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

ate other depictions of Rostopchina’s life. One could envision Ros-

topchina, for example, as a woman who longed equally for social ac-

ceptance and for self-expression, but whose society forced her into the

role of sexual/political rebel. To be sure, Rostopchina longed for social

success and reveled in conducting salons, hosting dinners, and social-

izing with the emperor and empress. The inscription that she wrote for

Empress Alexandra Fedorovna in 1841 suggests that Rostopchina saw

her as the ideal woman, perhaps as the mother she had lost: “And to

whom, then, Madame, would one address [this book] if not to Your

Majesty, to Her, the most eminent Woman among all women, the sweet-

est, most tender, the most right-thinking and the most richly endowed

in feelings, imagination, and kindness?”^25

Yet there appears to have been another equally strong side to Ros-

topchina that demanded freedom, self-determination, and self-

expression. That is, her rebellion against being sexually confined in an

unsatisfactory marriage may have been of a piece with the works of so-

cial protest she wrote throughout her life. Her support of the Decem-

brists, for example, expressed in such poems as “Mechta” (A dream,

1830 ) and “K stradatel’tsam” (To the sufferers, 1827 ) did not end with her

youth. In the 1840 s and 1850 s she sent copies of “K stradatel’tsam” with

a warm inscription to two Decembrists, Z. G. Chernyshov and Sergei

Bolkonsky. On her deathbed she translated Pushkin’s Decembrist poem

“Vo glubine sibirskikh rud” (In the depths of Siberian ore, 1827 ) into

French for Alexandre Dumas.^26 She wrote other works of social protest

as well, as shall be discussed later. One could argue that in “Nasil’nyi

brak” Rostopchina made the forbidden connections between the op-

pression of women, the oppression of Russians, and the oppression of

Poles (patriarchy, autocracy, and imperialism) and paid dearly for it.

Rostopchina faced an additional problem: the social requirement that

she pretend to conform to social standards for women. So in “Vmesto

predisloviia” (Instead of an introduction), the foreword to her 1856 col-

lected works, she wrote:

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Evdokiia Rostopchina 95