formal devices of women writers” discussed in the introduction (Schwe-
ickart, “Reading Ourselves,” 29 ). For example, as suggested in the
comments on “Iskushenie,” one profitably might look for irony in Ros-
topchina’s work.^59 Or one might apply to “Kak dolzhny pisat’ zhen-
shchiny”(How women should write, 1840 ), “Na lavrovyi venets” (On a
laurel wreath,” 1846 ), and Dnevnik devushki(A girl’s diary, 1845 , 6 : iii) Ali-
cia Ostriker’s concept of “the duplicitous,” in which contrary meanings
coexist with equal force; in these works Rostopchina both denies and as-
serts the autonomy of the woman writer. These poems might also be
read in relation to Cheryl Walker’s discussion of women writers’ “am-
bivalence” toward power, ambition, and creativity. Similarly, one might
reexamine the often-republished “feminine” poems about balls men-
tioned earlier in the light of Sandra Gilbert’s concept of “female female
impersonation” or “womanly masquerade,” in which the poet looks at
herself being looked at.
Such interpretative strategies would help us better appreciate Ros-topchina’s novel in verse, Dnevnik devushki,a very original work both in
form (metrics) and content. In the nineteenth century Dobroliubov sar-
castically remarked on its abundance of epigraphs, but the work re-
ceived no other notice. In the twentieth century it has been charac-
terized only as “unsuccessful,” and “drawn out.”^60 Except for brief
excerpts, it has not been republished since 1866.
Rostopchina’s extensive use of epigraphs in this work should be con-sidered in relation to Catriona Kelly’s remarks on the “difference, in-
deed ‘otherness,’ of intertextuality in poetry by women.” Kelly writes
that in contrast to men writers, who observe “a respectful cult of cultural
artifacts,” women writers are “anticanonical”; their subtexts are not
“carefully integrated,” but rather “assembled by accretion, bricolage”
(“Reluctant Sibyls,” 132 ). In Dnevnik devushki Rostopchina assembles an
alternative European literary tradition. Citations from now-forgotten
gynocentric works by women writers (for example, Delphine Gay’s
“Napoline” [ 1833 ], Mme. de Krudener’s Va lerie[ 1803 ], Lady Morgan’s
Woman, or, Ida of Athens[ 1809 ], Mme. Roland’s Memoirs[ 1795 ]) and from
appropriated works by men (Byron, Zhukovsky, Goethe, Pushkin, and
others) create a background against which a woman’s story may be told.
It is a work that deserves further study, both in relation to Elizabeth Bar-
rett Browning’s contemporaneous but “canonically” intertextual novel
in verse, Aurora Leigh( 1856 ), and also in relation to Evgenii Onegin.
All this is not to argue that Rostopchina’s poetry belongs in the canonof Russian literature, but, rather, to point out that much of what has
110 Evdokiia Rostopchina