Zhadovskaia, who assumed confessional personae; such critics, how-
ever, often attacked or ignored women poets like Pavlova, Khvoshchin-
skaia, or Fuks, who did not pretend to be exposing their most intimate
feelings.^25
Despite men critics’ views that women could not and should not cre-ate fictional personae, these fourteen women poets used a great num-
ber and variety of them, possibly more than did the men. Many of the
women wrote at least one poem in which they combined a male persona
with “unmarked” male grammatical endings and pseudonyms in order
to disguise their gender. Men poets, it should be noted, wrote far fewer
such “cross-gendered” poems; Pushkin for example, wrote none, except
for a draft of “Dioneia” ( 1821 ) from which he subsequently eliminated
the female-marked verb endings. Among the other men poets we are
considering I found only two by Del’vig, five by Fet, one by Tiutchev, four
by Kol’tsov, two by Miller, and one by Maikov. Perhaps the men felt un-
comfortable in assuming the lower-status female role.^26
Even among the women poets, however, cross-gendered poems rep-resent an insignificant number of works. Most of their fictional personae
are female, suggesting that they were less interested in disguising
their gender than in exploring different personalities and perspec-
tives. Gotovtseva, for example, juxtaposes poems with similar vocab-
ulary but very different viewpoints. In the last stanza of one poem,
“Odinochestvo,” (Solitude, her translation of Lamartine’s “L’Isolement,”
1819 ) and in the first stanza of the next “K N. N.” (To N. N.) the same
word, poblekshii(withered), appears, first seriously and then mockingly:
“Kogda poblekshii list na zemliu upadaet” (When the withered leaf falls
to the earth), as opposed to
,
$ # ?h
(Why do you with a light brush
Shade withered flowers?)^27Similarly, Zhadovskaia starts one poem “Ty skoro menia pozabudesh’“
(You will soon forget me, 1858 ) and another “Ty menia pozabudesh’ ne
skoro” (You won’t forget me soon, 1858 ). In Fuks’s collection
Stikhotvoreniia(Poems, 1834 ), “Zhenikh” (The bridegroom), a poem sat-
irizing romantic love, is followed by “Aneta i Liubim” (Aneta and Liu-
bim), which exemplifies it. Similarly, in this collection, which appeared
under Fuks’s name, “Schastlivye druz’ia!” (Lucky friends!), a poem with
46 Literary Conventions