One of the few women writers to emerge from the nineteenth-century Russian merchant class, Aleksandra Petrovna Kobiakova documented the dreary life of the provincial merchantry in novels and tales published in the radical press in the early 1860s. Although she was less well known and less prolific than many of her peers, Kobiakova's origins, her subject matter, and the harshly realistic tenor of her prose make her an unusual figure among the Russian women writers whose numbers grew so rapidly during the realist period.

The little that is known about Kobiakova's life comes primarily from the brief "Avtobiografiia" (Autobiography) she published in Russkoe slovo (Russian Word) in 1860. She was born in the town of Kostroma in 1823 into the oppressively traditional and patriarchal world of a provincial merchant family. She spent almost forty years in this "kingdom of darkness," as the radical critic Nikolai Aleksandrovich Dobroliubov and the dramatist...