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

notebook before sending it to Rostopchina with a letter requesting that

she fill it with her poetry. In the 1856–57edition of her works Ros-

topchina included the letter before her poem that concludes:

! 

   , 

       ! 

   , ,  ,

.     u

 

       u

,

.     " ",   ,   

*

 u /u

          

    

!..

      



 

       ,

      

u 

       

!

      





 

       ,

       

     

    u :

  

!..  

    

       

*



    

"   .

h

(And this gift is for me, for me!

My heart’s confessor arrived to entrust it to me, weak and unworthy.

He commanded me with my shy, inexperienced, ungraceful song

To replace the marvelous verse of Pushkin!

But it is not for me to fulfill such an assignment,

It is not for me to attain the desired heights!

Not all the sources of living poetry

Not all subjects are accessible and given to me:

I am a woman!... in me both thought and inspiration

Must be constrained by humble modesty.)

While critics often cite the last two lines of this poem as an example

of Rostopchina’s “femininity,” one notes the tension between their ap-

parent humility and the repetition of “mne” (to me) eight times in the

last ten lines of the poem.^57 And perhaps Rostopchina in these last two

lines does not so much humbly prescribe and glorify her lesser role as

a woman poet as simply note the limitations to which she is subject. One

thinks of similar lines by the American poet Frances Sargent Osgood

(1811–50), born the same year as Rostopchina:

Ah! Woman still

Must veil the shrine,

Where feeling feeds the fire divine,

Nor sing at will,

Untaught by art

The music prison’d in her heart!^58

“Art” here, one suspects, means artifice. Other poems by Rostopchina

yield richer, denser, and more complex meanings in the light of the “in-

terpretative strategies consonant with the concerns, experiences and

Evdokiia Rostopchina 109