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

as a quality, but as a “position.” For Kristeva the feminine, along with

the working class and some avant-garde writers, are defined by their

marginalization from the “patriarchal symbolic order.”^9 Similarly, in the

case of Russian poets, some of the writing practices that women and

noncanonical men poets share may be a function of their marginaliza-

tion from Russian literature, of being perceived as Other.

We have seen that some women poets ambivalently exploited their

feminine Otherness in the “poetess” stance. Nonaristocratic men poets

similarly exploited their provincial or uneducated Otherness. For ex-

ample, Kol’tsov appeals to presumably wealthy and aristocratic read-

ers in the capitals to pity his unhappy, uncivilized youth in the follow-

ing repeatedly cited lines:

u      



  :

 u  

 

         

.

     

h

(I spent my youth

Bored and joyless:

In empty occupations

I saw no beautiful days.

I lived on the steppe with the cows.)

(“Povest’ moei liubvi” [The tale of

my love, 1829 ])^10

Mil’keev similarly prefaced his one book of poetry with a twelve-

page letter to Zhukovsky describing his unhappy, uncivilized youth:

“[Priroda] naznachila rodit’sia i zhit’ v takoi sfere, gde nichto ne moglo

sposobstvovat’ svoevremennomu probuzhdeniiu i obrazovaniiu etogo

instinkta.... Ne garmonicheskii tot klass, iz kotorogo ia proiskhozhu.”

([Nature] appointed me to be born and live in a sphere where nothing

could assist the awakening and development of that instinct [for poetic

sound].... The class I come from is not harmonious).^11 While Kol’tsov

had a well-to-do if despotic father, Mil’keev lived in poverty. This is re-

flected in the conclusion of his open letter to Zhukovsky, in which Mil’-

keev asks not only for sympathy and recognition but also for help find-

ing a job in Saint Petersburg that would provide enough free time for him

to continue writing poetry.

Fedotov, in addressing the aristocracy, took a more ambivalent,

clowning attitude toward his lack of a university education and lower

In Conclusion: Noncanonical Men Poets 171