We are left, however, with intriguing half-hints. While all memoirists
describe relations between Andrei Rostopchin and Rostopchina as an-
tagonistic and characterize him as a spendthrift, Rostopchina’s daugh-
ter, Lidiia, implies that he also was physically abusive. Rostopchina’s
brother Sergei Sushkov, Vladislav Khodasevich, and V. S. Kiselev sug-
gest that Rostopchin was homosexual or, in any case, not interested in
sexual relations with Rostopchina. It is true that she did not have any chil-
dren for the first three years of her marriage while she and her husband
were living on his estate, Selo Anna, outside of Voronezh. When she re-
turned to Saint Petersburg in the fall of 1836 , she appears to have had
several affairs and at least two children by another man.^13
Another strange gap in Rostopchina’s biography is the period be-tween 1841 —the year her first book of poetry appeared to very enthu-
siastic reviews—and the fall of 1845 when she, her husband, and their
three children left for a trip to Europe, which lasted until September
- V. S. Kiselev-Sergenin in a recent article is the first to discuss this
period, when Rostopchina was at the height of her popularity, but he
does so exclusively in relation to her affair with Andrei Karamzin, the
son of the Russian historian.^14 It would be interesting to know more
about Rostopchina’s literary activities during this time. Addressing
these and other neglected aspects of Rostopchina’s biography (such as
her relationships with women) might reveal a more complex and com-
pelling picture of her life.^15 More generally, a fresh look at all the facts of
Rostopchina’s life would allow new and possibly truer stories to be told
about her, stories that also might affect the evaluation of her work.
One obvious but underemphasized fact about Rostopchina’s life isthat she surmounted childhood abandonment and almost total neglect
to become a celebrated poet. On the death of Rostopchina’s mother
when Rostopchina was five, her father left her and her two brothers with
their maternal grandparents in Moscow while he worked first in Oren-
burg, then in Saint Petersburg. According to accounts by both of Ros-
topchina’s brothers, their grandparents hired inadequate and dishonest
tutors, otherwise ignoring the children, while the two maiden aunts who
lived in the household treated them with active malice.^16 In 1826 , when
Rostopchina was fourteen, her father returned to Orenburg, taking his
two sons, but not his daughter, to live with him. One need not be a
Freudian to imagine that Rostopchina felt rejected by her father and
abandoned by her brothers in an unpleasant living situation, as she had
already been abandoned by her mother’s death, her father’s absence,
and her tutors’, grandparents’, and aunts’ indifference or hostility.
92 Evdokiia Rostopchina