Anastasiia Verbitskaia

Verbitskaia, Anastasiia Alekseevna 

Born Feb. 10 (22), 1861, in Voronezh; died Jan. 16, 1928. Russian writer.

The principal themes of Verbitskaia’s topical but very superficial books are family life and interrelations between the sexes: the novella Discord (1887), the novels Vavochka (1898) and She Got Free (1899), the novella In a New Way (1902), and the play Whose Fault (1904). However, a certain protest is expressed in them against the abnormal upbringing of women in bourgeois-aristocratic society. In the novel Spirit of the Time (1908), she made an attempt at commenting on the events of 1905-07. In the later novels The Keys of Happiness (1909-13) and The Yoke of Love (1914-15), the problem of the emancipation of women is replaced by advocacy of “free” love and by sexual motifs, which made the novels popular primarily among bourgeois readers.

REFERENCES

Chukovskii, K. Kniga o sovremennykh pisateliakh. St. Petersburg [1914].
[“Stat’i o Verbitskoi i perepiska.”] In Ol’minskii, M. Po literaturnym voprosam. Moscow-Leningrad, 1932.