capital in the lives of canonical and noncanonical men poets. Gender,
however, also appears to have been an important component of a poet’s
literary social capital. Thus, for reasons that will be discussed in chap-
ters 1 and 2 , even well-to-do women poets who lived in Moscow or Saint
Petersburg commanded less literary social capital than their men con-
temporaries.
But what constitutes canonicity in Russian Romanticism and what ac-
counts for the absence of women poets? Pushkin, Russia’s national poet,
occupies what can be thought of as the first circle or the top of a hier-
archy. Just below him we find his poet associates (Baratynsky), poet
friends (Del’vig), and those whose work appeared in his journal, Sovre-
mennik(The contemporary). The poets whom Pushkin mentored (for
example, Iazykov) and Pushkin’s “self-appointed successor,” Lermon-
tov, who suffered political consequences for his outraged elegy on
Pushkin’s death, also occupy ranks near the top.^19 Women poets who had
personal contact with Pushkin (Rostopchina, Pavlova, Fuks), however,
did not thereby enter the canon since Pushkin did not mentor—or re-
spect—women poets and generally thought very little of women’s in-
tellectual and aesthetic capabilities.^20 Nor did critical attitudes toward
Pushkin’s women contemporaries improve during the rest of the nine-
teenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, with the exception of
a short-lived Pavlova revival among the Symbolists (see chapter 6 ).
The Soviet era perpetuated negative attitudes toward women andwomen poets on a political and nationalistic basis. While, according to
a Soviet slogan, the Revolution had “resolved the woman question,”
women’s actual needs and concerns remained a low priority for the So-
viet government, which fostered a paramilitary atmosphere in order to
industrialize the country with all possible speed. Writers were expected
to help build socialism by promoting and celebrating in literature these
heroic goals—a literary climate unpropitious not only to the depiction
of women characters but also to the reputations of women writers.^21
So, for example, K. D. Muratova’s 1962 index, Istoriia russkoi literaturyXIX veka: Bibliograficheskii ukazatel’(History of Russian literature of the
nineteenth century: A bibliographic index) lists only two post- 1917 ar-
ticles about Rostopchina, one published in Irkutsk. In 1965 V. S. Kiselev
pronounced her a forgotten poet. In the case of Karolina Pavlova, now
the best-known woman poet of her generation, we find shorter articles
about her in the 1955 and 1975 Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia(The great
Soviet encyclopedia) than about her husband, Nikolai Pavlov, a littéra-
8 Introduction