Aleksandra Xvostova, Nikolaj Karamzin, and the Gendering of Toska

This article reviews the evolution of toska in eighteenth-century literary discourse to demonstrate how writers wielded this sentiment in a larger debate about gender and the 'ownership' of personal emotions. Despite the 'feminization' of literature in the sentimentalist era, Aleksandra Xvostova’s emphatic and reiterative use of toska was perceived by the male literary establishment as a marker of strictly feminine discourse. Our examination of Xvostova's sentiment in the context of Russian women's writing uncovers a tradition of emotional expression that is lexically distinct from the male tradition and illustrates how toska was deeply intertwined with anxieties about the relationship of femininity to the male self.