In the wake of Peter the Great's westernizing reforms, Russians raced to build the kind of modern literary culture that Europeans had achieved centuries earlier. Until recently, women's contribution to this fascinating period of rapid assimilation and creation has been ignored. This volume challenges us to reimagine the early Russian literary canon, by considering a broad range of pioneering women poets who remain largely unknown, even in their homeland. Readers of Russian and English alike will appreciate this unprecedented bilingual collection of fully annotated texts, with critical introductions for each poet. "Russian Women Poets of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries" is a bold, pioneering achievement. Not only does it bring to light a poetic tradition that has been totally forgotten for over two centuries, even in its country of origin, but it does so in a broadly inclusive fashion. This corpus of texts sheds significant light on the genesis and formation of modern Russian verse and on the ways in which this new cohort of poets strove to find their voice during a complex era of shifting literary, cultural and gender values, navigating between the male-oriented high genres of Neoclassicism and the 'feminized' modes of Sentimentalism." - Marcus C. Levitt, Professor, Slavic Languages, University of Southern California