Olga Simonova profile picture
Olga
Simonova
Collegium Researcher, Literary Studies and Creative Writing
Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS)
PhD (Literary Studies)
Women in the World War I and the Russian Civil War: Images in Memoirs and Fiction

Areas of expertise

Russian literature of the beginning of the 20th century
Mass literature
World War I
Russian Civil War
Women magazines
Children literature

Biography

I am a philologist who works on early-20th-century Russian literature, with a special focus on gender studies and mass literature. I graduated in 2005 from the Faculty of History and Philology of the Russian State University for the Humanities. My specialization was History, Literature and Culture of Russia and France. From 2005 to 2008, I was a postgraduate student at the A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature (IWL) of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. In 2008, I defended my thesis “Mass literature in the Structure of Russian Women’s Magazines of the 1910s”.

Furthermore, I studied at the French University College of Moscow, where I received the French diploma “Master 1” in History in 2007.

In recent years, my academic activity has been connected with the A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature (Moscow). In 2011, I began to work as a Senior Researcher at the Department of Manuscripts of the IWL. I wrote scholarly articles, participated in conferences, was one of the organizers of conferences at the IWL, and I was a coeditor of books published by the IWL.

Research

In my research, I focus on the way the war theme is connected with women images in fictional and non-fictional texts. I study strategies of constructing female images in fiction and in ego-documents about war. The study works with texts of Russian literature about the World War I and the Russian Civil War, written by both men and women: the well-known Soviet authors Boris Lavrenev, Boris Pilnyak, Pavel Blyakhin, Eduard Bagritsky; the “forgotten” writers Sofia Fedorchenko, Lusia Argutinskaya. Moreover, I look at memoirs by Anna Saksaganskaya, Natalia Sukhogorskaya, and by nameless Sisters of Mercy. The research methodology is based on methods in gender studies and literary analysis of texts. I also work with methods from history and memory studies.

Publications

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