Larissa Reissner

Katie McElvanney (The British Library)

Ed. by Andrei Rogatchevski, UiT - The Arctic University of Norway
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 2.2.2.00: Post-1917 Writing and Culture in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, 1917-present.
Vol. editors: Neil Cornwell (University of Bristol), Roman Koropeckyj (University of California, Los Angeles), Andrei Rogatchevski (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway)

Dates

Born 1 May 1895
Died 9 Feb 1926
Activity 1913-1926

Places

Born in Poland
Active in Russia

Activities

Primary

Journalist

Other

Poet

Resources

Reissner's Works

Save to Bookshelf

In his 1930 autobiography,

Moia Zhizn’

[

My Life

], Leon Trotsky described the Soviet author, poet and journalist Larisa Reisner as a "warrior", an "Olympian goddess" and a "writer of the first rank". Written just a few years after Reisner’s untimely death at the age of thirty in 1926, Trotsky’s words encapsulate the myths that came to define her life. Reisner was herself partly responsible for the conflation of myth and reality, promoting the image of, and herself as, the "woman of the revolution". Many biographies of Reisner, especially those written during the Soviet period, reflect these myths, and some later biographers, drawing from these sources, have also fallen into the trap of exaggerating Reisner’s achievements and prominence in the years after the October Revolution.…

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2133 words

Citation: McElvanney, Katie. "Larissa Reissner". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 December 2016 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13714, accessed 25 November 2024.]