Chapter 2. Literary Conventions
- On the friendly epistle, see Taylor, “Friendly Epistle in Russian Poetry.”
Taylor notes that while they could serve as addressee, “women rarely wrote
friendly epistles” ( 118 ). She characterizes the genre as “a celebration of poets’
symposia, fueled by alcoholic drink” ( 322 ), its core consisting of “affirmations
of friendship and that ‘You are a poet’” ( 325 ). As in the case of anacreontic
poetry, such male bonding experiences rarely included women. In addition
to Batiushkov’s “Vakkhanka” (1814–15), already cited in chapter 1 , see A. N.
Maikov’s “Vakkhanka” ( 1841 ), Fet’s “Vakkhanka” (“Zachem, kak gazel’,” 1840 )
and “Vakkhanka” (“Pod ten’iu sladostnoi poludennogo sada,” 1843 ), and
Del’vig’s “Videnie” (1819–20), a Bacchic poem with metaphysical overtones. - On men Romantic poets as priests, see Gilbert and Gubar, introduction to
Shakespeare’s Sisters,xxi. On the tradition of the poet-prophet in nineteenth-
century Russian literature, see Pamela Davidson, “The Moral Dimension of the
Prophetic Ideal: Pushkin and His Readers,” Slavic Review 61 , no. 3 (fall 2002 ): 490– - Shelley’s conclusion to Defence of Poetry ( 1821 ): “Poets are the unacknowl-
edged legislators of the world.” - Examples of Russian poets’ self-representation as bards include
Zhukovskii’s famous “Pevets vo stane russkikh voinov” (The singer in the camp
of Russian warriors, 1812 ), Iazykov’s “Pesn’ barda vo vremia vladychestva tatar
v Rossii” (Song of the bard during the time of the Tatar’s dominion of Russia,
1823 ), “Baian k russkomu voinu” (Baian to a Russian warrior, 1824 ), “Pesn’ Ba-
iana” (Baian’s song, 1824 ), Del’vig’s “Romans” (Romance, 1824 ), Davydov’s Hus-
sar poems, and Lermontov’s “Pesn’ barda” (Song of the bard, 1830 ). - On the ballad revival, see A. B. Friedman, Ballad Revival,and Katz, Liter-
ary Ballad.
On the influence of Ossian in Russia, see Iu. D. Levin, Ossian v russkoi litera-
ture konets XVIII-pervaia tret’ XIX veka.(Leningrad: Nauka, 1980 ), 154 , 157 , 164 ,
172 , 180 , 191. Among the Russian writers who cited Macpherson, Levin lists
Karamzin (whose translation of Ossian appeared in 1798 ), Batiushkov,
Kiukhel’beker, Pushkin, and Lermontov. - For example, in Tiutchev’s “Ne ver’, ne ver’ poètu, deva!” (Don’t trust,
don’t trust the poet, maiden! 1839 ) the speaker portrays poets as so sexually
powerful (“all-powerful, like the elements”) that they suck dry maidens’ hearts
as a bee does a flower. A similar sexual power disparity can be found in Iazykov’s
“Poèt” ( 1831 ), in which a young woman, hopelessly in love with a poet, cannot
sleep at night. He, however, sleeps peacefully. Other examples of the poet’s sex-
ual prowess with his muse and others can be found in Pushkin’s “Muza” (The
muse, 1821 ), “Vot Muza rezvaia boltun’ia” (Here is the playful, chatterbox muse,
1821 ), “Solovei i roza,” (The nightingale and the rose, 1827 ), and Evgenii Onegin
8 , I–VI ( 1829 ); Lermontov’s “Poèt” ( 1828 ), Fet’s “Muza” ( 1854 ) and “Muze”
( 1857 ), Guber’s “Krasavitsa” (The beauty, 1838 ), Maikov’s “Svirel’” (The reed-
pipe, 1840 ), and Kol’tsov’s “Solovei” (The nightingale, 1841 ).
6 .Most of these women poets must have known Mme. de Staël’s novel
Corinne( 1807 ), which concerns a nineteenth-century namesake of the Greek
234 Notes to Pages 38–39