Mary Zirin's Bibliography of Pre-Revolutionary Writings by Women

We are excited to announce that Annabella Irvine and Sveta Stoytcheva of the Slavic Reference Service recently completed an online database of Mary Zirin's Bibliography of Pre-Revolutionary Writings by Women. Mary Zirin gave her bibliography to the Slavic Reference Service in 2009. The database allows researchers to search for works in her bibliography by keyword, title, and author, among other fields. Mary is a longtime supporter of the Slavic Reference Service and patron of the service’s Summer Research Lab. The website is intended to honor her work, as well as make it available to other researchers interested in Russian women writers.

About the Database

The database contains over 3,000 entries of authors from the time period, their bibliography, and references. Included in the bibliography are any fiction OR one nonfiction work of at least ten pages OR two poems; with some exceptions for works of special interest to women.  It does not include authors that appear in the following standard reference works: Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, Women and Gender in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Volume II: Russia, the Non-Russian Peoples of the Russian Federation, and the Successor States of the Soviet Union, and Russkie pisateli 1800-1917. Biograficheskii slovar'.

To assist scholars with archival research, this database contains references (whenever possible) to personal archives from Lichnye arkhivnye fondy v gosudarstvennykh khranilishchakh SSSR. Ukazatel'.

About Mary Zirin

Within the field of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Mary Fleming Zirin stands out as a beacon of strength and hope to students, faculty, librarians, and independent scholars. It is impossible to summarize Mary’s extraordinary contributions to the development of Slavic and East European Women’s Studies. As a bibliographer, Mary introduced significant number of scholarly sources on women and gender, which are now standards in the field. These include Dictionary of Russian Women Writers (1994), Women & Gender in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia: A Comprehensive Bibliography (2007), and Women East-West Current Bibliography through the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.  Her tireless advocacy on behalf of independent scholars, who are in constant need of access to collections and services, continues to this day.