that literary standards are not class, race, or gender neutral, but rather
validate the experiences and tastes—defined as “universal”—of people
in cultural power. It is worth considering how the experiences and tastes
(aesthetics) of nineteenth-century women influenced their poetic prac-
tices—and their reception by men critics.
In the next chapter we shall see what these poets shared as Russianwomen of their generation. Here I would like to suggest some of the
more general physical, social, and metaphysical conditions they shared
as nineteenth-century Western women, conditions that influenced the
form and content of their work. I am not suggesting that these poets
wrote differently from their male contemporaries because of some es-
sential female difference, but rather because their raw materials—the re-
alities and experiences of their lives—were not the same.^35 Any evalua-
tion of their work must take these differences into account.
On the physical plane, one scholar (Donovan, 102–3) has suggestedthat in the nineteenth century menstruation and the lack of birth con-
trol may have caused women to experience their projects as more inter-
ruptible than did men. Certainly, women were expected to put aside
their own activities when called upon by parents, children, spouses,
brothers, and others. The interruptibility of women’s lives may be re-
flected in the many short forms, such as lyrics and ballads, that these po-
ets used, or, even as Elaine Showalter has suggested, some women’s use
of small, self-contained units to structure extended forms. Showalter
compares the structure of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,for example, to a quilt made
of many small pieces sewn together (“Piecing and Writing,” 234–37).
It also seems likely that the high infant mortality rate in the nine-teenth century affected women more immediately than it did men, lead-
ing them to view and depict death differently. Tania Modleski (Loving
with a Vengeance, 189 ) argues that while for men, as Walter Benjamin
writes, death reveals meaning, for women at that time death and espe-
cially the death of a child represented the end of meaning. We shall dis-
cuss in chapter 3 these Russian women’s poems about the death of chil-
dren or young women, a theme that is not common in the poetry of their
canonical male contemporaries.^36
Also on the physical plane, Tania Modleski has made the intrigu-ing suggestion that there might be a relationship between narrative
pleasure and sexual response. She suggests that the plots of twentieth-
century popular genres such as soap operas and television serials
appeal to women because they are “open-ended, slow paced, and
multi-climactic” (Loving with a Vengeance, 98 ). In contrast, the plots of
Introduction 15