Larissa Reissner

Katie McElvanney (The British Library)
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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.…

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 04 December 2024.]

13714 Larissa Reissner 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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