publish six editions of his complete works during his lifetime. Both Kho-
miakov and Maikov have separate Biblioteka poeta editions of their
works, perhaps another indication of literary social capital. However,
Khomiakov is known primarily as a Slavophile philosopher and is con-
sidered to have subordinated his poetry to his Slavophilism. Maikov
won many honors in the course of his life, but critics have called his po-
etry “flat,” “weak,” and “overworked.”^5
The noncanonical poets, however, did share male privilege with thecanonical poets, which may account for the wider variety of social
classes they occupied than the women poets. As discussed in chapter 1 ,
men’s literary social networks generally extended to men of all classes
but excluded women. Belinsky helped Kol’tsov, the son of a Voronezh
cattle dealer, publish his first book of poetry, but one cannot imagine
him similarly helping the daughter of a Voronezh cattle dealer. Zhu-
kovsky brought Mil’keev, the orphaned son of a Siberian petty civil ser-
vant, to Saint Petersburg to be educated as a poet, but one doubts he
would have similarly sponsored Mil’keev’s sister. Guber, whom Pushkin
befriended and encouraged in his translation of Goethe’s Faust,became
a literary critic for the journal Biblioteka dlia chteniia.Miller founded his
own journal, Razvlechenie (1859–81). Fedotov received encouragement
to pursue his career as an artist from the fable writer I. A. Krylov and
was embraced by the Sovremennikgroup (Druzhinin, Nekrasov, Panaev,
etc.). Such opportunities were not available to women.
Poetical Practices
As we have noted in the course of this study, the poetical practices of non-
canonical men and women poets resemble each other, while differing
from those of the canonical men. Many women and men noncanonical
poets avoided classical themes, presumably because they lacked a clas-
sical education. Both women and men noncanonical poets wrote many
more prayers, poems to family members, and poems about children
(lullabies, elegies on their deaths).^6 Noncanonical men poets less fre-
quently personify nature as a female sex partner than do the canonical
men and do not generally address poems to a sexualized female muse.^7
They also write more cross-gender poems than do their canonical men
counterparts. In short, in some ways they could be said to write “like a
woman.”^8
Such similarities in the poetic practices of noncanonical men andwomen poets bring to mind Julia Kristeva’s definition of femininity, not
170 In Conclusion: Noncanonical Men Poets