Nikolai Shelgunov, one of the ‘progressives’ of the 1860s, wrote in his article ‘The soullessness of women’ (1870): ‘Which of our women writers – and we have a fair number of them – has studied the woman question and written about it? Not one. Is this not grim evidence of women's lack of resolve, of women's hereditary passivity?' This opinion seems strange, not least because its writer is known as a ‘radical’ literary critic who was able to monitor at first hand the history of the ‘woman question’ (zhenskii vopros). It does, however, demonstrate the ambiguity of women's opportunities to participate in the discourse of the ‘woman question’.

The contradictory nature of the ‘woman question’ of the 1860s becomes apparent through comparison with the opening decades of the century or with the fin de siècle. The paradigmatic breakthroughs of the 1820s and 1830s and also those of the turn of the century are characterized by the gradual rise to prominence of women's culture, notably in the diversity of their literature. What, then, were the opportunities for women's writing in the 1860s, characterized as it was by a forceful discourse on gender equality, on the ‘woman question’? Why did Shelgunov fail to acknowledge the contribution of women writers? I pose the question in order to challenge the assumption that establishing an egalitarian gender model of the period enhanced women's ability to transfigure the visions of their knowledge in a manner adequate to their cultural experience.