either signed their poems with their full name—as did Gotovtseva,
Lisitsyna, Pavlova, and Khvoshchinskaia, who, however, used a male
pseudonym, V. Krestovsky, for her prose–or chose female-gendered
pseudonyms.^20 Bakunina, for example, used P. B-na; Garelina used
Nadezhda Libina, Neskazaeva, and L. G-a; Rostopchina used gr–ia, R-
a, russkaia zhenshchina, S-va, D., and many others. Even Mordovtseva,
who published her one book of poetry under the unmarked signature
A. B-z, established herself as female in the first poem—which concerns
her poetic vocation—by using marked female verbal endings. It would
appear that these poets wanted to write as women, even if doing so ad-
versely affected their reception.
A self-representational device related to signature is the persona orspeaker in a poem. Poets may choose personae closely identified with
themselves, for example, the speaker in Wordsworth’s Prelude,or com-
pletely separate, for example, Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara, the speaker
in Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” or somewhere in between, for ex-
ample, the speaker in Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”^21 Men crit-
ics have often assumed women poets to be too “artless” to use personae
at all, taking for granted that anything a woman writes in a poem is com-
pletely autobiographical. Emily Dickinson found it necessary to explain
to Thomas Higginson, poetry critic of the Atlantic Monthly,“When I state
myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a
supposed person” (Bianchi, Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson, 242 ). Even
in the twentieth century at least one Russian critic in his discussion of
the “lyric heroine” (liricheskaia geroinia) assumed that women poets use
the same persona in every poem.^22
Yet, while some men critics assumed women to be incapable of cre-ating personae, others urged women not to use them. Belinsky in his re-
view of Rostopchina’s first poetry collection suggested that in the future
she write “poetic revelations of the world of the feminine soul, melodies
of the mysticism of the feminine heart. Then they would also be more
interesting to the other half of the human race, which, God knows why,
has appropriated the right of judgment and reward.”^23 Similarly, Petr
Viazemsky advised Gotovtseva in an open letter, “Don’t write verses
on general problems.... There is a special charm in women’s confes-
sions.... For God’s sake, don’t put on masks.”^24 One wonders whether
such critics were motivated by voyeurism, hoping to gaze upon women’s
naked souls in poetry as they gazed upon women’s naked bodies
in paintings and at the ballet. Certainly, men critics praised, if con-
descendingly, the “sincerity” of women poets like Rostopchina and
Literary Conventions 45