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

4 .Evdokiia Rostopchina Evdokiia Rostopchina (1811–58), one of the few recognized women po- ets of her generation, has been the ...

emerges even more clearly from another frequently recounted episode: the scandal that erupted when “Talisman” appeared, and Rost ...

Although the poet Nikolai Vasil’evich Berg (1823–84) claims in a memoir to have heard about Gogol’s involvement from Rostopchina ...

object of the male gaze—even in the biographical sketch her brother Sergei published thirty years after her death: She had strai ...

We are left, however, with intriguing half-hints. While all memoirists describe relations between Andrei Rostopchin and Rostopch ...

Many of Rostopchina’s male contemporaries—Pushkin, Iazykov, Lermontov, Fet, Tiutchev, Del’vig, and Baratynsky—received excellent ...

quented balls, dinners, salons, and receptions, despite their access to other public venues, without being accused of superficia ...

ate other depictions of Rostopchina’s life. One could envision Ros- topchina, for example, as a woman who longed equally for soc ...

u   ,  e              [...............]
u   ,    ...

ception and literary reputation. Viewed chronologically, the criticism of Rostopchina’s work reveals some surprising changes—and ...

zhenshchiny” (How women should write, 1840 ). Rostopchina’s poem, which encourages women to be “shy singers” who “with shame hid ...

Sexualization Not only Rostopchina’s life but also her work have been sexualized by both positive and negative criticism. The “p ...

vided the details of her sex life. Chernyshevsky claims that Rostopchina wrote poetry in order to seduce men.^36 Another, citing ...

critic quotes her letter to Viazemsky concerning the 1856 edition of her works: “These are leaves from the secret diary of my he ...

quests, were read and are read without any special compulsion, because there is something in it, ils avaient quelque chose là,un ...

Sergei Ernst similarly lists the sources of Rostopchina’s epigraphs and the subjects of what he calls her “souvenir” poems, with ...

tives of the vieux regime.(Ernst, “Karolina Pavlova i gr. Evdokiia Rastopchina” [ 1876 ], 34 ) Once famous, now forgotten. (Khod ...

tional literature. (L. A. Ozerov, introduction to Stikhotvoreniia [ 1970 ], 24–25) Frank Kermode’s interesting study, Forms of A ...

would indeed be unlikely to produce deep or meaningful or even in- teresting poetry. But do these characteristics of the poetess ...

Finally, Rostopchina’s poetry can in no way be said to embody the sphere of domestic and maternal affection. Rather than describ ...