Although the poet Nikolai Vasil’evich Berg (1823–84) claims in amemoir to have heard about Gogol’s involvement from Rostopchina her-
self, the more closely one looks at this story, the more unlikely it appears.
By October 1845 —when Gogol supposedly encouraged Rostopchina to
smuggle into print a poem critical of the Russian government—he had
become increasingly reactionary. In July of 1846 he would send to Saint
Petersburg the first six chapters of his Vybrannye mesta iz perepiski s
druz’iami (Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends), a book that
would shock Russia’s liberal camp when it appeared in 1847. Nor is there
any evidence that Gogol sympathized with the plight of Poland under
Russian domination. A third problem is that although Rostopchina
wrote the poem in September 1845 , and according to the story met with
Gogol in Rome shortly thereafter, she did not send the poem to Bulgarin
until August of 1846 , almost a year later. Gogol, then, was not the im-
mediate cause of her sending Bulgarin the poem, even if the story of
their meeting is true. The effect of this story, however, is to give credit to
Gogol and depict him as a liberal, while decreasing Rostopchina’s re-
sponsibility for her own political act.^7
Biographers rarely mention that Rostopchina sent Bulgarin alongwith “Nasil’nyi brak” nine other poetical works, as well as the drama
Donna Maria Kolonna Manchini.She requested in her cover letter that
three of the poems, “Liubovnik i moriak” (The lover and the sailor),
“Nasil’nyi brak” (The forced marriage), and “Sosna na Kornishe” (The
pine at Cornish), be printed in that order, supposedly because they
would not reveal her gender.^8 No one has ever asked whether Ros-
topchina might have had artistic reasons for grouping these poems to-
gether or has bothered to analyze “Nasil’nyi brak” in relation to the ac-
companying poems. Critics, in focusing on the “scandal” of “the forced
marriage” have ignored Rostopchina not only as agent but also as poet.
Many other episodes repeated in these Rostopchina biographies sim-ilarly inscribe nineteenth-century gender ideology: Rostopchina Meets
and Pleases Pushkin at a Ball, Rostopchina Perhaps Has an Affair with
Lermontov, Rostopchina Is Seduced and Abandoned and Spends the
Rest of Her Life Pining for Her Former lover, Rostopchina as Salon Host-
ess Bores Her Guests When She Forces Them to Listen to Her Own
Works.^9 That is, while Rostopchina was able, very temporarily, to please
men, including great poets, with her body, she always bored men with
her writing.
In conjunction with these accounts of Rostopchina’s life, we findprominent and often detailed descriptions of Rostopchina’s body as the
90 Evdokiia Rostopchina