Russia’s First Female Crime Writers, 1870-1917

Professor Claire Whitehead

Russia’s First Female Crime Writers is the first study in any language of the women who wrote crime fiction in the Russian Empire in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Crime fiction was hugely popular with readers during this period, but it is still a relatively understudied page of Russophone literary history. Research that does exist, including my own book, The Poetics of Early Russian Crime Fiction (published in 2018), focuses largely on the male writers who dominated the genre. Consequently, almost nothing is known about the women who wrote in the genre and the works they produced. This project argues that female-authored crime fiction represents a valuable source of social history because of the way it reflects and critiques various aspects of late imperial society in the period following the ‘Great Reforms’ of the 1860s and 1870s.

The project is supported in the academic year 2025-26 by a British Academy / Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship.

The Fellowship funds time to complete the monograph, undertake an archival trip to the National Library of Finland for primary texts, present findings at international conferences and record new episodes for the ‘Lost Detectives’ podcast series.

The monograph discusses works by Kapitolina Nazar’eva (1847-1900) and Aleksandra Sokolova (1833-1914) – the two most prolific female writers in the genre – but also examines works by Liudmila Simonova (1838-1906), Sof’ia Smirnova (1852-1921) and Ol’ga Bebutova (1879-1952). Chapters discuss issues including: views on the post-reform legal system; the consequences of patriarchal control within family and marriage; the depiction of economic disenfranchisement and the ‘commodification’ of the female body; and the portrayal of Jewish identity in works of crime fiction.