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

object of the male gaze—even in the biographical sketch her brother

Sergei published thirty years after her death:

She had straight, delicate features and a swarthy color to her

face. Beautiful and expressive black eyes edged with long lashes,

black hair shiny, fine and not thick.... She was of medium

height, her figure was not distinguished by a graceful form;

beautiful hands; she was not strikingly beautiful, but she was at-

tractive. (S. Sushkov, “Biograficheskii ocherk,” 1 : xxxiv)

Not of great height, unusually shapely for her thirty-five years

with a well-developed bust, a healthy flush that our female gen-

eration would envy, with big, protuberant [pochti na vykate] ex-

tremely intelligent eyes.^10

At that time ( 1849 ) she was rather young, rather shapely, and

could please [men].... [When Rostopchina attended a reading

of Ostrovsky’s Bankrot (The bankrupt) in 1849 ] all eyes looked

only at her and it seems that everyone found her pleasing.^11

Biographies of men poets’ lives generally do not contain such sexual-

ized descriptions of their bodies.

These stories of Rostopchina’s life have affected Rostopchina’s liter-

ary reputation directly, as their common effect is to trivialize her as a po-

etessawhose sexuality defines the significance of her work. No biogra-

phers have similarly looked for the meaning of Lermontov’s life and art

in his love affairs, or highlighted the scandal of Pushkin’s ménage à trois

with his wife and his sister-in-law, or read Tiutchev’s poetry through his

fourteen-year extramarital affair with Elena Denis’eva, a woman

twenty-three years his junior, with whom he had three children.^12 Inter-

estingly, the biographers who trivialize Rostopchina range from nine-

teenth-century radical critics, to modernists, to Soviet critics, to post-

Soviet critics. It would appear that despite dramatic changes in Russian

literary politics in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

the tendency to denigrate women poets remained constant.

In addition to reiterating the same episodes and focusing on Ros-

topchina’s physical appearance, these biographies also share the same

lacunae. For example, while many of the biographies state that in some

way Rostopchina’s husband, Andrei Rostopchin, made her unhappy,

none specify how he did so, surely relevant biographical information.

Perhaps the critics’ reticence results from their respect for Andrei Ros-

topchin’s father, Fedor Vasilevich Rostopchin, the governor general of

Moscow during the Napoleonic invasion and a hero of the War of 1812.

Evdokiia Rostopchina 91