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

sire in men’s lyrics. These women poets also wrote lyrics about “do-

mestic affections” (that is, poems to mothers, sisters, brothers), female

childhood and education, motherhood, and women’s old age.^58

Other themes frequently found in these women’s lyrics, but rarely in

those of their male contemporaries, concern the darker side of their ex-

perience as women, for example, forced marriages.^59 Their poems often

treat boredom, isolation, and the enforced, rather than chosen, solitude

that many upper- and middle-class women experienced in the nine-

teenth (and the twentieth) century.^60 Some of these poems give the im-

pression of having been thrown over a prison wall; in many of them the

speaker sits by an open window, often at night, as if longing to escape.^61

Many poems express depression, a sense of futility or despondency. The

word naprasno(in vain) appears in several of these women’s poems, as,

for example, in Khvoshchinskaia:

"  

u  u,   ,

#       



h

(And in deep night, not knowing sleep

In vain I called upon heaven.)

(“I dlia menia byvala

zhizn’ trudna,” 1847 )

$ ,  

,    

,   



     uu 

h

(I know that tomorrow or today,

I will pine in vain.)

(“Uzh vecher,” 1848 )

" 

,  u u        

h

(And of bright, clear thoughts conceived in vain.)

(“Druz’ia moi,” 1847 )

Or Pavlova:

#    

      ,       :

#  u ,   

h

(But fruitless, but in vain:

There are no sounds, no words for her [the soul]).

(“Shepot grustnyi govor tainyi,” 1839 )

84 Gender and Genre