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

happiness and of long years of heavy bondage. It is the groans of female

slavery with all its tortures, its feelings of helplessness, loneliness, bit-

ter humiliation, shame before its own impotence, and vain efforts to con-

sole itself and forget, now in religious paroxysms, now in contemplation

of nature’s beauty” (“Pesni o zhenskoi nevole,” in Sochineniia, 2 : 551 ).

Or of Vil’gel’m Kiukhel’beker’s sexualizing of Kul’man’s work and

life: “She herself is immeasurably better than her verses.... There is no

doubt that I would have fallen in love with her, but that love would have

been as beneficial to me as are harmful my little passions for petty, vain

creatures” (“Dnevnik Vil’g.,” 351–52). Ellmann in Thinking about Women

shows how “phallic criticism” describes both women and women writ-

ers in stereotypes of excess and inadequacy: “formlessness, passivity, in-

stability, confinement, piety, materiality, spirituality, irrationality, and

compliancy.” “Femaleness,” Ellmann wryly concludes, “is a congenital

fault, rather like eczema or Original Sin” ( 34 ).

The women poets we are considering responded to these literary lim-

itations as women traditionally have responded to social limitations

placed on them—with a combination of “accommodation” (conform-

ity) and “resistance.”^20 Some writers ostensibly accommodated to the pa-

triarchal order by presenting themselves either as frivolous poetesses,

sociomoral handmaidens, or both. One thinks of Rostopchina, who in

several of her poems depicted women as superficial, capricious, amoral,

governed by feelings, and living only for men, depictions that can ex-

tend to her poetic personae as well.^21

#, # &

       

  ,

[.................]

'    &

... 

    

#  

       ,...

'  !!!..    !..

h

(But I, I am a woman in the full meaning of the word,

[.....................]

I am only a woman... and am prepared to be proud of it...

I love a party!... Give me parties!...

“Iskushenie” [Temptation, 1839 ])^22

Zhadovskaia assumed the stance of a sociomoral handmaiden in poems

chiding society women (but not men) for their worldliness and urging

children to pray for the brave soldiers dying for the tsar (“T. Go-i,” [To

T. G., 1858 ], “Ne sviatotatstva, ne grekhi,” [Not a sacrilege, not a sin,

1858 ], “Polnochnaia molitva” [Midnight prayer, 1858 ]). Bakunina, too,

28 Social Conditions