even positioned herself against Rostopchina, whom she depicts as a
scandalous “George Sandist,” in order to delineate herself as a virtuous
supporter of Slavophile patriarchy. The poem ends:
u! e
#;
!! ( #
uu
[...........]
! # uu
$
u.h
(I don’t demand emancipation
And a self-willed existence;
I love the peace and the hard frost of Moscow,
[................]
And I simply give my husband
My verses for his stern judgment.)
(Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii,134–35)From what we know about Pavlova’s disintegrating relationship with
her husband at this time, it is difficult to read these verses as expressing
anything other than an ideological stance.^26
Perhaps the ultimate accommodation was to fall silent, as did Ekate-rina Shakhovskaia, after publishing her visionary epic, Snovidenie
( 1833 ).^27 Mariia Lisitsyna, who resisted both literary and social expec-
tations for women, disappeared from literature after the early 1830 s,
perishing, according to a poem written in her memory by her friend
Nadezhda Teplova, “a victim of passions and delusions” (“pogibla
zhertvoiu strastei i zabluzhdenii”) (Vatsuro, “Zhizn’ i poeziia Nadezhdy
Te p l ovoi,” 21 ).
Exclusions
Besides legal, social, and literary constraints, this generation of women
poets shared a less obvious but equally significant limitation: their
tangential relationship to the world of their male contemporaries, a
world that included the Napoleonic wars and the invasion of Russia,
the Decembrist uprising and its aftermath, the Polish uprising, the
1848 European revolutions, the censorship terror, and the professional-
ization of Russian literature as it moved from aristocratic salons and
kruzhki(literary circles) to “plebian” journals. These events grew out of
male political, social, and literary institutions, from which women
30 Social Conditions