ets to express a more complex and uncomfortable relation with God and
nature than did their male contemporaries (see chapter 2 ).
As for women’s tastes, the scholar Anne Mellor argues that women’sdifferent experiences in the nineteenth century resulted in different
artistic concerns and a different aesthetic, at least among British Ro-
mantic women writers. In contrast to Romantic male concerns with the
“creative imagination... the achievements of genius... the sponta-
neous overflow of powerful feelings,” she writes, British women writ-
ers were interested in “right feeling” (“Criticism of Their Own,” 30 ), “the
workings of the rational mind” ( 31 ), joining sensibility with “correct
perception” ( 39 ), and an “ethic of care” ( 32 ). Instead of celebrating “the
transcendental ego standing alone,” British women writers represented
“a self that is fluid... with permeable ego boundaries,” one that “locates
its identity in its connections with a larger human group” ( 31 ). That is,
British women writers placed women’s concerns (nonviolence, gender
equality, education of the young) in the foreground, opposing both the
patriarchal values of neoclassicism, and those of the alienated Roman-
tic artist. Several of the Russian women poets we are considering like-
wise appear to have subscribed to this aesthetic. Aleksandra Fuks in her
“Grecheskaia skazka” (A Greek tale, 1834 ) warns against the dangers to
women of romantic love untempered by the rational mind. Karolina
Pavlova in Dvoinaia zhizn’ (A Double Life) and “Za chainym stolom” (“At
the Tea Table”) emphasizes the importance of educating women in ra-
tionality and accurate perception. The many poems these poets ad-
dressed to groups of friends and to family members, discussed in chap-
ter 3 , indicate a self that locates its identity in connection with larger
groups.
I suspect that contemporary men critics, unfamiliar with the experi-ences underlying these women’s poetry, found it alien and incompre-
hensible and therefore dismissed it as substandard.^40 For example, as we
shall see in chapter 3 , Vissarion Belinsky, Russia’s best-known critic, den-
igrated as rebiacheskii(puerile) a poem by Teplova in which the speaker
dreads her inevitable separation from her sister in death and promises,
should she die first, to return to tell her sister of her experiences.
Teplova’s poem, addressed to a family member and treating death as an
extension of life, was typical of women’s, but not men’s, poetry.
Another factor in men critics’ reception of these women poets was thegendering of “genius,” a favorite Romantic concept, as male. The scholar
Christine Battersby defines the genius as “a superior type of being who
Introduction 17