in her published religious poetry depicted women and women poets
(but not men) as fallen and sinful creatures (for example, “Rozhdenie
nezabudki” [The birth of the forget-me-not, 1841 ] and “Groza” [The
thunderstorm, 1840 ]). As English poetesses “positioned themselves
against bluestockings to delineate their own ‘normality’“ (Ross, Con-
tours of Masculine Desire, 190 ), so Bakunina in a literary epistle dissoci-
ated herself from A. V. Zrazhevskaia, who expressed anger at men crit-
ics’ prejudice against women writers.^23
Other writers in the group, however, resisted various aspects of thepoetess role, implicitly demanding that they be taken seriously as po-
ets. They often suffered attacks from men critics: Kul’man for her eru-
dition and knowledge of Greek and Latin poetics and classical allusions;
Gotovtseva for daring to allude to Pushkin’s condescending attitude
toward women; Shakhovskaia for writing a “pretentious” visionary
poem, Snovidenie (A dream, 1833 ); Pavlova for caring about art and tech-
nique in her work; and Khvoshchinskaia for having intellectual content.
One critic complained that he sometimes had to read her poems twice
to understand them.^24
This is not to suggest, however, that accommodation and resistanceare mutually exclusive qualities; most of these poets showed some com-
bination of the two. For example, if we consider Rostopchina’s great suc-
cess and popularity as a poet during the 1830 s and 1840 s, the attention
and praise she received from Pushkin, Viazemsky, Zhukovsky, Ler-
montov, and others, we begin to understand that her “accommodation”
to her society’s gender stereotypes allowed her to satisfy a powerful and
very “unfeminine” ambition for literary recognition. In effect, Ros-
topchina accommodated to her society’s gender stereotypes in order to
resist the social pressure that would have excluded her from the realm
of literature. Similarly, Zhadovskaia, who was born with no left arm and
only a few fingers on her right hand, managed to have an astonishingly
successful career by accommodating to her society’s ideas about
women’s love poetry. Bakunina, too, who in her published poetry ac-
commodated completely to patriarchal religious views of women, in her
unpublished poetry expressed pride in herself as a poet and even dab-
bled in a Russian folk paganism dominated by witches and rusalki(wa-
ter spirits).^25 (See her “Ballada” and “Prolog” in the Appendix.)
Nor did the “poets” always resist the poetess role. Pavlova, as we haveseen, on occasion denigrated her poetry writing. In one poem (“My
sovremennitsy, grafinia” [We are contemporaries, countess, 1847 ]), she
Social Conditions 29