Towards the Problem of Motherhood in Russian Literature of the 19thCentury. For the objective reasons, Russian masculine literature of the 19thcentury did not pay attention to maternal subjects, which play an important rolein women's prose, especially in the modern one. There is an opinion that theimages of mothers depicted by the Russian writers are characterized by a tendencyto self-sacrifice, and maternal love seemed to be described as exclusivelyiconic. This article aims to deny this statement because it’s not based on thehistorical development of the concept of motherhood. The examples from theworks of Nekrasov, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who portrayed images of mothers,demonstrate that their attitude towards motherhood was based on the understandingof its functions typical to that time. The Russian writers also outlinedsome trends that would be put forward by feminist criticism in the field ofmotherhood problems.