sian Romantic poetry. Rather, it is a corrective to scholars’ tendency in
the past to neglect issues of gender—and gender as a category of anal-
ysis—when looking at this period.
The women poets—all members of the generation that producedPushkin and the Golden Age of Russian literature—came from a wide
variety of social classes and circumstances. Mariia Lisitsyna was the
daughter of an actor; Elisaveta Kul’man, whose civil-servant father died
when she was young, lived and died in extreme poverty; Nadezhda
Teplova was the daughter of a merchant. Liubov’ Garelina, Anna Go-
tovtseva, Karolina Pavlova, Evdokiia Rostopchina, Elisaveta Shakhova,
Ekaterina Shakhovskaia, Iuliia Zhadovskaia, and Aleksandra Fuks be-
longed to various levels of the aristocracy. Praskov’ia Bakunina and
Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia were both déclassé: their fathers were dis-
missed from government positions for embezzlement. The life span of
these poets ranged from seventeen years (Kul’man) to eighty-six
(Pavlova); some lived in Saint Petersburg (Kul’man, Rostopchina,
Shakhova), some in Moscow (Bakunina, Lisitsyna, Pavlova, Shak-
hovskaia, Teplova), and others in the provinces (Fuks, Gotovtseva,
Khvoshchinskaia, Mordovtseva, Zhadovskaia).
Their writings were equally varied. Many of them wrote prose worksand plays, as well as poetry. Almost all of them wrote verse epistles, na-
ture poetry, love lyrics, and folk poetry. In addition, their poetic genres
included religious lyrics, visions, verse prologues for domestic theater,
lullabies, anacreontic and other classical verse forms, fables, elegies,
narrative poems (poemy), and verse tales (povesti v stikhakh), as well as
otryvki iz poemy(excerpts or fragments from narrative poems, a genre in
itself), ballads, epigrams, metaphysical poetry, civic poetry, and a novel
in verse (roman v stikhakh).^9
Yet despite their diversity, these women poets all faced common so-cial and literary-historical issues as women writers. Perhaps the most
obvious and fundamental was their difficulty in getting their works
published. A major part of the poetry of Bakunina, Gotovtseva,
Khvoshchinskaia, Mordovtseva, and Teplova—in quality as well as
quantity—still remains entombed in archives. Much of the poetry of the
others has been lost entirely: most of Pavlova’s work after 1864 , most of
Kul’man’s original poetry (as opposed to her translations), much of
Teplova’s early poetry and late prose, and all but three works by
Shakhovskaia, one of which is a fragment of a larger work.^10
Even when these poets managed to get their work published in jour-nals or—against all odds—as books, the published versions often did
Introduction 5