such issues, and although, I hasten to add, I do not question the impor-
tance of men writers of the Golden Age, this study to a large degree
grows out of the questions that such canon studies raise. They make it
possible to read with an open mind the work of writers who as yet have
no critical “context”; they keep us from labeling the poetry of these
women as substandard and inept simply because it differs from that of
their male contemporaries. Rather, such questions encourage us to con-
sider whether this poetry’s formal and aesthetic differences (discussed
in chapters 2 and 3 ) might not also have meaning and value.
Looking at these women’s poetry through the lens of gender not onlyhelps to explain why these poets are unknown but also offers a new per-
spective on the Golden Age and Romanticism in Russia. How might
women poets have experienced the social and literary environments of
early nineteenth-century Russia? What effects might these environ-
ments have had on their writing? Did these women use poetic devices
and genres differently from men, and can we define those differences?
What functions might those differences have served? Did these women
in fact subscribe to a different and definable aesthetic? Such questions
form a necessary basis for evaluating the work of these women poets.
My purpose in this study, then, is neither to establish a new literarycanon nor to add writers to the one that presently exists; as we shall see,
a great deal of theoretical and recovery work will have to be done before
the canon can be reevaluated.^34 Rather, I explore the poetry and poetic
practices of several Russian women writers, both in their own terms and
also in comparison with those of their male contemporaries. Another
purpose is to show the need for critical tools (“interpretive strategies”)
that will allow us objectively to evaluate women’s poetry in comparison
to men’s. I would add that on a personal level I consider these particu-
lar unknown writers well worth investigating and recovering because
much of their poetry moves and excites me, and I imagine that others
may find it meaningful as well.
Let us return to our first and most difficult theoretical question, onethat is central to this study of unknown women’s writing: How are we
to evaluate these poets’ work in order to determine whether they have
been justly or unjustly forgotten? What criteria can we use in the ab-
sence of the “context” of critical and interpretive essays, book-length
studies, biographies, reference work entries, conference sections, a place
on the syllabus, and annotated critical editions of their work? Or, to put
it another way, what does it mean to say that a poet is “good”?
Some critics, as mentioned in the preceding discussion, have argued14 Introduction