About the Author

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Avdotya Panaeva (1820-1893) was a Russian novelist, memoirist, and contributor to the liberal and radical literary journal The Contemporary. Her novels include Lady of the Steppes (1855), A Woman's Lot (1862), and, coauthored with Nikolai Nekrasov, Three Countries of the World (1848) and The Dead Lake (1851). Fiona Bell is a translator and scholar of Russophone literature. Her translations from the Russian include Nataliya Meshchaninova's Stories of a Life and the short fiction of the contemporary Belarusian writer Tatsiana Zamirovskaya.