Reinventing Romantic Poetry : Russian Women Poets of the Mid-nineteenth Century

contemporary American woman poet, Emily Dickinson. In her “Appar-

ently with no surprise” ( 1884 ), the frost carelessly beheads a flower

while observed by an “unmoved” sun and an “approving God.”^42 In this

and the other poems mentioned here, nature’s indifference or hostility

are merely noted without comment.

The range of attitudes toward nature found in these poems suggests

that the conventional identification of women with nature and the char-

acterization of both as Other deeply affected these poets. I would sug-

gest that the issue was intensified for them by the Western religious tra-

dition, which for thousands of years also has asserted the hierarchical

oppositions of man/woman, spirit/body, God/nature. In the Judeo-

Christian world these binary oppositions may be traced to the identifi-

cation of nature with Eve, who is considered responsible for man’s fall.^43

These women poets, then, not only had to invent new ways to relate to

nature but had to do so without challenging patriarchal religious doc-

trine or the righteousness of the male God who decreed their otherness;

such challenges would have been unthinkable in mid-nineteenth-

century century Russia.

It is possible, however, that these women, in reinventing their rela-

tionship to nature, could not entirely avoid looking at the cosmology

that supported the traditional view. Some women poets depicted them-

selves in hopeless situations presided over by a sadistic God. Pavlova

writes in “Tri dushi” (Three souls, 1845 ), a poem about the souls of three

women poets (including herself) sent into a hostile world:

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(And the will of the Lord said to them:

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“And if your lazy spirit falls

In earthly battle,

Don’t in your lying complaints blame

My love.”)

In contrast, Bakunina and Kul’man, as we have seen, consciously or un-

consciously sidestepped Christian cosmology by evoking the pre-

Christian worlds of Russian folklore and ancient Greece.^44

54 Literary Conventions