discreteness and Indiscretions of Russian Women's Prose (Russian Studies in Literature, Spring 1992); Lives in Transit (Ardis, 1993). She is working on three monographs, devoted respectively to recent women's fiction, Tat'iana Tolstaia, and Liudmila Petrushevskaia.

Introduction 1 BAKHTIN AND WOMEN A Nontopic with Immense Implications 2 BAKHTIN'S CONCEPT OF THE GROTESQUE AND THE ART OF PETRUSHEVSKAIA AND TOLSTAIA 3 SOVIET RUSSIAN WOMEN'S LITERATURE IN THE EARLY 1980s 4 THE POETICS OF BANALITY Tat'iana Tolstaia, Lana Gogoberidze, and Larisa Zvezdochetova 5 THE CREATION OF NADEZHDA IAKOVLEVNA MANDEL'SHT AM 6 THE CANON AND THE BACKWARD GLANCE Akhmatova, Lisnianskaia, Petrovykh, Nikolaeva 7 SPEAKING BODIES Erotic Zones Rhetoricized 8 GAMES WOMEN PLAY The Erotic Prose of Valeriia Narbikova 9 HAPPY NEVER AFTER The Work of Viktoriia Tokareva and Glasnost' 10 LEAVING PARADISE AND PERESTROIKA A Week Like Any Other and Memorial Day by Natal'ia Baranskaia 11 IULIIA VOZNESENSKAIA'S WOMEN With Love and Squalor 12 THE HEARTFELT POETRY OF ELENA SHY ARTS 13 REFLECTIONS, CROOKED MIRRORS, MAGIC THEATERS Tat'iana Tolstaia's Peters