Reinventing Romantic Poetry : Russian Women Poets of the Mid-nineteenth Century

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wounded in battle. Maikov translated three poems by Sappho (“Zachem
venkom iz list’ev lavra” [Why like a wreath from laurel leaves, 1841 ], “Zvezda
bozhestvennoi Kipridy” [Star of divine Venus, 1841 ], “On iunyi polubog i on—
u nog tvoikh!” [He is a young demigod and he is at your feet, 1875 ]).
27 .Bartenev Archive, f. 46 , op. 2 , n. 426 , poems nos. 1 and 2 , RGALI. “K
N. N.” appeared in Moskovskii telegraf,no. 11 ( 1826 ): 115. For “L’Isolement” and
Lamartine’s commentary on it, see A. de Lamartine Premieres et nouvelles medi-
tations poétiques,vol. 1 of Oeuvres de Lamartine (Paris: Hachette, 1886 ), 19–21.
28 .Khvoshchinskaia, “Solntse segodnia za tucheiu chernoi takoi za-
katilosia,” Otechestvennye zapiski 83 , no. 8 ( 1852 ): 317.
29 .On implied readers, see W. Daniel Wilson, “Readers in Texts,” PMLA 96 ,
no. 5 ( 1981 ): 848–63.
For a short time at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Karamzin
led a group of writers who considered upper-class women their ideal readers.
See Gitta Hammarberg, “Reading à la Mode: The First Russian Women’s Jour-
nals,” in Reflections on Russia in the Eighteenth Century,ed. Joachim Klein, Simon
Dixon, and Maarten Fraanje (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2001 ), 218–32, and Judith
Vowles, “The ‘Feminization’ of Russian Literature: Women, Language, and Lit-
erature in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” in Women Writers in Russian Literature,
ed. Toby W. Clyman and Diana Greene (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994 ), 35–
40. By the late 1820 s, however, it had become fashionable to denigrate women’s
minds (see chapter 1 ) and aesthetic capabilities. See V. Brio for Pushkin’s low
opinion of women readers (“Pushkin o vozmozhnosti zhenskoi literatury,” 187–
200 ). The status of Russian women readers suffered additionally at this time be-
cause Russia imported from Europe eighteenth-century “male hostility to the
acts of imagination and identification involved in women reading.” Women’s
novel-reading was construed as a sexual act of “adulterous imagination,” an
idea reflected in Pushkin’s comments in Evgenii Oneginon the reading habits of
Tatiana and her mother. See Andrew Ashfield, introduction to Romantic Women
Poets, 1770–1838, 1 : xii–xiv.
30 .On nineteenth-century male and female literatures, see Gilbert and
Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic;Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British
Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing(Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1977 ); Baym, Women’s Fiction.
On U.S. women’s magazines, see Caroline Garnsey, “Ladies’ Magazines to
1850 : The Beginnings of an Industry,” New York Public Library Bulletin 58 ( 1954 ):
74–88. On editors’ expectations, see Isobel Armstrong, “The Gush of the Femi-
nine: How Can We Read Women’s Poetry of the Romantic Period?” in Romantic
Women Writers,ed. Paula Feldman and Theresa Kelley, 15.
Cheryl Walker argues that Emily Dickinson, who rejected the marketplace,
was able to transform many of the poetess conventions into great poetry
(Nightingale’s Burden).
31 .Pavlova addressed several poems to women. “Da, mnogo bylo nas,
mladencheskikh podrug” (Yes, we were many, friends from early childhood,
1839 ) describes a group of friends whose happiness and freedom as girls con-
trasts with the burdens they have come to know as adults. Similarly, in “Byla ty
s nami nerazluchna” (We were inseparable, 1843 ) the speaker describes a once


Notes to Pages 46–48 239

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