Introduction

This introduction outlines the aims, scope, and theoretical framework of the book, which examines literary and autobiographical representations of women who participated in the First World War and the Russian Civil War. The chapter provides a review of relevant scholarship, highlighting gaps in the academic discourse on gender and war in early twentieth-century Russian literature. It contextualizes the research within literary criticism, memory studies, feminist and gender studies, and historical analysis. Military femininities are presented as a key conceptual framework. They have been embodied in the figures of nurses, women soldiers, and commanders. Focusing on under-researched texts of Russian and Soviet literature from the 1910s to the early 1930s, the study traces how women were represented within a predominantly male literary tradition. By recovering the marginalized self-identities of women who took part in the wars, it lays the groundwork for reevaluating gendered war narratives and deepens the understanding of how war shaped representations of femininity in early twentieth-century Russian culture.