Barbara Heldt (born 2 February 1940 in New York City) is an American emerita professor of Russian at the University of British Columbia.
She is best known for her researches on Russian literature by women, the introduction of gender analysis and feminist perspectives into Slavic studies,[1] and for her translation of Karolina Pavlova's novel A Double Life.
The next year, her doctoral degree was awarded by the University of Chicago and she was hired as an assistant professor in her department, teaching Russian language and literature.
Pavlova, a nineteenth century Russian poet, had been celebrated in her youth but disdained and disregarded later on, and fell out of the canon in Soviet times.
[10] Heldt argued that Western feminist critiques of European literature attempted to raise the feminine from conventional attitudes of inferiority, while in Russia, the feminine was held to an impossible perfect standard that terrified men who could not match it in masculine action and suppressed women who couldn't live up to it.
[11] Meanwhile, Russian women entered the literary sphere in fewer numbers than their western European counterparts and did so mainly in the genres of poetry and memoirs.