Many of Rostopchina’s male contemporaries—Pushkin, Iazykov,Lermontov, Fet, Tiutchev, Del’vig, and Baratynsky—received excellent
formal educations, encouragement in their poetic vocation, and men-
toring. Rostopchina, however, with the exception of one governess dur-
ing her tenth and eleventh years, appears to have been given very little
guidance in her development as either a person or a poet and no sys-
tematic education. Yet she taught herself to read French, German, Ital-
ian, and English literature in the original, while acting on her deter-
mination to become a woman poet—a career for which she had no
models—in the face of horrified family reaction. She may have been
helped to persevere by knowing of the many writers on her father’s side
of the family: her father’s brother, Nikolai Sushkov, writer, critic, and
editor of the al’manakh Raut;her father, who wrote and translated plays;
her grandmother, Mariia Vasil’evna Sushkova (née Khrapovitskaia,
1752–1831), a poet, essayist, and translator of works into Russian from
Italian, French, and English, including Milton’s Paradise Lost.^17
An overemphasized but underanalyzed factor in Rostopchina’s biogra-
phy—and, indeed, in the biographies of all aristocratic women writers
of this generation—is the significance for them of high society (svet,
literally, “the world”). Vissarion Belinsky, echoed by the radical crit-
ics, contemptuously described Rostopchina’s poetry as “fettered to the
ball,” and all her thoughts and feelings leaping to the music of a fash-
ionable galope.^18 Other biographers have charitably explained that for
Rostopchina society was a way to forget her domestic unhappiness or
uncharitably called it her drug.^19 One could more accurately say that for
aristocratic women of Rostopchina’s time and social class, society was,
indeed, the world. As discussed in chapter 1 , upper-class women had
no access to the public places available to many men: universities, uni-
versity discussion groups, literary circles, editorial offices of journals
and newspapers, and so on. For such women, society represented their
only public forum, as important for a sense of self, association, compe-
tition, and achievement as is the workplace today. Rostopchina in her
poem, “Tsirk 19 -ogo veka” (The circus of the nineteenth century, 1850 )
expresses how high the stakes seem to guests at a Russian ball by com-
paring social encounters and their emotional undercurrents with glad-
iatorial combat in ancient Rome. Similarly, Pavlova in Kadril’has Ol’ga
compare herself at her first ball to a raw recruit facing his first battle.^20
Although men poets of this generation may not have written as exten-
sively as Rostopchina did about society, certainly many of them also fre-
Evdokiia Rostopchina 93