Quote by Dawn D. Eidelman

“The relationship between women and fiction extends also to the role of women as consumers of fiction. During the 1830s and 1840s, Russians who had any pretense of revering European culture formed a veritable cult in appreciation of the fiction of George Sand, originally Aurore Dupin Dudevant. So pervasively did Sand's work (and personal life) influence tsarist Russia that a special term was coined to describe the literary phenomenon. The term Zhorzhzandism was applied to the many Russian novels written in the 1830s and 1840s that dealt with themes similar to those of Sand's early novels. The international opera star Pauline Viardot attested to Sand's enormous popularity in Russia. She wrote to Sand that her works were immediately translated there from the time they first appeared, that everyone read them from the top rungs of the social ladder to the bottom, that the men adored her, the women idolized her—that, in short, she reigned over the Russian people more sovereignly than the tsar." Talk about Sand took the Russian literary salons by storm. Pushkin wrote in a letter to his wife, "If her [Evgenia Tur's] translation is as faithful as she herself is a faithful copy of Madame Sand, then her success is undoubtable." His letter reflected the fashionable attitude toward Sand in Russian high society. Diaries, memoirs and letters testify to her immense popularity among the Russian people and to the fact that young Russians seized each Sand novel as quickly as it arrived in their motherland, and devoured her prose. Almost all educated Russians in the nineteenth century read French fluently, but nonetheless many of her works were translated into Russian almost as quickly as they appeared in the original.”

Quote by Dawn D. Eidelman