warrior-bard.^3 While poetic self-representation as glorifiers of war can
be traced back at least as far as Homer, in late eighteenth-century Rus-
sia and Europe the bardic tradition gained new life from the ballad re-
vival, with its focus on minstrels, as well as from James Macpherson’s very
popular Ossian poems.^4 As late as 1919 one literary historian of Russia’s
Golden Age hypothesized that all “professional epic-lyric poetry” orig-
inates in battle songs and stories (Verkhovskii, “Poety pushkinskoi
pory,” in Poety pushkinskoi pory,16–17). In addition, men poets repre-
sented themselves in explicitly sexual terms—as seducers of women or
in sexual relationships with desirable female muses or muse surrogates.^5
Women poets, in contrast, had few mythic or historical models fromwhich to create female images of the poet. The two most eminent women
poets known at this time were the classical Greeks Sappho and Corinna,
whose work only survives in fragments.^6 Women poets avoided using
Sappho as a model, not only because they lacked a male classical edu-
cation and thus had no direct access to her poetry but also, it seems
likely, because men poets and critics used the term russkaia Safo (the Rus-
sian Sappho) in sexualizing epigrams and ad feminamattacks. One Rus-
sian scholar cites a series of epigrams directed at women poets from the
beginning of the nineteenth century that implied they suffered from un-
requited love for a particular man poet, as Sappho is supposed to have
done for Phaon. Other epigrams encouraged women poets to follow
Sappho’s example by jumping from the promontory of Leucas or ex-
pressed the epigrammatist’s desire to do so rather than listen to their po-
etry.^7 Such demeaning allusions to Sappho and women poets continued
at least into the middle of the century. In 1847 , when V. R. Zotov, editor
of Literaturnaia gazeta,started publishing Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia’s
poetry, he placed the first two selections below a serialized article about
Sappho’s career as a courtesan (“Safo i Lezbosskie getery” [Sappho and
the courtesans of Lesbos]). In the article, the author, M. Mikhailov, refers
to Sappho as “this lamentable mixture of such depravity and such ge-
nius” (“eto plachevoi smeshenie takoi isporchennosti i takogo geniia”),
while describing in great detail Sappho’s training as a courtesan, pre-
sumably for the delectation of men readers.^8
How, then, could women poets represent themselves? As mentionedearlier, some enacted the culturally encouraged but unsatisfying stance
of poetessaor “sociomoral handmaiden.” Several wrote poems about the
impossibility of being both a woman and a poet in their society or iron-
ically advised women, in poetry, not to write poems at all, or counseled
Literary Conventions 39