not reflect their wishes. Pavlova’s only poetry collection to appear dur-
ing her lifetime, published in Russia in 1863 , after she was already liv-
ing abroad, was badly edited by two Russian friends. Khvoshchinskaia
strongly objected to having her poetry “edited” for publication by
Vladimir Zotov (then editor of Literaturnaia gazeta), to Zotov’s amuse-
ment. Similarly, Nadezhda Teplova, who was forced to work through ed-
itor and Moscow University professor Mikhail Maksimovich, expressed
annoyance at his attempts to improve her poetry.^11 These difficulties, I
suggest, are the effects of social conditions for women, discussed in the
next chapter.
This is not to deny that men writers also had trouble getting pub-lished and controlling their work. For example, Pushkin’s first poetry col-
lection did not appear until 1825 because the friend to whom he en-
trusted the manuscript in 1820 did not keep his promise to publish it.
Guber’s first book of poetry, although passed by the censor, never ap-
peared in print, and the badly edited posthumous edition of his works
( 1859 ), according to the Soviet scholar E. M. Shneiderman, cannot be
considered a reliable text. As for problems with artistic control, Osip
Senkovsky, the editor of Biblioteka dlia chteniia(Library for reading), was
notorious for reworking all authors’ texts without their permission.^12
Nonetheless, most of the canonical and noncanonical men poets, as we
shall see, not only enjoyed the help of powerful mentors at the begin-
ning of their careers but also might themselves become publishers or ed-
itors of journals and al’manakhi(annual literary collections), thus gain-
ing control of literary “means of production.” I do not intend to suggest
that the literary careers of the canonical men poets were typical for all
men poets of their generation, but rather that social constraints made
such achievements impossible for any woman.
A related issue for these women poets consists in the long interrup-tions we find in their careers, what Tillie Olsen calls “silences.” Olsen ob-
serves that while men writers also fall silent for external reasons, women
additionally have had to contend with social and family demands that
make sustained writing especially difficult (Silences, 17 , 23 , 38–39). In her
enumeration of silences, Olsen mentions writers “never coming to book
form at all” ( 6 ), a term that describes Khvoshchinskaia, Bakunina, and
Gotovtseva. Khvoshchinskaia published a great deal of poetry in tolstye
zhurnaly (“thick” journals) and newspapers but never collected it in
book form (although she did publish books of her prose). Bakunina and
Gotovtseva may have “chosen” not to publish the notebooks of their po-
etry that still remain in archives, but that choice was probably condi-
6 Introduction