Gossiping and Ageing Princesses in Odoevsky's Societal Tales.

There have been numerous and extensive discussions of the role of 'слухи' [gossip] in nineteenth-century Russian literature; usually gossip was viewed as a formative force behind plot dynamics, and as the launching point for grotesque narrative effects. This article attempts to frame different perceptions of gossip, treating it in its specific relation to the subject of ageing and as a contributive factor to the development of the Russian realist tradition. This paper proposes a new approach to the reading of gossip by examining how it functions in the nineteenth-century Russian genre of the 'society tale'. It emerges there as a witch's spell, in which ageing heroines choose gossip as their defense mechanism in response to physiological and psychological changes within and around them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]