Customer Reviews

Nihilist Girl (Texts & Translations)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you ski downhill, be willing to walk back uphill. That's one of my two favorite Russian sayings. Can one meaning be not forgetting the gophers and grunts when you have a specialized skill? That in a way is what NIHILIST GIRL is all about.

Higher education, like downhill skiing, was for people with money, during Sofya Vasilevna Kovalevskaya's lifetime, 1850-1891. Women had such chances because of wealth and family connections. Some, such as the author and her older sister Anyuta Korvin-Krukovskaya Jaclard, wanted schooling for peasants and workers.

Kovalevskaya grew up on nursery walls papered, because of a run on wallpaper, with lithographed lectures of Professor Mikhail Ostrogradsky on differential and integrated calculus! Also, in the late 1850s, women got into higher educational institutions, until a decree against this narrow window of opportunity in 1863. At 18, she found a husband ahead of his times in paleontologist Vladimir Kovalevsky. Then as the daughter of a landowning, moneyed noble family and as a married woman, she got a hard-to-get passport, for study and travel abroad.

In fact, Kovalevskaya was among the first women to study at European universities, at Heidelberg, Germany. Then she became the first European woman doctor in mathematics. She got it summa cum laude, at only 24, from the University of Gottingen, Sweden. Then she became the first 19th-century woman with a tenured teaching appointment at a European university, in mathematics at Stockholm. And the first woman member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. And the first woman editorial board member of the leading European scientific journal, Acta Mathematica. And the winner of a much sought-after prize from the French Academy, for a ground-breaking solution to a problem in mathematical physics. And the writer of highly regarded, widely known studies in theoretical mathematics.

Basically what makes her one and only finished novel interesting and lasting is the middle child who had it all, but wanted to share. This comes through loud and clear on every page. And by reading about her in Don Kennedy's LITTLE SPARROW and Joan Spicci's BEYOND THE LIMIT.

For Kovalevskaya took up fiction writing, to tell both what was wrong with Russian life under the tsarist rulers and how it could be bettered. The idea came from having read Ivan Turgenev's FATHERS AND SONS of 1862 and Nikolay Chernyshevsky's WHAT IS TO BE DONE? of 1863. Kovalevskaya's spin was getting women educated, employed and independent. If only Leo Tolstoy's ANNA KARENINA had been as lucky.