not linguistically, and she is as destructive as she is creative.... [E]nor-
mous as her powers are, they are not the ones that her daughters want
if they are to become poets” (Women Writers and Poetic Identity,13–16).
Not surprisingly, we find a wide variety of attitudes toward nature in the
work of these fourteen women poets, as well as conflicting attitudes
within the work of some. These variations indicate how difficult they
found the female gendering of nature and also how inventive they were
in finding ways to address their dilemma.
Some of these Russian women poets accepted the prevailing para-digm with modifications or reservations. Lisitsyna, for example, repre-
sents women, nature, and especially the moon as inconstant, and her-
self as a fallen woman; but she often refers to the moon as mesiats
(masculine gender) rather than as luna(feminine) and describes men’s
inconstancy as well as women’s (“Golubok,” [The dove]; “K S[erafime]
S[ergeevna] T[eplov]-oi” [To S[erafima] S[ergeevna] T[eplova]]; “K nev-
ernoi” [To an unfaithful woman]; “K mesiatsu” [To the moon]; “Zavet-
naia gora” [The cherished mountain]). Bakunina avoids romantic
themes altogether, but in her published poetry also seems to identify
with nature as the fallen female principle, spiritually inferior to the god-
like male (see “Rozhdenie nezabudki” [The birth of the forget-me-not,
1841 ], “Groza” [The storm, 1840 ], and “Nad Koreizom nebo iasno” [The
sky is clear over Koreiz, 1851 ]).
Teplova identifies herself with the beauty of the natural surroundingsof her childhood in “K rodnoi storone” (To native parts [ 1827 ]) and with
nature’s gloominess in “Osen’“ (Autumn, 1837 ). Gotovtseva in two un-
published poems, “Derevnia” (The country) and “Sad” (The garden), de-
picts nature as a close friend and safe haven. Similarly, the heroine of Ros-
topchina’s Dnevnik devushki(A girl’s diary, 219–20) apostrophizes the
moon as a friend. Khvoshchinskaia, while depicting nature as feminine,
expressed a wide range of attitudes toward it, from longing (“O daite
mne pole, shirokoe, gladkoe pole!” [Oh, give me a field, a wide, smooth
field! 1847 ]); to finding nature more meaningful than her writing (“U
okna” [At the window, 1853 ]); to rejecting nature as less important than
the struggle for social justice (“Zhila-b v tebe moia dusha, o mat’
priroda” [If only my soul lived in you, O, Mother Nature, 1858 ]).^40
At the same time these women poets often used a variety of devicesto avoid identifying nature with the feminine. Bakunina, who in her pub-
lished poetry identifies herself with fallen nature, in her unpublished po-
etry creates a pagan world in which nature is represented by gods, god-
desses, and Slavic folk figures of both genders (for example, “Prolog
52 Literary Conventions