“N. A. Neelova’s Literary Experiment: French Novels and the Elite Woman Writer in Eighteenth-Century Russia"

This article examines Nataliia Neelova's short novel "Leinard and Termiliia, or the Ill-starred Fate of Two Lovers" (Leinard i Termiliia, ili zloschastnaia sud’ba dvukh liubovnikov, 1784), the second prose work by a woman to be published in Russia. In considering the possible European influences that led to Neelova's novel, it highlights not the male sentimentalist canon established by Rousseau and Goethe, but the prose texts of French women writers such as Madame Gomez (e.g. her "L'amant malheureux" or "Le quiproquo", both taken from her "Cent nouvelles nouvelles)". This article also reconstructs the social context of Neelova's little-known short novel. Her access to publication relied on family connections with the aristocratic Chernyshev clan, whose Francophilia and literary ambitions were well established, and through that family to publisher Nikolai Novikov. These circumstances suggest that French popular romance literature, far from being despised, was in fact deemed worthy of imitation by a young woman of the Russian elite who played a decisive intermediary role in the circulation of literary models between France and Russia in the 18th century.