a female-voiced speaker about unhappy love, is followed by “Poslanie
k drugu” (Epistle to a friend) and “Pavel i Virginiia” (Paul and Virginia),
two unhappy love poems with male-voiced speakers.
Several poets wrote dramatic monologues in which they speak in awoman character’s voice: Kul’man in “Safo” (Sappho, 1839 ); Pavlova in
“Doch’ zhida” (The Jew’s daughter, 1840 ) and “Donna Inezil’ia” ( 1842 );
Rostopchina in “Kak liubiat zhenshchiny” (How women love, 1841 ), in
which she speaks as Charlotte Stieglitz, wife of the German poet Hein-
rich Stieglitz (1801–49); and Khvoshchinskaia in “Solntse segodnia za
tucheiu chernoi takoi zakatilosia” (Today the sun disappeared behind
such a black cloud, 1852 ), in which she speaks as a nanny.^28 It is pos-
sible that men poets found the androcentric poetic modes of self-
representation discussed earlier so comfortable, natural, and transpar-
ent that they were less concerned with persona as a poetic device.
Women poets, on the other hand, had to expend a great deal of energy
to modify the “conventional” male poetic persona, which fit them so
badly, and as a result may have turned to exploring other fictional per-
sonae as well.
A final aspect of poetic self-representation is the audience that poetsaddress—both the “you” of a poem and their implied reader. In the po-
etry of men poets, even when the addressee of the poem is a woman, the
implied audience is almost always men.^29 In the poetry of these and
other women poets, in contrast, both the addressee and the “implied
reader” (the intended audience) are often female. Several Western schol-
ars have suggested that there were two nineteenth-century literatures:
a male, supposedly “universal” literature, written by, for, and to men,
which women also read, and a female literature, written by, for, and to
women, which, with few exceptions, men considered second-rate and
ignored. We can see the split between the two literatures perhaps most
clearly in the United States, where economic factors maintained it. At
a time when middle-class women generally were entirely dependent
upon men, American women could support themselves by writing for
the many U.S. women’s magazines. To do so, however, they had to con-
form to editors’ expectations that they assume the poetess role and con-
fine themselves to a “special feminine discourse” of “affect and do-
mesticity,” reflecting “woman’s sphere.”^30 Such strictures, of course,
made for rather superficial poetry. The absence of a market for “women’s
poetry” in Russia may have decreased the number of women who wrote
poetry, but also the number writing as poetesses.
Several of these fourteen Russian poets, however—and not onlyLiterary Conventions 47