Virginia Woolf, reader of Russian fiction

Abstract

Virginia Woolf's carrer as an essayist begins around ten years before the publication of her first novel. While considering the nature of the problems posed to the fiction of her time, Woolf highlights the Russian literature of the second half of the nineteenth century. This paper seeks to investigate the extent to which the peculiarities of the Russian fiction underscored by the author are responses to questions she herself  would  face in her work.