On Thursday, Russians celebrated one of the few holidays that has remained intact since Soviet times -- International Womens' Day. So perhaps this is a good time to take a look at the female side of Russian literature.

Of course, there's never been any shortage of female writers. Some genres, such as detective fiction, are now occupied almost exclusively by women. But what about literature aimed at female readers; books written by women, for women, whose very mention makes men shudder? In short, is there Russian chick lit?

Chick lit is a recent phenomenon, even in the West. Sue Townsend introduced it with "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole" (which had a male hero, yes, but was definitely a chick book); Helen Fielding took it a step further with Bridget Jones; and Candace Bushnell pressed the point home with "Sex and the City."

Well, one of the first Russian novels by a female author, "Memoirs of Madame de Batteville," with more than a hint of proto-feminism, appeared in Russian as long ago as 1789! With such a long tradition, it's not surprising that the Russian answer to chick lit would appear in due time. One example was "Luiza Lozhkina's Diary," a 2005 book that began as a series of columns written by Katya Metelitsa for the magazine Bolshoi Gorod. It describes the life of a rather disorganized real estate agent in her 30s who hates cult Danish film director Lars von Trier and loves U.S. author Kurt Vonnegut. Fielding's and Bushnell's books started as columns, too, but there is a key difference between Metelitsa's heroine and her Western counterparts: Luiza has a son. This reflects a serious distinction between attitudes toward young urban professionals here and in the West: In Russia, a thirty-something woman without children somehow doesn't seem right. Mind you, Luiza's son does not transfer the book into the category of "mom lit," or "hen lit." He's a part of her life, not everything she lives for.

This makes the Russian version of chick lit more relaxed. Western working women as portrayed in "chick" books and television shows are extremely aggressive and competitive. They hunt for the scant resources available to them in the big cities -- that is, men -- and they hunt to kill. For Russian women, the resources are even scanter (as one heroine muses, "Unless you turn into a baby-snatcher, all the men you meet after a certain age are either gay, psychotic or married"), but, in the end, they're not that vital. It's strange, but despite the victorious march of feminism in the West, English-language chick lit very much revolves around the world of men, while its Russian counterpart doesn't.