1 .Social Conditions
The social conditions that these poets shared included Russian women’s
educational, economic, legal, and literary-historical status.^1 As we shall
see, these poets responded to those conditions in a great variety of ways.
During the first half of the nineteenth century the only educationavailable for nonserf women—all the poets in this group—was pro-
vided by home tutors, instituty (government-run boarding schools for
girls of the nobility), or private pensionsof varying quality.^2 The first gim-
naziia(secondary schools) for women would not be established until
Economically, such women could only survive outside of marriage byremaining dependent on relatives or by entering a convent.^3 Few if any
opportunities existed for them to earn money, and they inherited con-
siderably less than their male siblings.^4 Within this group of fourteen po-
ets, all of them married except for Kul’man, who died at age seventeen,
Shakhova, who became a nun, and Bakunina, who inherited an estate
from an aunt, where she was able to live with her two unmarried sisters.
Lisitsyna’s biography remains unknown.
But although marriage represented the only option for most Russianwomen, it also put women at a disadvantage. The law not only required
a woman to live “in absolute obedience” (v neogranichennom poslushanii)
to her husband—whose permission she needed to work, go to school,
or travel—but also condoned a husband’s corporal punishment of his
wife “short of severe bodily injury.” Even if a severely assaulted woman
managed to get her husband convicted of the crime, the law still re-
quired her to live with him when he returned from prison or exile; Rus-
sian Orthodox canon law, which regulated marriage law, did not recog-
nize legal separations. Nor did abuse, no matter how severe, constitute
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