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

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Sbornik luchshikh proizvedenii russkoi poezii,ed. Nikolai Shcherbina (Sankt-
Peterburg: E. Prats, 1858 ), 400. Regarding critical interpretation, see Tsebrikova,
“Ocherk zhizni,” 4 ; A. Karrik, “Iz Vospominaniia o N. D. Khvoshchinskoi-
Zaionchkovskoi,” 12 : 82 ; N. V. Gerbel’, Russkie poety v biografiakh i obraztsakh
(Sankt-Peterburg: Tip. Imperatorskaia Akademii Nauk, 1879 ), 583 ; and Poety
1840–1850-kh godov,266–67. “Net, ia ne nazovu obmanom” is also cited as one
of Khvoshchinskaia’s three best poems in the Russkii biograficheskii slovar’.
17 .Regarding her cigar smoking, see Tsebrikova, “Ocherk zhizni,” 8 ; Se-
mevskii, “N. D. Khvoshchinskaia-Zaionchkovskaia,” 10 : 55 ; P. Khvoshchin-
skaia, “Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia,” ix; Karrik, 4. As recently as 1999 Khvo-
shchinskaia was described as having “masculine habits” (Tomei, Russian Women
Writers, 262 ; Semevskii, “N. D. Khvoshchinskaia-Zaionchkovskaia,” 12 : 142 ;
Ts ebrikova, “Ocherk zhizni,” 39 ).
18 .Belinskii, “Sochineniia Zeneidy R-voi,” in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7 :
654. First published in Otechestvennye zapiski 31 , no. 1 , section 5 ( 1843 ): 1–24.
Men critics continued to use such sexual metaphors to denigrate women’s
achievements well into the twentieth century. One also thinks of Osip Man-
del’shtam’s comment, cited in English by Svetlana Boym: “Adalis and Marina
Ts vetaeva are prophetesses, and so is Sophia Parnok. Their prophecy is like do-
mestic needlework.” Boym points out, “In this cultural paradigm women can
excel only in textiles,but not in texts” (Death in Quotation Marks, 193 , 195 , author’s
italics).
Similarly, Mary Ellmann quotes several contemporary men writers who com-
pare “the female mind” to a uterus, a kitchen, or a temple, “an enclosed space
in which what other and (as we always say) seminalminds have provided is
stored away or tended or worshipped”; a “domestic container of some sort, a
recipe file or Thermos jug... always as an empty object in which others put
things” (Thinking about Women,13–15, author’s italics).
19 .Semevskii, “N. D. Khvoshchinskaia-Zaionchkovskaia,” 10 : 134. Se-
mevskii calls Khvoshchinskaia cowardly ( 10 : 55 ), expresses disapproval at the
fact that she was thirteen years older than her husband ( 11 : 83 ), and dismisses
many of her literary critical views ( 11 : 110 ).
20 .Smith-Rosenberg, “Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between
Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” 1 –29; and Jonathan Ned Katz, The In-
vention of Heterosexuality(New York: Dutton, 1995 ), 50–51.
21 .On the nineteenth-century belief that “good women had no sex drive,”
see Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 156 , 149–77.
22 .D.D. Iazykov, Obzor zhizni i trudov pokoinykh russkikh pisatelei(Sankt-
Peterburg: Tip. A. S. Suborina, 1885–1916); Masanov, Slovar’ psevdonimov.
23. Karrik, “Iz vospominanii,” 39 ; Zotov, “Nadezhda Dmitrievna Khvo-
shchinskaia,” 96–97.
24 .On domestic ideology in Russia, see my “Mid-nineteenth-Century Do-
mestic Ideology in Russia,” 78–97.
25 .Tsebrikova, “Ocherk zhizni,” 9–10; Semevskii, “N. D. Khvoshchinskaia-
Zaionchkovskaia,” 10 : 58 , 59 n. 3 , 63 , 65 , 96.
26 .Anne Mellor in referring to the “modesty topos” (see introduction) sug-


Notes to Pages 117–119 265

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