“Who's the fairest of them all?” Beauty and Femininity in Contemporary Russian Adolescent Girl Fiction

Abstract

The present article draws attention to “post‐Soviet commodity tales,” a subgenre of adolescent girl fiction that provides a narrative of personal success for girls willing to learn the tricks of managed beauty, fashion, consumer literacy, and other lessons of femininity. Since these tales are written almost exclusively by women authors for the consumption by young girls, they vividly demonstrate a gender ideology that the older female generation passes on to the new one. I trace the history of the relationship between beauty and gender construction in Soviet children's literature and analyze how new economic and cultural realities affected it in post‐Soviet time. My analysis focuses on two representative popular tales, Ludmila Matveeva's Beauty Contest in Sixth Grade (2001) and Svetlana Lubenets’ A Heart for the Invisible Man (2007).