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

 

!  

!

 

  !

h

(My misfortune! My wealth!

My sacred craft!)

(“Ty, utselevshii v serdtse

nishchem” [You, who

having remained whole in a

destitute heart], 1854 , 154 )

As for poetic persona, from the beginning Pavlova used feminine

endings when writing about herself as poet (“Sonet” [Sonnet], 1839 , 76 ;

“Da il’ net” [Yes or no], 1839 , 78 ; “Duma” [Meditation], 1840 , 89 ;

“Duma,” 1843 , 114 ), although she also wrote poems with unmarked

endings (for example, “Est’ liubimtsy vdokhnovenii” [There are inspi-

ration’s favorites], 1839 , 79 ; “Motylek” [The butterfly], 1840 , 83–84), and

very occasionally verses in a male voice (“Vezde i vsegda” [Everywhere

and always], 1846 , 127 ; “Sputnitsa feia” [The fairy companion], 1858 ,

198 ). Pavlova’s awareness of the issue of gender and poetic persona

emerges clearly in “Fantasmagorii” (Phantasmagorias, 1856–58, 373–

76 ). In the first section of this mixed-genre work she recounts the

thoughts of a poet whose gender she carefully withholds. The poet plays

with gendered metaphors to describe the act of writing: the writer is a

rapist who attacks the “virgin” white page with a (phallic) pen, but also

the princess Scheherazade, who must constantly find new ways to en-

tertain a bored shah-public or face extinction. The section concludes, “It

must be added that this was a woman” ( 376 ). Similarly, in Dvoinaia zhizn’

Pavlova reveals the gender of the narrator only in the second stanza of

the envoi when she uses a gender-marked verb:

     u  u 

      

h

(And for a long time I was able

To keep [this thought] silently in my soul, only for myself)

( 306 )

Such devices indicate that Pavlova, like other women writers discussed

in chapter 2 , while aware of the adverse judgments she would incur,

chose to write as a woman.

As for audience, Pavlova addresses several of her poems to women:

Iuliia Zhadovskaia, Evdokiia Rostopchina, A. V. Pletneva, Ol’ga

Karolina Pavlova 147