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Defiant Trajectories: Mapping out Slavic Women Writers Routes

Virginia Woolf writes in the seminal work in the history of feminist thought, in the essay A Room of One’s Own (1928), that at the end of the 18th century a change came about that was of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of Roses and that change was that a woman from middle class started writing. If we were to develop this idea further, we could say that another similarly important change took place at the end of the 19th century - that is when a middle-class woman, if she had enough material grounds, began to travel quite freely. Both turning points changed the course of life for many women in the Western world. The middle-class writer, as Nancy Armstrong in her book Desire and Domestic Fiction. A Political history of the Novel has shown, has created a special type of novel. Domestic fiction, as Armstrong convincingly argues, “mapped out a new domain of discourse as it invested common forms of social behaviour with the emotional values of women”. Many middle-class women then realized that they could make a living by writing and that there was a world, albeit in the realm of domesticity, in which a woman was the one who set the rules. However, their lives were based on whether they decided to get married or whether they remained single. In the late 19th century, women began to look for alternatives to such trajectories. If for married middle-class women until then, migration to other places was largely the consequence of husband's career, in the last decades of the 19th century they began to discover new spaces of freedom - both literally and figuratively. Compared to the trajectories of contemporaries who chose the expected trajectories, theirs defied the expectations of society. They began to map out the routes by themselves. It is therefore no coincidence that the Women Writers Cultural Route project focuses not only on tracking stations on the life trajectories of women writers we want to mark with a cultural route, but also on the very act of discovering new spaces. Papers in the volume, which are extended research papers presented at the Women Writers Route conference in Ljubljana in April 2019, are connected by a common thread of crossing actual and symbolic boundaries. Croatian writers, represented by Maša Grdešić, Marija Jurić Zagorka and Ivana Brlič Mažuranić, each sought spaces of freedom in their own way. While Zagorka, as a single woman (after bravely escaping from a marriage of convenience), crossed the boundaries set by her gender at the beginning of the 20th century and aroused the indignation of the guardians of tradition, Ivana Brlić Mažuranić felt most free when she retired to the world of imagination and dared to create literary texts. The Montenegrin intellectual, physician and translator Divna Veković, represented by Ksenija Rakočević in the present volume, sought freedom in a different way. The path led her from Montenegro to Paris, where she successfully completed her medical studies. During the Great War she was a doctor on the Thessaloniki front, and the World War II found her in Yugoslavia, where she came to celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo. Towards the end of the war, when it was clear that the political regime would change, she wanted to return to France, but her last journeys remained a mystery, as did her death. In Polish literature, the most cosmopolitan writer of her time is Maria Konopnicka, represented in this volume by Monika Grodzka. On the threshold of the fifth decade of her life, Konopnicka decided to leave her homeland and then lived for ten years in France, Switzerland, Germany and Italy. She went on holiday to the Adriatic Sea several times. Her postcards draw her itinerary to family and friends. Maria Konopnicka was esteemed both in the Polish homeland and across its borders, and during her lifetime she was translated into various Slavic languages. Thus, her literary texts also drew their own itinerary. The varied political history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries led to the migration of Russian and Soviet writers, respectively, who, if history had taken place differently, would probably not have chosen such trajectories themselves. Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva and Zinaida Grippius, as Ekaterina Artemyuk shows, lived in different parts of Europe in their lives. The age in which they lived had a particularly strong influence on their trajectories. But not only on their lives, but also on the creation that was inspired in ground breaking historical events. The Serbian writer Jelena J. Dimitrijević is undoubtedly the greatest traveller among the women writers we present in this volume, as she has travelled seven seas and three oceans, as she titled one of her travelogues. From the beginning of her writing career, she paid particular attention to the position of women. As a woman who showed an interest in Islamic culture and spoke fluently Turkish, she was able to cross thresholds that others could not. As the author of the article about her, Biljana Dojčinović, points out, her distance from the European homeland also enabled her to have a different view of the old continent. Jelena J. Dimitrijević developed many friendships during her travels in different foreign countries, but she also had many compatriots in Yugoslavia, whom she appreciated and corresponded with. Among them was a Slovenian born multicultural author Zofka Kveder. Katja Mihurko Poniž follows her itinerary, but also the traces she left in her relationships with other people - many intellectuals at the time saw her as a role model, a kind of cultural and feminist icon of Central and Southern Europe. Mihurko Poniž also explores how Kveder’s life and works were interpreted in the obituaries. In many Slavic literatures (the exceptions in this volume are Polish and Russian literature), women writers entered the cultural field not earlier than in the second half of the 19th century, thus they were pioneers in discovering new paths. Many times, they had to clear their way on their own, as no one before them had done so. The more there were, the more paths there were. Therefore, mapping the paths of women writers is not only creating maps, which we then follow and by doing so enrich and deepen our knowledge about female literary authorship, moreover following their footsteps we celebrate women's strength, innovation and creativity.

women wrtiers ; slavic literatures ; modernity ; travel ; influence, gender roles

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