shchina,as a source of biographical information, and Romanov (editor’s intro-
duction, 22 ) discusses Rostopchina’s novel in verse, Dnevnik devuskhi, exclu-
sively as autobiography. Similarly, in a review of Rostopchina’s 1856 poetry col-
lection, “Stikhotvoreniia grafini Rostopchinoi,” Chernyshevskii assumed that all
of Rostopchina’s poems had the same speaker, who was Rostopchina herself.
Chernyshevskii called this speaker Rostopchina’s “lyric I” and proceeded to
lambaste it for immorality.
38 .“It is well known that with Pushkin the authorial ‘bio’ and the lyric ‘I’ of
his heroes are often very close, almost merging” (Yuri Druzhnikov, Contempo-
rary Russian Myths, 153 ).
39 .Khodasevich, “Grafinia E. P. Rostopchina,” 45 ; Pedrotti, “Scandal of
Countess Rostopcˇina’s Polish-Russian Allegory,” 211–12; Uchenova, Ts aritsy
muz,5–6; and Romanov, editor’s introduction, 17.
40 .On women’s defensive use of the “modesty topos,” see introduction and
Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, 8.
41 .Belinskii, “Stikhotvoreniia grafini E. Rostopchinoi, “Polnoe sobranie sochi-
nenii, 5 : 459 ; Ernst, “Karolina Pavlova i gr. Evdokiia Rastopchina,” 32 ; Ranchin,
editor’s introduction, 5 n. 2. See also Bernice Carroll’s “The Politics of Original-
ity: Women and the Class System of the Intellect,” in which she argues that “orig-
inal” is a political term used to create “lines of inheritance for control of re-
wards” for powerful men, rewards that are denied to women, among others
( 147 ).
42 .Nekrasova, “Grafinia E. P. Rostopchina,” 51 ; Aronson and Reiser, Liter-
aturnye kruzhki i salony, 287.
43 .Sandler, introduction to Rereading Russian Poetry, 5. Rostopchina invari-
ably used poèt,never poetessa,for her female personas. See her “Poslednii tsve-
tok” ( 1835 ), “Iskushenie” ( 1839 ), “Pesn’ vozvrata” ( 1847 ), and Dnevnik devushki
6 : iii.
44 .We find Rostopchina referred to as a “poèt” in reviews by Pletnev, Ak-
sakov, Kireevskii (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Moskva: V. tip. Bakhmeteva, 1861
[reprint, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1983 ], 1 : 118 ); Druzhinin, Bykov, Berg, and Belinskii
(“Stikhotvoreniia grafini E. Rostopchinoi,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4 : 456 )
although, as we have seen, they discuss her work in gendered and condescend-
ing terms. Later nineteenth-century writers (Chernyshevskii, Ernst, and Ros-
topchina’s brother Sergei Sushkov) refer to her as a poetessa, as do all twentieth-
century accounts of Rostopchina that I have read (Khodasevich, Ranchin,
Romanov, Afanas’ev, Kiselev, and Fainshtein). Fainshtein unconsciously illus-
trates the change from calling Rostopchina a poètto a poetessa.He writes, “Plet-
nev... wrote about the talent of the poetessa, ‘She is without doubt the first poèt
now of Russia’” (Pisatel’nitsy pushkinskoi pory, 92 ; italics mine). Rostopchina ap-
pears to have been demoted still further frompoèt;she recently appeared on a
Russian newspaper’s daily birthday list identified as literator(man/woman of
letters), a term generally not associated with poets (“Odinnadtsataia polosa:
Dni rozhdeniia,” Moskovskii komsomolets,Jan. 4 , 1999 , 643 Kb, Universal Database
of Russian Newspapers, July 20 , 2000 ).
45 .Ivan Aksakov, “Stikhotvoreniia grafini E. P. Rastopchina [sic],” in his Ivan
Sergeevich Aksakov v ego pismakh, 1 : 309 , 310–12.
Notes to Pages 100 –102 259