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

Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (“Sel’skoe kladbishche:

Elegiia,” 1802 ).

As with the poema,the implied gender norms of the elegy led women

poets to write them differently from men. Boris Tomashevsky observes

that the elegist made himself the hero of poems that described his feel-

ings of unrequited love, jealousy, grieving, sadness, and loneliness and

his thoughts about the end of youth or the approach of an untimely

death. The poet, Tomashevsky continues, by his use of the pathetic fal-

lacy, made nature a character that sympathizes with those feelings

(Pushkin, 1 : 120 ). That is, a male poet/protagonist grieves his lost love,

youth, or friend in the midst of a female-gendered nature. Since women

poets did not always feel comfortable with a female-gendered nature

(see chapter 2 ), we would expect their elegies to tell different stories.

We can infer other gender norms of the elegy from the work of the

twentieth-century American scholar Peter Sacks, whose influential

study of the English elegy may be applied to many nineteenth-century

Russian elegies.^41 Sacks’s discussion of the elegy is particularly male-

centered because he relies on the theories of Freud and Lacan, which of-

ten conflate the male with the human. For Sacks the elegy concerns the

“renunciatory experience of loss and the acceptance, not just of a sub-

stitute but of the very means and practice of substitution” (English El-

egy, 8 ). Sacks identifies the “means and practice of substitution” with the

capacity for symbolic behavior, and more specifically with the Oedipus

complex, thereby implicitly excluding women from art:

There is a significant similarity between the process of mourn-

ing and the oedipal resolution.... In the elegy, the poet’s pre-

ceding relation with the deceased (often assimilated with the

mother or Nature or a naively regarded Muse) is conventionally

disrupted and forced into a triadic structure, including the third

term, death (frequently associated with the father, or Time). The

dead, like the forbidden object of primary desire, must be sepa-

rated from the poet, partly by a veil of words.... [This] castra-

tive aspect should not be slighted, for it lies at the core of the

work of mourning.^42

Sacks claims that the Freudian model of mourning applies equally to

men and women, that both mourn in the same way their necessary “re-

nunciation of primary [sexual] desire,” “separation from [the] mother,”

and the “internalization and identification with the idealized parental

figure” (that is, the father) (English Elegy, 12 , 11 , 15 ). Whether or not this

is a true, other twentieth-century writers have suggested that women ad-

Gender and Genre 75