 Besides being a rare example of a female soldier's military memoir, "The Cavalry Maiden" is one of the few sustained accounts of the Napoleonic wars to describe events from the perspective of a junior officer and one of the earliest autobiographical works in Russian literature.Durova became a figure of some cultural interest in Eastern Europe but remained largely unknown to the English-speaking world until Mary Fleming Zirin's translation of "The Cavalry Maiden" in 1988.Durova is now a subject of university syllabi and scholarly publications in comparative literature and Russian history.