Ksenia Shmydkaya on "Revolution, She Wrote": Women Writers, Radical Knowledge and Revolutionary Visions

Could you begin by introducing "Revolution, She Wrote" to readers who are encountering the book for the first time? What is it about, and what is its central argument?

As the title suggests, it is about women who wrote about revolutions: the book’s three main chapters follow the interwar trajectories of three authors who, for one reason or another, chose to create fictional depictions of revolutionary action. At the same time, the potential reader should not expect to find a “proper” literary study. My interest in researching this period and writing the book lay with the ideas of the time (about history, politics, social change) that just so happened to be expressed through novels and theatre plays and in discussions around them. In other words, the book presents a picture of the interwar historical culture – of the circulating historical narratives, institutions and individuals involved in their production and dissemination, and the underlying visions of history – and argues for the significance of left-wing politics and revolutionary images in it.

How did you first become interested in the relationship between historical fiction, revolutionary history and left-wing politics?

I began my academic journey as a student of the French Revolution, and it was during my master’s that I learned about Stanisława Przybyszewska, the early twentieth-century Polish playwright who was fascinated with Maximilien Robespierre. My doctoral research project, on which this book is based, grew out of my own fascination with Przybyszewska and the gradual discovery of the interwar intellectual and cultural life. Initially, I planned to study women-authored historical fiction more broadly and it was only one year into my PhD (I still remember that hot summer day) that something clicked in my head and I realised that it is all actually about the revolutions. This clear focus was immensely beneficial for the study: not only did it allow me to narrow down the scope of the research (a must for any doctoral thesis), but more importantly, it revealed the political layers of my material.

At the heart of the book are three women writers: Olga Forsh, Stanisława Przybyszewska and Sylvia Townsend Warner. Why did you choose these particular authors, and what connects them?

My wonderful thesis supervisors, Liisi Keedus and Julia Kuznetski, have always warned me against saying that, but there was, after all, a great deal of chance – if not to say randomness – in how this selection came to be. I already mentioned that Przybyszewska was there from the beginning; Forsh and Warner were the ones who remained after sifting through dozens of other interwar female authors of historical fiction. The reason why I readily confess it is that the “accidental” nature of this trio only serves to confirm my intuition: there was something in the air in the interwar period that drew women towards historical fiction and revolutions.

An anonymous reviewer of the manuscript wrote that its structure seemed to be composite rather than comparative, and I was glad to accept this characterization. These three authors, as I explain in the book, belonged to different generations, lived in different countries and worked in different languages, never met or read each other, and the fictional works themselves are far apart in terms of plot and style. Nonetheless, there is an important connection that binds the whole composition: through their works, these women mediated radical knowledge to their audiences. Although not considered to be intellectuals in the common usage of the word, they performed this function within the culture of the transnational political left. That is not to say that they were activists – their practical political engagement varied greatly. Nonetheless, the left-wing ethos influenced how Forsh, Przybyszewska, and Warner thought and wrote about the past, and they sought to influence it in return.

Was there a particular discovery, text or archival find that surprised you or changed the direction of the project?

I cannot pinpoint one discovery that changed the course of my study dramatically, but there was one major finding that I consider a genuinely important contribution to the field. Namely, I confirmed that Sylvia Townsend Warner not only read the first chapter of György Lukács’s "The Historical Novel" (an influential work of Marxist philosophy and literary criticism, it was first published in Russian in 1937 and did not become commonly known in Western scholarship until the 1962 English translation) in 1938, but also critically responded to his claims – and he wrote back! This short exchange happened on the pages of the journal Internatsional’naya Literatura and, to my knowledge, has never been analysed by scholars of either Lukács or Warner.

The publication of this book has been a long journey. How did the project develop over those four years, and what were the most rewarding or challenging parts of writing it?

I started my thesis in 2018, defended it in 2022, and the book came out in 2026, so there is a nice symmetry to this sequence. Naturally, writing something from scratch is not the same as re-writing something into a different form, and the latter is not always easier. It took me around two years to figure out the direction in which I wanted to go with the revisions and to find a publisher interested in the project. The most important development at that stage was discovering the field of the history of knowledge (with the adjacent disciplines of the sociology of knowledge and social epistemology). It gave me the necessary conceptual vocabulary to supplement the frame of “historical representation” and thus to think about my material, about what these women were doing with history – this was when the idea of “radical knowledge” came to be. It took me another year to rewrite the text, refining the theoretical infrastructure and cutting down mercilessly. Finally, the last year was dedicated to many rounds of edits, proofreading and – the final boss of any monograph – putting together the index. This last bit took me about a week and nearly killed me; I had to re-read the manuscript so many times in this short time that I was left nauseous and hating everything about the text. If I can give one piece of advice to scholarly authors, it would be this: never postpone making the index until the last moment.

Although the book examines literature and politics in interwar Europe, what can it tell us about our own time and the ways in which we imagine political change today?

I want to be careful with overstating the “burning relevance” of my work for the present day: even if every single person on the planet reads it, it is not likely to change the global perception of contemporary politics, let alone to bring about a revolution. It is, first and foremost, a book about the 1920s and 1930s, but perhaps this is exactly why it is valuable today. In the conclusion of the book, I cite a sad and concise summary of the interwar struggle of the British left, offered by Sylvia Townsend Warner in the 1970s: “We had fought, we had retreated, we were betrayed, and are now misrepresented.” There is an unfortunate tendency to present the leftists of this period as doomed and delusional dreamers who failed both to see the evils of one totalitarian regime (Stalin’s) and to prevent the advent of another (Hitler’s). The very name of these decades, the interwar, installs two world wars as its alpha and omega, the tragic beginning and the even more tragic ending. This sense of inevitability, the unspoken idea of the future being preordained, is something I tried to argue against in the book. In offering a fresh look on the 1920s and 1930s, through the minds of these women intellectuals, for whom interwar was not yet interwar, I wanted, in the words of Pierre Rosanvallon, to “give the past back its present” and to “re-invest the past with its dimension of indeterminacy.”

Indeterminacy is an antidote to the stagnation and fatalism that pervades so much of public discourse today. The rise of the far-right is presented as something unavoidable, a natural cataclysm rather than human action; the spread of so-called “generative AI” into all areas of life, including education, is painted as an organic evolution that cannot be stopped. We read about these developments as if we were reading it in history books: things happen this way, and this is the only way they can happen, so the future is predetermined. But it does not have to be so! The defeats of the interwar left were neither inevitable nor fatal, nor do they mean that it is not worth trying to change the world again. To quote another interwar thinker and author of historical fiction, Yuri Tynianov, “Nothing is yet decided.”

Read more about the book here