Reinventing Romantic Poetry : Russian Women Poets of the Mid-nineteenth Century

happiness and of long years of heavy bondage. It is the groans of female slavery with all its tortures, its feelings of helpless ...

in her published religious poetry depicted women and women poets (but not men) as fallen and sinful creatures (for example, “Roz ...

even positioned herself against Rostopchina, whom she depicts as a scandalous “George Sandist,” in order to delineate herself as ...

wereexcluded: the military and its pastimes, dueling and gambling, the civil service, lyceums and the classical education provid ...

all the poets in the generation preceding them, including Goethe and Schiller, wrote or translated anacreontic odes. So much a p ...

With a wreath of yellow hops And her glowing cheeks Like the rose’s bright crimson And her mouth in which melts Purple grapes— E ...

aonidy (New muses),Severnaia lira(Northern lyre), and Galatea.M. A. Maksimov, professor of botany at Moscow University, publishe ...

versity, P. A. Pletnev and A. V. Nikitenko. Khomiakov, while stationed in Saint Petersburg with his regiment, frequented the lit ...

functioned very differently for men than they did for women. For up- per-class men poets, salons offered the opportunity to rece ...

(who traveled to Saint Petersburg from Saratov and Riazan’, respec- tively), Bakunina, Rostopchina, and Pavlova (and only after ...

2 .Literary Conventions Several literary critics have argued that Romanticism was a male- gendered institution. Certainly we fin ...

warrior-bard.^3 While poetic self-representation as glorifiers of war can be traced back at least as far as Homer, in late eight ...

them to write only those appropriate to poetesses. For example, Shakhova’s “K zhenshchinam poetam” (To women poets, 1845 ):
 ...

Many of these women, however, chose to represent themselves as po- ets, reworking elements of men’s poetic self-representation. ...

Mordovtseva, whose son died in the Russo-Turkish War, questioned militarism, and her work appeared at a much later date.^13 Fina ...

gendered muse. Shakhova, for example, in an early poem describes her muse as a “maiden-phantom” (deva-prizrak) (“Vdokhnovenie” [ ...

Kul’man in “Korinna” ( 1839 , see appendix) implies that her heroine’s muse is Diana—goddess of the moon but apparently more sup ...

either signed their poems with their full name—as did Gotovtseva, Lisitsyna, Pavlova, and Khvoshchinskaia, who, however, used a ...

Zhadovskaia, who assumed confessional personae; such critics, how- ever, often attacked or ignored women poets like Pavlova, Khv ...

a female-voiced speaker about unhappy love, is followed by “Poslanie k drugu” (Epistle to a friend) and “Pavel i Virginiia” (Pau ...