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

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(I am proud that in these pure pages

There is not a sinful word or a guilty thought,

That neither in my songs, nor stories or fables

Have I scorned the command of quiet modesty!

That I have remained a meek woman

In thought, word, and soul!...

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I am proud that in this new book

No one will underline a harmful hint

[.................]

I am proud that a solicitous mother

Will give it without fear to her innocent daughter,

That the girl with a dovelike soul,

Will allow herself to cry and dream over it!.. .)^27

Rostopchina protested her “purity” too much, providing a target for

radical critics; they could safely invoke the patriarchal double standard

to attack Rostopchina as an immoral woman in order to attack her

covertly as an aristocrat of increasingly conservative views. Those crit-

ics who fought against the inequities of class politics—the autocratic

control over men’s civil rights—did not choose to extend their analysis

to sexual politics, the patriarchal control over women’s sexuality.^28 Con-

servative biographers, on the other hand, have “defended” Rostopchina,

also on patriarchal grounds, as a “one-man,” that is, pure and loyal

woman, even if that one man—variously identified as Platon Meshch-

ersky; his brother, Petr Meshchersky; or Andrei Karamzin—was not her

husband.^29 Whether viewed by enemies or apologists, however, Ros-

topchina remains the titillating object of the male gaze. It is worth re-

peating that biographers generally do not consider the sexual behavior

of men poets central to the evaluation of their work.

Literary Reputation

As suggested in the preceding discussion, the gender ideology that

shaped accounts of Rostopchina’s life also played a large role in her re-

96 Evdokiia Rostopchina