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

In early 20th century Russian literature, there is no author whose fame was established by World War I 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 by Svetlana Alexievich, 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", this paper investigates if such observations can be extended to WWI and sheds light on the way Russian female soldiers narrated their participation in the First World War. This research is grounded in an examination of two unique wwi-related memoirist works: Yashka (1919), a (very likely) fictionalized biography of the soldier Maria Botchkareva, and the novel V Okopakh (1930), written by Tatiana Dubinskaya, also a woman soldier. The article analyzes 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.