This lively and engaging book is a dual biography of two important participants in the Russian theater of the fin-de-siècle: the actress Lidiia Yavorskaiia and the playwright and translator Tatiana Shchepkina-Kupernik. They are the “sirens” of the title, the moniker given to them by the writer Anton Chekhov, who first met the two women at the Hotel Louvre in Moscow in 1893.

The image on the cover is a colorized version of the photo taken in the same year, featuring Chekhov together with Yavorskaiia and Shchepkina-Kupernik posed as if begging for the writer’s attention. Chekhov, thirty-three years old at the time, who referred to the picture as “the temptation of St. Anthony,” appears deliberately aloof. The two women (Shchepkina is nineteen and Yavorskaiia twenty-two) play temptresses quite convincingly. The title and the image together prompt the reader to begin reading. Upon closer inspection, however, The Sirens has less to do with Chekhov than the title or the cover image suggests. The story of Yavorskaiia and Shchepkina-Kupernik, the two women connected by their passion for the theater, creative work, and intimate friendship is at the center of the book.

Information about Yavorskaiia and Shchepkina-Kupernik is generally scattered across writings, memoirs, and letters of those who knew them, as well as in encyclopedia entries about the period. Most of the material is in Russian. In these documents, the two women mostly appear on the fringes of the discourse on the cultural life of their time. Little has been done to reevaluate their position and significance for Russian theater. Gregory’s book is an important step in the right direction.

The volume is structured roughly chronologically. In the prologue, we learn about Korsh’s private theater, which played a major role in the careers of Yavorskaiia and Shchepkina-Kupernik. The following chapters follow the two “sirens” from their first meeting in the Hotel Louvre until their deaths in two different countries and many years apart.

Detailed descriptions of stage productions in which they participated serve as a necessary background for showcasing the women’s achievements. Depictions of those around the two protagonists—of their lovers (male and female), husbands, directors, writers, prominent actors and actresses—create a vibrant picture of theater life of the time. The overarching goal is to demonstrate the ways in which these two women “rebelled personally and creatively against the social dictates that confined them” (2).

To achieve this goal, Gregory expands on Catherine Schuler’s Women in Russian Theater: The Actress in the Silver Age (Routledge, 1996). In the chapter dedicated to Yavorskaiia, Schuler describes the actress as someone who openly challenged accepted norms of behavior and whose work, along with her public and personal life, influenced the next generation of Russian women. A key source for Gregory’s analysis of Shchepkina-Kupernik’s remarkable achievements as a dramatist, poet, short-story writer, and translator is Donald Rayfield’s 2001 groundbreaking article in The Slavonic and East European Review, “The Forgotten Poetess: Tatiana Lʹvovna Shchepkina-Kupernik.” Much information about the theater scene and her friendship with Yavorskaiia can be found in Shchepkina-Kupernik’s memoirs. Gregory enriches these renditions and analyses with striking details and descriptions that are almost novelistic in their vividness and ability to engage the reader.

Except for Shchepkina-Kupernik’s memoir and the two women’s correspondence, the available narrative of their lives is based on the mostly negative impressions of others, most of them men. How wonderful would it be to actually hear Yavorskaiia’s voice (described by Shchepkina-Kupernik as uniquely hoarse and seemingly cracked)? The actress’s voice, demeanor on stage, as well as her costumes were derided by the connoisseurs of dramatic art but adored by numerous theater goers. Shchepkina-Kupernik, one of the most prominent translators of western literature into Russian and, as Rayfield has shown, a prodigiously talented poet and playwright is mostly known for her friendship with Chekhov and her love affair with Yavorskaiia. The “sirens” were the new women of the age. Gregory’s book gives them justice.