versity, P. A. Pletnev and A. V. Nikitenko. Khomiakov, while stationed
in Saint Petersburg with his regiment, frequented the literary circles of
future Decembrists Ryleev and Bestuzhov, who published his first po-
etry in their journal, Poliarnaia zvezda (The north star).^34
Women poets, however, could not attain the positions of power nec-essary to mentor one another, nor did men poets give them the kind of
mentoring they offered other men. One notable exception was Viazem-
sky, who published Rostopchina’s and Gotovtseva’s first poems. More
typical was the behavior of Zhukovsky, who, as we have seen, helped nu-
merous men writers—including the poverty-stricken Siberian civil ser-
vant Evgenii Mil’keev and the Voronezh cattle dealer Aleksei Kol’tsov—
but did his best to discourage the one woman writer we know who
appealed to him for help. According to Aleksandra Zrazhevskaia,
Zhukovsky wrote in a letter of advice to her “that all women writers are
exceptions and pay very dearly for their glittering fame, that this [her
desire to be a writer] is something that would affect my entire life, that
thousands of unpleasantnesses are connected with authorship...
and that all this demands a tremendous amount of work” (“Zverinets,”
Maiak 1 , no. 1 [ 1842 ], 2–3). The influential social and literary critic Belin-
sky, who made so many men’s reputations, may have wished to improve
women’s position in society but generally wrote condescendingly about
women poets. In one article he describes eighteenth-century Russian
women’s writing as “poeticheskoe viazanie chulkov, rifmotvornoe shit’e” (the
poetic knitting of stockings, rhymed sewing), terms one cannot imag-
ine him using in relation to eighteenth-century men poets. In another
article he unfavorably compared the work of Iuliia Zhadovskaia, which
he was supposedly reviewing, with Leverrier’s discovery of Uranus.
Real poetry, he wrote, concerns life on earth, but since Zhadovskaia, as
a woman, had little real experience, Leverrier was more of a poet than
she.^35
Even those women poets who managed to find a man poet willing tosponsor them remained in the position of permanent literary “ward”
rather than “mentee.” That is, rather than being guided to artistic ma-
jority, they remained forever dependent on a benefactor who negotiated
on their behalf with journal editors and publishers, as did Zotov for
Khvoshchinskaia and Maksimovich for Zhadovskaia.^36
It might be objected that women at least had access to one literary in-
stitution—the salon—where they often officiated as hostesses, receiv-
ing tributes of laudatory poems written about them.^37 Salons, however,
Social Conditions 35