jects of male sexual fantasies. In “Bessonitsa” (Insomnia, 1831 ), spring
breathes its sweet breath on the poet’s face and breast and the moon
kisses his eyes as he thinks about his lover. Nature provides a sexualized
backdrop for even more explicitly described sexual encounters in
“Vesenniaia noch’“ (Spring night, 1831 ), “Pesnia (Ia zhdu tebia, kogda
vechernei mgloiu)” (Song [I wait for you when like the evening dark-
ness], 1829 ), and “Elegiia (Zdes’ gory s dvukh storon stoiat)” (Elegy
[Here mountains stand on both sides], 1839 ).
Fet, too, presented nature as the female object of male sexual fan-tasies. Spring is a sexually alluring peasant woman in “Eshche vesny
dushistoi nega” (Still the voluptuousness of fragrant spring, 1854 ), and
a sleeping beauty whose body is described in voyeuristic detail in “Glub’
nebes opiat’ iasna” (The depths of the heavens are clear once again,
1879 ). A May night is a trembling bride in “Eshche maiskaia noch’“ (An-
other May night, 1857 ); morning on the steppe is like a “newly married
queen before her powerful groom” (“Utro v stepi” [Morning on the
steppe, 1865 ]); a woman is compared to a May breeze, and her sexual re-
sponse to an Aeolian harp, which, despite its few strings, always finds
new sounds (“Kak maiskii golubookii zefir” [Like a blue-eyed May
zephyr], 1842 ). Like Iazykov, Fet often describes a sexualized, feminized
nature as a backdrop for sexual encounters with women.^38
It is not my intention to suggest that these poets represent nature onlyas female Other. They also use the nightingale (male gender, solovei) as
a symbol for the man poet, Pan to represent the spirit of nature, and the
masculine word for moon(mesiats) as well as the feminine (luna), al-
though in different contexts worth examining.^39 But it seems significant
that they preferred to exemplify nature with feminine nouns—for ex-
ample, zvezda, luna, vesna, zima, berezka, roza, noch’, buria—rather than
masculine- or neuter-gendered nouns (les, mesiats, veter, oblako, vecher,
solntse, tsvetok). At the very least, we can say that a strong literary tradi-
tion identified the poet as male, while identifying women with a femi-
nized and sexualized nature.
This tradition left Romantic women poets of this generation in a
quandary: should they identify with the figure of the man poet, or with
nature as female Other, or try to invent some other way of relating to
these two concepts? As we have seen, for a woman to identify herself as
a man poet, as opposed to a poetess, was to transgress cultural norms.
But, as Margaret Homans observes, it was equally dangerous for women
poets to identify with nature: “Mother nature is... prolific biologically,
Literary Conventions 51