those who could be described as poetessy—addressed themselves pri-
marily to women. Perhaps they assumed men would not be interested
in the realities of their lives. Or perhaps they chose as their implied
reader an audience that had also experienced those realities. Teplova,
for example, in about twenty of her poems directly addresses women
friends and relations. Pavlova dedicated Dvoinaia zhizn’(A Double Life)
to society women:
- u u.
[.............]
*
, "
,
u !h
(Slaves of noise and vanity.
[.............]
All of you Psyches deprived of wings
The mute sisters of my soul!)In digressions throughout the work Pavlova’s narrator addresses this
audience. Several other women poets wrote poems to groups of women
friends.^31
The implied reader can affect a poet’s attitude toward the poem’s sub-ject. Rachel Blau DuPlessis finds that many lyrics by men poets objec-
tify and silence women. Such poems depict “masculine heterosexual de-
sire looking at and framing a silent, beautiful, distant female; an overtly
male ‘I’ speaking as if overheard in front of an unseen but loosely pos-
tulated male ‘us’ about a (beloved) ‘she’“ (“’Corpses of Poesy,’“ 71 ). In
women’s poetry written to women friends, audience and addressee
are the same and such objectification does not occur. Furthermore, in
these Russian women’s poems the male Other is often allowed to speak
or even have the last word, if only to demonstrate his insensitivity
to women. For example, in Garelina’s “Bezumnaia” (The madwoman,
1870 )—in which a count’s son seduces and abandons a priest’s daugh-
ter, who drowns herself—the poem closes with her seducer dismissing
her as a madwoman. We do occasionally find poems by these women
in which the male Other is framed and silenced, for example, Pavlova’s
two poems “ 10 noiabria 1840 ” ( 10 November 1840 , 1840 ) and “Na 10
noiabria” (For 10 November, 1841 ) about Mickiewicz. We also find a
very few poems by men in which a nonaristocratic male Other speaks.
For example, in Pushkin’s “Besy” the coachman speaks to tell his pas-
senger, who narrates the poem, that they are lost in the snowstorm; in
48 Literary Conventions