thirty-three; Kol’tsov, who died at thirty-three; Mil’keev, who died at thirty-one;
and Guber, who died at thirty-two. During their lives Iazykov and Tiutchev each
published three books of poetry, Baratynskii six, Fet eight, and Pushkin twenty-
six. Maikov published nine books of poetry, including six editions of his poetic
works, and Miller three editions of his works.
15 .While, of course, no “official” canon of Russian literature exists, one may
infer which literary works are considered central from those chosen as topics of
literary criticism and research, those appearing on course reading lists, men-
tioned in literary histories, and included in anthologies.
16 .As will be discussed in chapter 3 , the themes and genres men Russian
Romantics preferred included lyrics about the archetype of the (male-gendered)
poet, a return to a (female-gendered) nature, and relationships with submissive
women or femmes fatales; poemy(narrative poems) about Byronic heroes; and
elegies about lost love or deceased heroes with whom they identified. Women
poets could not use such themes and genres without transforming them. Joe
Andrew, perhaps somewhat reductively, concludes that all of Russian literature
between 1820 and 1840 concerned sexual relations between men and women
from the male point of view (“her defeat, his victory”), in which women were
portrayed as “an impossible collage of conflicting and irreconcilable stereo-
types” (Narrative and Desire in Russian Literature, 215 , 214 , 216 ).
17 .Three women (out of a total of fourteen poets) appear in Poety 1840–1850-
kh godov,and three (out of a total of forty-eight) appear in N. M. Gaidenkov, ed.,
Russkie poety XIX veka(Moskva: Prosveshchenie, 1964 ). One woman poet ap-
pears in Nikolai Bannikov, ed., Tri veka russkoi poezii(Moskva: Prosveshchenie,
1968 ), and one in the two volumes of L. Ia. Ginzberg, ed., Poety 1820–1830godov
(Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1972 ). No women poets appear at all in A.
Krakovskaia and S. Chulkov, eds., Russkaia poeziia XIX veka(Moskva: Khu-
dozhestvennaia literatura, 1974 ); S. M. Petrov, ed., Istoriia russkoi literatury XIX
veka(Moskva: Prosveshchenie, 1970 ); Christine Rydel, ed.,Ardis Anthology of
Russian Romanticism;or in William Brown’s four-volume History of Russian Lit-
erature of the Romantic Period.
Russian literary historians have tended to treat women poets separately, un-
equally, and often condescendingly in such collections as N. K. Bannikov, ed.,
Russkie poetessy XIX veka (Moskva: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1979 ); Uchenova, Ts aritsy
muz;and Fainshtein’s study, Pisatel’nitsy pushkinskoi pory,works that nonetheless
have been very useful in recovering these women’s poetry.
18 .While I do not use Pierre Bourdieu’s entire paradigm, my term “literary
social capital” is indebted to his discussion of the “different kinds” and “over-
all volume of capital understood as the set of actually usable resources and pow-
ers—economic capital, cultural capital, and also social capital” (Distinction,114 –
15 ). Here I am concerned with the usable resources and powers that determine
writers’ positions within a hierarchy defined by reception and subsequent rep-
utation. As we shall see, writers’ economic and cultural capital plays an impor-
tant role in determining their literary social capital. See also John Guillory, Cul-
tural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation(Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993 ). This is not to deny that writers’ literary reputations and
canonical status rise and fall because of literary political factors as well.
222 Notes to Page 7