Guber’s “Ia po komnate khozhu” (I pace the room, 1845 ) an apparently
poor speaker condemns a rich nobleman for seducing and abandoning
a servant. In men’s poetry, however, the silenced female Other appears
to be the rule.^32
Of course, Russian women poets also wrote many epistles and poemsto men and participated in men’s discourses—for example, Pavlova’s
engagement with Slavophilism in “Razgovor v Kremle” (A conversa-
tion in the Kremlin, 1854 ). These poets could not afford to ignore a male
audience or men’s concerns if they wished to publish their works. At the
very least they needed to win the support of a man editor or influential
family friend, and doing so often required conforming to men’s ideas of
what women’s poetry should be. Nonetheless, women poets related dif-
ferently from men poets to their male audience. Rather than taking a
male audience for granted, the women poets, as Gitta Hammarberg de-
scribes writers of album verse, engaged in a “peculiar form of double
address, with a sideward glance at potential other readers”—in this
case, male (“Flirting with Words,” 299 ).
Nature
Men poets, in addition to gendering the poet as male, also continued a
long tradition of gendering nature as female, identifying women with
nature, men with culture, and asserting the moral superiority of the
male over the female.^33 Hélène Cixous discusses these equations as part
of a system of binary “hierarchical [that is, unequal] oppositions” that
she believes structure Western thought: activity/passivity, logos/
pathos, high/low, culture/nature, form/matter, day/night, father/
mother, and, most basically, man/woman. In each pair, the first term is
presented as inherently superior to and ultimately victorious over the
second, its negation or Other. As a result of such thinking, women are
defined only in terms of how they differ from men, those differences be-
ing considered aberrations from the norm (“Sorties,” 101–2). Romantic
men poets expressed these ideas in a recurring image noted by several
literary critics: the man poet’s usurpation or colonization of the procre-
ative powers of female nature.^34
Certainly, the Russian men poets of this generation often depictednature in terms of a woman—variously characterized as the dangerous,
devouring, alluring, repulsive, attainable, or unattainable Other. In
Pushkin’s “Rusalka” (The rusalka, 1818 ), for example, a hermit living in
the wilderness, who tries and fails to resist the seductive wiles of a fe-
Literary Conventions 49