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

of her generation.^4 Finally, we shall look at a series of works Pavlova

wrote over a twenty-year period about the position of women in society

in order to trace the development of her views on this subject. As we shall

see, gender issues played as important a role in Pavlova’s life, poetic

practices, reception, and literary reputation as they did for Khvoshchin-

skaia and the other poets of their generation.

One factor accounting for the contrasting literary reputations of

Pavlova and Khvoshchinskaia may simply have been a difference in age.

When Pavlova, who was seventeen years older than Khvoshchinskaia,

started publishing her poetry in the early 1830 s, no one would have

urged her to write prose. By the 1840 s, however, prose had begun to sup-

plant poetry as the preeminent and more prestigious Russian genre.^5 I

believe, however, that other factors played a significant role in these two

poets’ reputations—factors constituting “literary social capital” (see in-

troduction).

Literary Social Capital

Although for reasons discussed in chapter 1 these women poets as a

group enjoyed very little literary social capital—access to education,

mentoring, social connections with literary gatekeepers and opinion

makers, the opportunity to be a literary critic or journal editor—differ-

ences did exist among them. For example, in contrast with Khvoshchin-

skaia’s impoverished, déclassé family living in the provinces, Pavlova’s

family was well-to-do, well connected, and lived in Moscow, one of the

two publishing centers.

Of course, women poets, like other women, also could capitalize on

their attractiveness to men, as did Rostopchina, but this generally did

not help them professionally. Although, as we have seen, critics sexual-

ized all women poets, they more often dismissed as a poetessaan attrac-

tive woman, for the very reason that she conformed to gender norms.

Nor did capitalizing on the “feminine” characteristic of beauty protect

women poets from ad feminamattacks. Beauty, like any source of female

power, was seen as dangerous, even demonic. As the holy Prekrasnaia

dama(beautiful lady) inevitably turns into the disreputable neznakomka

(unknown woman) in the poetry of Aleksandr Blok, so the beautiful, re-

fined poetess implies her binary opposite, the whore.^6

Women poets as well as men poets could generate social capital by

hosting salons, thus influencing literary production.^7 A salon not only

allowed these women to earn the gratitude and good will of important

138 Karolina Pavlova