Kul’man in “Korinna” ( 1839 , see appendix) implies that her heroine’s
muse is Diana—goddess of the moon but apparently more supportive
of women poets than the god of the arts, her brother Apollo. We find no
muse figures at all in the poetry of Garelina, Gotovtseva, Lisitsyna, or
Rostopchina. In this literary period, I would suggest that the absence of
muse figures—that is, of projected creativity—in women poets’ work
indicates their discomfort within the male-defined role of poet. Such ab-
sence also may have led men critics to question further women’s credi-
bility as poets; every one of the seven canonical men poets under
consideration wrote several poems to a traditional muse.^16 It is not sur-
prising, however, that so many women poets chose a nonsexual muse
or decided to dispense with one altogether. For many heterosexual men
poets of this period, muses represented an unproblematic fusion of their
sexuality with their creativity. Women, on the other hand, were subject
to even stronger prohibitions against expressing their sexuality than
those against writing. Aside from the other problems that male muses
presented, women poets may not have been able to conceive of a muse
relationship that was both satisfying and socially acceptable.
Men poets represented themselves not only archetypally, asprophets, bards, or Don Juans, but also as individuals, through the lit-
erary devices of signatures and personae—devices that women poets
modified as well. Signatures, as one scholar has shown, allow poets to
represent themselves either in the “sincere” and “natural” pose of po-
ets who always sign their own name (for example, Wordsworth) or in a
“theatrical” pose, in which there is a “deliberate creation of multiple
selves” (for example, Wordsworth’s contemporary Mary Robinson).^17
During the first part of the nineteenth century most Russian poets used
pseudonyms from time to time; Masanov (Slovar’ psevdonimov,v. 3 ) lists
sixteen for Baratynsky, for example, and thirty-three for Pushkin. For
women poets, however, female pseudonyms carried the added signifi-
cance of allowing them to disguise their identity in a society where their
poetry writing was considered controversial. Further, if a woman poet
chose a male-sounding pseudonym and avoided feminine past-tense
verbs and adjectives, she could disguise her gender, thus gaining more
favorable reactions from male literary gatekeepers.^18 Indeed, several of
these fourteen women poets occasionally used “unmarked” pseudo-
nyms.^19 None of the canonical or noncanonical men, on the other hand,
ever signed their poetry with a feminine pseudonym.
Surprisingly, however, despite the benefits of an unmarked pseudo-nym, these women poets very rarely used them. Most of the time they
44 Literary Conventions