Many of these women, however, chose to represent themselves as po-ets, reworking elements of men’s poetic self-representation. In so doing,
they appropriated cultural prerogatives reserved for men: positions of
“sacred authority”—the role of priest or prophet—as well as the power
to “experience and narrate the sacred” (S. Friedman, “Craving Stories,”
24 ), although they did so with ambivalence, with what Gilbert and
Gubar call “anxiety of authorship” (Madwoman in the Attic, 49 ).
Interestingly, the only woman poet in this group to represent herselfas prophet was Rostopchina, who, as we shall see, generally has been
perceived as enacting the poetessa role.^9 However, if women could not be
prophets, they could narrate the sacred as visionaries; seven out of the
fourteen women poets we have been considering wrote poems describ-
ing religious visions, poems usually titled “Videnie” (Vision). Perhaps
it is significant that while there are no instances in the Bible of God
speaking directly to a woman, there are models for women having reli-
gious visions in the Annunciation and in the three Marys’ vision of the
resurrected Christ.^10 However, these Russian women poets express
ambivalence about assuming even such limited religious authority.
Zhadovskaia’s two poems, “Videnie proroka Ieziekiila” (Vision of
the prophet Ezekiel) and “Kto mne rodnia?” (Who is kin to me? both
1858 ), are “cross-gendered,” that is, written in the masculine voice.
Shakhovskaia’s ambitious religious-patriotic vision significantly is
called Snovidenie(A dream) rather than “Videnie” (Vision). Gotovtseva’s
and Teplova’s poems, both called “Videnie,” focus more on the female
narrator’s feelings for the angel than on the vision itself.^11
As for the representation of poets as bards and part of a military-poetic complex, a number of women poets appropriated this role as
well. It may be, as Paula Feldman and Theresa Kelley have suggested,
that “nationalistic or patriotic convictions allowed some women writ-
ers to strengthen their claim to authorship.”^12 In addition, these writers
may have been encouraged to portray themselves as patriotic and even
militaristic by the literary fashion for Joan of Arc—Robert Southey’s
epic Joan of Arc( 1796 ), Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans( 1802 ), which
Zhukovsky translated into Russian in 1820 and Karolina Pavlova trans-
lated into French in 1839 —as well as by Pushkin’s sponsorship of the
memoirs of Nadezhda Durova, who fought for Russia in the Napoleonic
Wars disguised as a man. The most exaggerated example of such patri-
otism is Shakhovskaia’s vision Snovidenie,which describes a heaven oc-
cupied exclusively by Russian and Roman soldiers and the poets who
glorify them and is dedicated to moia otchizna(my fatherland). Only
Literary Conventions 41