Eakin Moss's Only Among Women is a generous study of literary and cinematic depictions of women's community, spanning high realism of the 1860s, turn-of-the-century mysticism, socialist realism, and the Stalinist period. The new perspective it provides on gender in literature and film in Russian and Soviet society is augmented by a heightened awareness of the social, political, and ideational needs that motivate individual authors’ constructs of women's community. These constructs remain squarely within men's purview, leaving women tangential to the ideologies that their imagined community is used to promote.

Scrupulously contextualized in the cultural and political climate to which they respond, Eakin Moss's illuminating readings of individual works document radical shifts in how women's community is construed, but also prevailing continuities. Close attention to how writers frame women's community reveals their efforts to find solutions for pressing social, political, philosophical, and aesthetic concerns, making this book about gender also a literary and cultural history. The study's philosophical thrust expands its interest still further. Eakin Moss enriches her treatment of community with work of western philosophers, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and, as her chapter titles reflect, particularly Jean-Luc Nancy, who interrogates community and its political implications in the aftermath of Stalinism.

An introduction titled “Imagined” provides the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of the chapters that follow and situates the works that receive analysis in the literary and social debates of their times. Outlined here is the multiplicity of visions into which women's purported propensity for communal existence is absorbed, including nationality, divinity, and communism, but also the curtailment of selfhood and individual agency on which this valorized communality is predicated.

Chapter 1, “Rational,” studies Nikolai Chernyshevskii's What Is to Be Done? (1863), shifting the conventional focus on free love to the political project of the novel, which frames women's community—a manifestation of women's illogic that transcends rationality—as a means to obviate inequality and move toward a utopian future. Lev Tolstoi's response with his own vision of community follows in Chapter 2, “Organic,” which examines moments from War and Peace that illustrate his refutation of Chernyshevskii. The centerpiece is the friendship that develops between Natasha and Princess Marya after Prince Andrei's death and that exemplifies, as Eakin Moss persuasively argues, an idealized community. The third chapter, “Inoperative,” moves from these divergent idealizations of women's community to the skepticism toward community evinced in Anton Chekhov's stories and his Three Sisters (1901). Here Eakin Moss draws Kira Muratova's 2002 film Chekhovian Motifs into the discussion. Muratova's response to Chekhov's views on community reflects her cognizance of their relevance in her own time and documents a persistent need to deal with isolation.

The three opening chapters of Only Among Women center on women's community as a means to ameliorate social, moral, and political ills. The two chapters that follow explore the symbolic and allegorical functions assigned to the concept of women's community. Chapter 4, “Erotic,” leads into the twentieth century and the displacement of realism with decadence, naturalism, and symbolism that mark a major shift in how women are portrayed and in how these portrayals signify. Foregrounded by debates surrounding Tolstoi's Kreutzer Sonata (1889), the woman question and gender identity assume a prominent place in literature, while women's community is eroticized. This chapter features brothels in two works that depict women's community as endangering rational order and blame it for social problems of the modern age: Maxim Gor΄kii's story “Vas΄ka the Red” and Aleksandr Kuprin's novel The Pit (1915), both of which connect to Chekhov's brothel story “A Nervous Breakdown.” Eakin Moss's insightful reading of Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal's “Thirty-Three Abominations” (1907) leads into Chapter 5, “Bolshevik,” which shows how idealized views of women's community of the previous century are absorbed into Soviet propaganda to further the new state's political ends. Films of the Stalinist period feature women's community as modeling an ideal collective that, incidentally, feminizes men, who join in adulation of Iosif Stalin. Here manipulation of the cinematic medium and its viewers receives excellent treatment, deepening understanding of the films’ messages. Only Among Women concludes with an epilogue titled “Traumatic,” which features post-Soviet stories by Viktor Pelevin and Lyudmila Ulitskaia that reject Chernyshevskii's utopian notions of women's community that made a comeback under Stalin and warn against modeling lived life on literary fictions.

Rich in content and thought, Eakin Moss's beautifully-written book commands attention and opens the way for future studies.