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

Rather, the speaker struggles with the polarization that her society

creates in her between two of her roles: the poet (“at a book, at work”)

and the woman:

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(Implacable persecutors of innocent vanity

You command the woman-poet

To live by thought and inspiration.

To dedicate her lively youth only to songs [i.e., poetry]

To renounce all glittering toys

To extirpate everything innate in us

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

To you, harsh judges, to you

Childish ecstasy at happy celebrations is inaccessible!)

The speaker feels she must choose between the male image of the

poet, which she perceives as dry, harsh, joyless, and disembodied, and

her own “feminine” desire to enjoy herself. Yet although the speaker’s

last words are a demand for pleasure, affirming that she is a “woman,”

not a “poet” (“I love a party, give me parties!”), she has chosen to express

herself in a poem. None of the critics have commented on, or perhaps

even noticed, this deliberate irony.

This is not to suggest that Rostopchina never took the poetess stance,

never promoted or even exploited the idea of the “essential feminine”

in her poetry, but rather to suggest that her work deserves a different

kind of reading. Like “Iskushenie,” other poems by Rostopchina—lines

of which are often quoted out of context—might better be understood

as her struggle to deal with the tensions inherent in her “society’s con-

cepts of being a writer and a woman” (Feldman, introduction to British

Women Poets of the Romantic Era,xxviii).

In “Chernovaia kniga Pushkina,” for example, Rostopchina describes

her feelings when Vasilii Zhukovsky, Pushkin’s longtime mentor and

friend, presented her with a notebook he found among Pushkin’s effects

after Pushkin’s death. Zhukovsky had written a few poems in the blank

108 Evdokiia Rostopchina