Anastasiia Iakovlevna Marchenko
Anastasiia Iakovlevna Marchenko was a 19th-century Russian writer born in 1830 to a Ukrainian father and a Polish mother. Raised on her father’s estate in the Kiev province, she received a noble upbringing with education from governesses and tutors, which introduced her to Western literature early on. Marchenko began her writing career at the age of twelve, but after her father's death, her family faced financial difficulties, prompting her to explore writing professionally to support her siblings. Despite her literary talent, some of her works contain notable anti-Semitic elements, depicting Jewish characters negatively, which has drawn criticism.
Her writing often focused on the struggles of the provincial nobility and offered vivid depictions of the Russian countryside and St. Petersburg society. Marchenko also wrote patriotic poetry during the Crimean War but primarily focused on prose. After marrying a Russian army officer, her later works included themes involving military officers and their interactions with civilians. She passed away in Kherson in 1880, and despite early acclaim, her voice, along with other women's writings, was overshadowed by dominant male perspectives of the time, delaying the recognition of women's contributions to literature for decades.
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Subject Terms
Anastasiia Iakovlevna Marchenko
Writer
- Born: 1830
- Birthplace: Russia
- Died: 1880
- Place of death: Kherson, Russia
Biography
Anastasiia Iakovlevna Marchenko was born in 1830, the daughter of a Ukrainian father and a Polish mother. She grew up on her father’s estate near Chigrin in the Kiev province of Russia (now Ukraine), and she and her siblings were raised by a governess and various tutors who were hired to teach the children the arts and skills expected of members of the nobility. She was exposed at an early age to the writings of leading Western authors, and throughout her career she sprinkled her works with references to them. Her started writing short stories when she was twelve years old and suffered a health crisis.
After her father’s death, her family lost their estate and had to move to Oddessa, where Marchenko began to offer piano lessons in an effort to help support her siblings. However, another health crisis ended that effort, and she found among her notebooks some stories which passed muster. Their publication helped tide the family over, and the positive critical response they garnered gave her the courage to continue writing and to consider it a viable career for an impoverished gentlewoman.
Several of her works are marred by notable elements of anti- Semitism, particularly portrayals of Jews as unscrupulous businessmen who prey upon naive or inept Russian noblewomen and thus bring about the impoverishment or other misfortunes with which the protagonists must deal. In several of her novels she experimented with the setting rather than the protagonist as the organizing principle, producing vivid images of the Russian countryside. Other novels are set in the aristocratic society of St. Petersburg and frequently deal with the travails of provincial nobility visiting the city, who often must dodge the insults of the more wealthy urban nobility, particularly those who are active at court.
By the 1850’s, Marchenko was dabbling in poetry and produced a number of patriotic verses in honor of the Crimean War. However, prose remained her primary métier. She married an officer in the Russian army, who briefly took her to St. Petersburg before settling in Kherson. Her later works feature military officers, particularly those who are on leave and interacting with civilians.
She died in Kherson in 1880 of unknown causes, having never quite been able to recapture the critical applause that had greeted her original publications. Her protofeminist explorations of women’s lives on their own terms were quickly submerged by strong Russian male voices, who dismissed women as inherently inferior physically and intellectually to men, and women’s writing would not come into its own for many decades.