Beauty Secrets of Margarita Morozova

Novella, 2005
Ed. Roxanne Carter, Persephassa Press
Introduction by Guy Maddin
Frontispiece by Xanthippe Svanstrom

From the Introduction
Miss Firunts’ strange and incomparable novella takes us on a long night-swim through dazzling sequin-strewn, tar-thick death-waters…
— Guy Maddin

A Note From the Publisher
The Beauty Secrets of Margarita Morozova is a lush novel told in a series of chapters numbered in the manner of Coco Chanel’s perfume…By turns poetic, vitriolic, and nostalgic…
— Roxanne Carter

A novella featuring Alla Nazimova—the queer silent film queen and Muscovite émigré—appearing as Margarita Morozova, a cipher for Soviet expatriation.

The Beauty Secrets of Margarita Morozova is the subject of The Cosmological Cosmetics Regimen, a University of Melbourne undergraduate thesis by Nicola Trethowan.

From The Cosmological Cosmetics Regimen: Metamorphosis and Monolingualism in the Text of Identity
The Cosmological Cosmetics Regimen investigates the construction and transformation of identity in texts. How to narratives project, frame, and identify images of the archetypal femininity? What prevents the agency of this figure, and what role does archetypal imagery perform in transforming narrative progress? The purpose of my study is to generate a hypothetical position about the construction of identity in texts. I draw upon critical discourses of metamorphosis and monolingualism to establish how identity transforms as a text in translation. I develop my argument through close textual analysis of a case study, The Beauty Secrets of Margarita Morozova, negotiating a dual methodology of archetypal criticism and post-structuralist discourse analysis. The study concludes that identities of literary texts dissimulate and disfigure the integral binary terms of narrative subjectivity by translating the archetypal object of desire to an image of identity.