Comparing Two Russian Women Soldiers’ Memoirs on WWI: T. Dubinskaya’s V okopach and M. Botchkareva’s Yashka

In early Twentieth century Russian literature, there is no author whose fame was established by First World War literature, and even considering the handful of writers who took part in the war and put their experience in writing, their literary output passed unnoticed by the critics. Even less attention has been paid to literary memoirist works, mainly because much of the literature produced and disseminated in Russia during the war years can be considered “mass literature” to its fullest extent, as it often stands out for the propagandistic overtones of its narrative. Taking inspiration from a statement of Svetlana Aleksievič, who in her famous work The Unwomanly Face of War writes that “Women’s war has its own colors, […] its own feelings. Its own words”, the aim of this paper is to investigate if such observations can be extended to WWI as well, and to shed different light on the way Russian female soldiers narrated their participation in the First World War. This research is grounded on an examination of two unique and WWI-related memoirist works: Yashka (1919), a (very likely) fictionalized biography of the soldier Marija Bočkareva, and the novel V Okopach (1930), written by Tat’jana Dubinskaja, also a woman soldier. This way, it is possible to portray the figure of the Russian female soldier against the background of World War I, considering not only a purely narrative point of view, but also the role that female soldiers played, and the recognition they gained, in the Russian society of those years.