Efron, 1911 ), 5 : ix–x. Viazemskii’s letter to Pushkin about Gotovtseva sexualized
and trivialized her—perhaps to spare Pushkin’s feelings but also, it would ap-
pear, as an expression of male bonding against women writers. “Do me the kind-
ness, friend Aleksandr Sergeevich, to put together a little madrigal in response
[to Gotovtseva’s epistle to Pushkin]. Don’t disgrace your pimp.... [I]t is fun to
indulge a young girl. [Gotovtseva at the time was twenty-nine.] Here are my
verses to her, so we can print this Susannah between two old adulterers.” On
Shakhovskaia, see my “Praskov’ia Bakunina and the Poetess’s Dilemma,” 50. The
complaint about Khvoshchinskaia, probably written by Vladimir Zotov, ap-
pears in “Peterburgskii vestnik,” Panteon, no. 8 (Aug. 1852 ): 17.
25 .Critics imposed the role of poetess on Zhadovskaia; they emphasized
her “songs of feminine bondage,” ignored her other themes, and treated her ex-
periments with prosody as evidence of her inability to write verses that scanned.
See my “Nineteenth-Century Women Poets,” 99–101, and Mary Zirin, “Iuliia
Zhadovskaia,” in Tomei, Russian Women Writers, 1 : 374. On the contrast between
Bakunina’s published and unpublished works, see my “Praskov’ia Bakunina
and the Poetess’s Dilemma.”
Rusalki,which I’ve translated as “water spirits” or “mermaids,” in Russian
folklore function as fertility spirits. They also were said to be the spirits of se-
duced and abandoned young women who had drowned themselves. Appear-
ing near bodies of water, they might revenge themselves by drowning or de-
stroying men. On rusalkisee Linda Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief(Armonk, N.Y.: M.E.
Sharpe, 1989 ), 75–81, and Natalie Moyle [Kononenko], “Mermaids (Rusalki) and
Russian Beliefs about Women,” New Studies in Russian Language and Literature,
ed. Anna Crone and Catherine Chvany (Columbus: Slavica, 1986 ), 221–38.
26 .For an analysis of this poem and the relationship between Pavlova and
Rostopchina, see Taylor, “Autobiographical Poetry or Poetic Autobiography,”
33–48.
27 .On Shakhovskaia’s epic, see my “Praskov’ia Bakunina and the Poetess’s
Dilemma,” 49–50.
28 .On the movement of Russian literature from the “gentlemen’s” party to
the “plebeians” in the 1830 s, see Mirsky, History of Russian Literature,96–97. In
the following discussion of male Romantic institutions, I am indebted to Todd,
Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin,and Theodore Ziolkowski, German Ro-
manticism and Its Institutions(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990 ).
29 .Walter Ong, quoted in Tayler and Luria, “Gender and Genre,” 100. See
also David F. Noble, A World without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of
Western Science(New York: A. A. Knopf, 1992 ).
30 .Pushkin, for example, who was an indifferent student at Tsarskoe Selo,
alluded several times to Ovid and Sappho and wrote elegies, epigrams, an
anacreontic ode, and a vakkhicheskaia pesn’(Bacchic song). While these women
poets did not need knowledge of classical languages to use classical genres,
they used them far less frequently and comfortably than did their classically ed-
ucated contemporaries, as shall be discussed in chapter 3. See also Tayler and
Luria, “Gender and Genre,” 101–3; Wellek, “Concept of Romanticism in Liter-
ary History,” 149–50.
31 .Mirsky, History of Russian Literature, 74. On anacreontic poetry, see J. M.
Notes to Pages 29–32 231