The Wives

The six literary wives in the book, Anna Dostoevsky, Sophia Tolstoy, Véra Nabokov, Elena Bulgakov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and Natalya Solzhenitsyn were muses, intellectual companions, and indispensable aids to Russia’s most celebrated writers. Popoff draws from the women’s autobiographical writings and other key Russian sources to reveal the women’s contributions to world literature and to tell about a collaborative tradition they established.