men, responds only to the narrator. Unfortunately, at this point the nar-
rator awakens as the first woman writer’s reading ends, and he realizes
he has been dreaming. The story is by Aleksandr Druzhinin, author of
Polinka Saks,who in Russian literary history is depicted as a champion
of women’s rights.^14
Little girls also received warnings about the evils of literary women.In a children’s story, “Perepiski sestry s bratom” (Correspondence be-
tween a sister and brother), thirteen-year-old Masha makes the mistake
of telling her older brother that she would like to be a writer.^15 He replies
with shock, outrage, and threats: “A writer!... Do you understand the
importance of this word, little girl? Of course not! It must be that you
[.. .] only [want] people to talk about you [.. .] friends and strangers to
praise you, perhaps even to publish some of your works” ( 43 ). “Yes, be-
lieve me, my dear Masha, any little girl who already wants to see her little
trivialities in print deserves to be punished” ( 44 ). Masha is suitably
chastened, as is their mother for having let Masha get so out of hand. In
her last letter Masha tells her brother that she has renounced her “brazen
literary schemes[derzkie literaturnye zatei]” ( 102 ) “and I am even afraid of
the name woman writer[pisatel’nitsa]” ( 103 ). In the final letter, her brother
congratulates her upon her reformation. Here, as in the other stories
about women writers, women’s (or girls’) writing is implicitly equated
with “sexual display.”^16
At the same time that women playwrights and prose writers were be-ing attacked, the cultural definition of woman poets gradually shifted
to accommodate the idea of “woman’s sphere.” In England a new con-
sensus arose between 1790 and 1830 that divided “the terrain of poetry
... into two complementary spheres, masculine and feminine” (Ross,
Contours of Masculine Desire, 189 ). Women could now be “poetesses” (as
opposed to poets) and still remain respectable ladies as long as they
were content to “nurture culture as a sociomoral handmaiden” ( 192 )
rather than assume the “visionary” “prophetic stance” ( 91 ) that was the
prerogative of men poets.
This new consensus soon spread to Russia as well. But even thosecritics who praised Russian poetesses did not create an encouraging en-
vironment for women’s writing. The very term poetess (poetessa) both de-
scribed women poets and implied the inferiority of their poetry to that
of men. Critics routinely referred to women’s poetry with condescension,
as milaia(sweet), skromnaia(modest), and iskrennaia(sincere, signaling
artless). One article that appeared in a Russian journal in 1851 praised
North American poetesses for treating poetry as an “accomplishment”
26 Social Conditions