2 .Literary Conventions
Several literary critics have argued that Romanticism was a male-
gendered institution. Certainly we find in the Russian poetry of the first
half of the nineteenth century such blatantly male-centered Romantic
conventions as the friendly epistle (druzheskoe poslanie) celebrating the
cult of male friendship, anacreontic odes, and Bacchic poetry.^1 Here I
would like to consider some of the ways that women poets of this pe-
riod dealt with two less obvious but more basic androcentric Romantic
conventions: poetic representations of the self and of nature.
Romantic Self-Representation
Both Western and Russian Romantic men poets commonly represented
themselves as priests, prophets, and “unacknowledged legislators of
the world,” all occupations barred to women. In Russia we find many
men poets appropriating God’s voice and authority to chastise men and
even rulers.^2 For example, in Pushkin’s “Prorok” (The prophet, 1826 ) the
prophet-poet becomes God’s surrogate, able to burn people’s hearts
“with the word.” In Baratynsky’s “Poslednii poet” (The last poet, 1834 )
the poet’s death expresses the ultimate condemnation of a civilization
that has rejected both nature and poetry. Other examples of the poet as
priest and prophet can be found in Del’vig’s “Vdokhnovenie” (Inspira-
tion, 1822 ), Lermontov’s “Poèt” ( 1838 ) and “Poet i tolpa” (The poet and
the crowd, 1828 ), Khomiakov’s “Poèt” ( 1827 ), “Rossii” (To Russia, 1839 ),
“Sud bozhii” (God’s judgment, 1854 ), and Maikov’s “Sny” (Dreams,
1885 ).
Russian men poets also represented themselves with the trope of the38