The ‘Golden Age’ is a literary historical term used to designate the Pushkin period and the writing of poetry by men. The term ‘Silver Age’ designates the period of modernism, but also refers to the achievement of male poets. However, the Silver Age period was more of a Golden Age for women writers, especially for female lyric poets. In any case, the Silver Age was definitely a period of transition during which women became professionals in all areas of literary activity – in poetry, prose, drama, literary criticism, as well as in the area of popular literature. If at the beginning of the period there were no major female poets, by 1910 there were several. In 1909 Annenskii noted this wealth of female poets as a unique contribution of the modernist movement: ‘Female lyric poetry is one of the achievements of that cultural effort which modernism will bequeath to history’. By the end of the period, there was firmly established a female poetic tradition that has remained a vital stream in modern Russian literature both in the Soviet Union and abroad.

To explain this transition, one must consider aesthetic, historical, philosophical and economic factors. Historically women's status was changing, as Russian society itself was being restructured by the forces of industrialization and urbanization. Economically, a new market for popular commercial fiction gave women writers the possibility of earning a living by writing ‘women's novels’.