Larisa Reisner. A Biography

‘She burst across the revolutionary sky like a blazing meteor, dazzling all in her path,’ Trotsky wrote. For the poet Boris Pasternak, she was Lara, the heroine of his novel Doctor Zhivago. Commissar, revolutionary fighter, espionage agent, journalist, Larisa Reisner (1895–1926) was a model for the ‘new woman’ of the Russian Revolution, and one of its most popular and brilliant writers, whose works were published in mass editions and read by millions. Her life is set against the world-shaking events of 1917, and draws on material recently released from the Soviet archives to tell her story through the memories of those close to her, her own voluminous writings, and her six books, published for the first time together by Brill with this biography.

This biography is accompanied by Brill’s publication of Cathy Porter and Richard Chappell’s Writings of Larisa Reisner, published as volume 302 in the Historical Materialism book series.

Cathy Porter studied Russian and Czech literature at London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies and Cambridge University, and has published over 20 books on Russia, including most recently, Alexandra Kollontai. Writings From the Struggle (Bookmarks, 2020), as well as translations of the plays of Maxim Gorky and the diaries of Sofia Tolstoy.