wereexcluded: the military and its pastimes, dueling and gambling, the
civil service, lyceums and the classical education provided there, uni-
versities, university student groups, literary circles and their al’manakhi
(annual literary collections), extended travel, and residence abroad.
These institutions formed the men poets of this generation as men and
as poets, providing both the subject matter and the genres of their po-
etry.^28
To understand the effect on women poets of exclusion from thesemale institutions, one need only consider their centrality to men’s lives
and works. Military life, dueling, and gambling played a vital role
in both the lives and the works of Davydov, Kiukhel’beker, Pushkin,
and Lermontov. The civil service experience of Pushkin, Viazemsky,
and Tiutchev, however irritating and confining, showed them very
concretely how their government operated, inevitably affecting their
attitude toward it. The lack of such experience may account for
Shakhovskaia’s naive and unrealistic patriotism in Snovidenie.The
lyceums that Pushkin, Del’vig, Kiukhel’beker, and Tiutchev attended
gave them lifelong friendships with fellow poets, as well as a classical
education, including a knowledge of Latin.
The importance of Latin as a male institution in the first half of thenineteenth century should not be underestimated. Latin has been de-
scribed as “a sexually specialized language used almost exclusively for
communicating between male and male,” a code in which boys learned
“a body of relatively abstract tribal lore inaccessible to those outside the
group,” that is, to all women and lower-class men.^29 As we have seen,
women like Elisaveta Kul’man, who knew Latin and Greek, were con-
sidered unnatural.
Most of the Russian men poets of this generation studied Latin. Theworks of Pushkin, Baratynsky, Del’vig, Iazykov, Fet, and Batiushkov, as
well as Maikov, Khomiakov, and Guber, not only contain allusions to
classical poets but make use of Latin poetic genres, such as the elegy, the
ode, and the epigram. Several scholars have argued that the Romantic
movements of all countries reworked rather than rejected the literature
of Greece and Rome.^30
The fact that Latin was a male language led to the canonization of an-drocentric or even misogynist genres and themes. For example, the
anacreontic ode, named for the Greek writer Anacreon, enjoyed great
European and Russian popularity during the first third of the nineteenth
century. Its subject was male drinking parties and the sexual use of
women or boys. Pushkin, Baratynsky, and Iazykov as well as virtually
Social Conditions 31