hardboiled detective stories, Westerns, or “action” movies appeal to
men because they have a more focused, forward thrust. It might be in-
teresting to apply this idea to “high art” as well—to contrast, for ex-
ample, the plots of Virginia Woolf’s novels with the well-made play as
codified by Aristotle (exposition, complication, turning point, climax,
and resolution).^37 Or to contrast the structure of Rostopchina’s novel in
verse, Dnevnik devushki(A girl’s diary, 1845 ), with that of Pushkin’s novel
in verse, Evgenii Onegin.
On the social plane, all nineteenth-century women were trained to becaretakers, the overseers of a nonprogressive, repetitive, and cyclical do-
mestic sphere defined as the complement to the male-dominated public
sphere of action and accomplishment. Nineteenth-century women
spent more time waiting than men, waiting for marriage, for family
members to come home or leave, for pregnancies to end. And, indeed,
as we shall see in chapter 3 , the themes of boredom, futility, and isola-
tion are very common in these women’s poetry. On the other hand,
women’s isolation may have had artistic advantages. As Josephine Dono-
van points out, the products of women’s domestic work traditionally
have had use value rather than exchange value. The domestic sphere
therefore remains the site of “relatively unalienated labor,” with women
retaining “creative control over [their] time and over the design and
execution of [their] products”—principles that women could apply to
their poetry as well (“Toward a Women’s Poetics,” 102 ). Or as Shari Ben-
stock writes, women’s marginal status also granted them “freedom and
dispossession of existence outside the law.”^38 Because Russian women
poets tended not to be part of groups or schools, their poetry is often
unconventional or even experimental. One thinks, for example, of
Iuliia Zhadovskaia’s sophisticated meters and rhymes or Nadezhda
Khvoshchinskaia’s atypically long, powerful lines.
On the metaphysical plane, women were defined as the Other, thecomplement of men, and the object of the male gaze in art and in life.
Modleski writes of women “continually forced to look at themselves be-
ing looked at” and of the self-consciousness and desire for transcen-
dence this engendered (Loving with a Vengeance,111–12)—themes par-
ticularly strong in the poetry of Teplova, for example (“Vysota” [Height,
1831 ], “Pererozhdenie” [Rebirth, 1835 ], “Kogda vo vpadine okna”
[When in the curve of the window, 1842 ], “Verbnoe voskresenie” [Palm
Sunday, 1847 ]).^39 In all Western religions women were associated with
the body and temptation, a linkage that led several of these women po-
16 Introduction