ception and literary reputation. Viewed chronologically, the criticism of
Rostopchina’s work reveals some surprising changes—and continuities.
To those who have read only twentieth-century Rostopchina criti-cism, the high praise she received in the 1830 s and 1840 s comes as a sur-
prise. Vissarion Belinsky and Petr Viazemsky compared Rostopchina’s
work with Pushkin’s, while after Pushkin’s death Petr Pletnev called her
“without doubt the first poet now in Russia.”^30
Although Belinsky revised his opinion of Rostopchina’s work down-ward starting in the 1840 s, her literary reputation, according to her
brother Sergei, started to fall to its present low level around 1852 , as a
result of her increasingly religious, patriotic, and antirevolutionary be-
liefs. As mentioned previously, these attitudes led radical critics such as
Dobroliubov, Chernyshevsky, and others who increasingly controlled
the periodical press to launch ad feminamattacks on Rostopchina, whom
they disparaged as an immoral, boring writer.^31 By the end of the nine-
teenth and beginning of the twentieth century modernist critics such
as Petr Bykov, Vladislav Khodasevich, and Sergei Ernst found Rostop-
china’s work banal and trivial. They ignored or noted with embarrassed
incomprehension the praise she had received from prominent male
contemporaries.^32
During the Soviet period literary scholars treated Rostopchina am-bivalently. Up to the 1960 s they published nothing by her and almost
nothing about her, presumably because of her social background and
high-society themes. Starting in the 1970 s and 1980 s, however, Ros-
topchina’s work began to appear in anthologies and in several separate
collections. In introductions and notes Soviet scholars, following the
radical critics, dismissed Rostopchina as a second-rate poet, denounced
her as a privileged aristocrat, and cringed at the references to sexuality
in her work. But while condemning her later political conservatism,
they applauded the revolutionary sentiments of her Decembrist poems
and of “Nasil’nyi brak.” They also attempted to save her for socialist re-
alism by depicting her as a Russian patriot and as one who protested
against the inequities of high society—albeit in a limited and ineffec-
tual way.^33
Perhaps reacting against the Western women’s movement, these So-viet critics anthologized and highlighted Rostopchina’s most “femi-
nine” poems. So, for example, the introductory essay to a 1987 col-
lection of Rostopchina’s poetry is tellingly entitled “Da, zhenskaia
dusha dolzhna v teni svetit’sia’“ (Yes, the feminine soul must shine in
the shadow), a citation from Rostopchina’s poem “Kak dolzhny pisat’
Evdokiia Rostopchina 97