Introduction
This study offers some preliminary suggestions toward rethinking Rus-
sian Romanticism, issues of canonicity, and the place of mid-nineteenth-
century women poets in the history of Russian literature. While the
question of whether Russia had a Romantic movement has been de-
bated,^1 most scholars agree that Romanticism was a pan-European phe-
nomenon with national variations, one of which was Russian. René
Wellek has defined three underlying elements common to all national
Romantic movements, Russia’s included: first, a view of poetry for
which the imagination, rather than rationality, is central; second, a view
of the world for which nature, rather than a mechanistic universe, is cen-
tral; and third, a view of poetic style for which symbol and myth, rather
than allegory, are central.^2
Here I wish to consider the place of women poets in Romanticism.Several literary critics have characterized Romanticism as a masculine-
gendered institution unfriendly to women.^3 Certainly, what Bertrand
Russell described as the “essential Romantic trait,” “titanic cosmic self-
assertion,” would not have been easy for women of the time to develop
and express in a society that demanded from them modesty, self-
sacrifice, and devotion to the needs of others.^4 Moreover, a closer look
at Wellek’s three basic elements of Romanticism shows that in practice
they, too, are gender-specific. Men poets, in expressing a “view of po-
etry for which imagination is central,” personified imagination as a fe-
male muse, often depicting her as sexual partner. The “view of the world
for which nature is central” means that Nature—troped as silent, femi-
nine, mother, and Other—served as an object of interpretation or as-
similation by the man poet. The third element, a poetic style for which
symbol and myth are central, meant in the case of several influential
3