walked a sublime path... described in terms of male sexual energies”
(Gender and Genius, 103 ). “To be... a ‘genius,’” Battersby writes, “the
artist must be positioned by the critics at a point within that tradition
that is viewed as the boundary between the old and the new ways...
located within the (patrilineal) chains of influence and inheritance out
of which ‘culture’ is constructed” ( 142 )—a position never granted to
women. One thinks of Belinsky’s statement: “We know many women
poets but not one woman genius;... Nature sometimes spares them a
spark of talent but never gives them genius.”^41
Can we develop interpretive strategies for these Russian women po-ets based on their different, but not necessarily less important, experi-
ences and aesthetic concerns? Scholars have begun to develop several
such strategies for reading nineteenth-century British and American
women’s poetry that also may apply to nineteenth-century Russian
women’s poetry. It should be emphasized, however, that these interpre-
tative strategies are preliminary, fragmentary, and even speculative. Al-
ice Ostriker identifies the device of “duplicity,” in which a poet “driven
by something forbidden to express but impossible to repress” produces
a poem that “means both what it says and its opposite” (Stealing the Lan-
guage, 40 ). For example, Emily Dickinson’s poem “I’m Nobody!” ( 1861 )
simultaneously rejects and expresses a longing for fame and power. Os-
triker maintains that duplicity—doubleness of meaning—should be
appreciated on aesthetic grounds, since “the highest art is that which
presses most matter and spirit into least space” ( 41 ). Among the Russian
poets we have mentioned, we can see an example of duplicity in Bakun-
ina’s “Siialo utro obnovlen’em” (The morning shone with a renewal,
1840 ), in which the speaker struggles to reconcile her mourning for a
dead child with the religious duty to accept God’s will. Similarly, in
“A. S.P.” ( 1829 ) Gotovtseva simultaneously expresses her awe of Push-
kin’s high artistic status and her anger at his depiction of women. And
Khvoshchinskaia’s Dzhulio(Julio, 1850 ) depicts an artist’s drive to
separate from his family in order to succeed, along with the guilt that
the separation arouses.
Cheryl Walker similarly employs as an interpretive strategy nine-teenth-century American women poets’ ambivalence “toward the desire
for power, toward their ambitions, toward their need to say, ‘I am’ boldly
and effectively” (Nightingale’s Burden,9–10). We see such ambivalence in
Kul’man’s “K Anakreonu” (To Anacreon, see chapter 2 ), in Pavlova’s in-
troduction to Kadril’(see chapter 6 ), in Rostopchina’s “Kak dolzhny
18 Introduction