Reinventing Romantic Poetry : Russian Women Poets of the Mid-nineteenth Century

Others tried to avoid confronting male religious authority by sepa-

rating God (male-gendered Bog) from fate (female-gendered sud’ba), at-

tributing all their sufferings to the latter. Garelina, for example, writes

in “Molisia obo mne” (Pray for me, 1870 ):^45

/ #  ,  #   

  #

   

 u

, #$ ;

h

(Pray for me that I carry with humility the heavy cross of suffering

Sent down by fate;)

Similarly, in Zhadovskaia’s “Nikto ne vinovat” (No one is to blame,

1847 ), the speaker blames fate (rather than God) for her unhappiness.

In several poems Rostopchina depicts fate as responsible for romantic

disappointments and God as benevolently supporting all the speakers’

desires and actions, including adultery. In Dnevnik devushki( 1850 ), the

speaker complains about the cruel fate that took her lover away:

u # u

,  , 

    #!

#!

h

(Fate hurtled you away from me

Far away, perhaps forever!

Cruel!)

(Dnevnik devushki, 241 )

while in Neizvestnyi roman,“Pri svidan’i” (An unknown romance, At the

rendezvous, 1857 ) the married speaker, who is about to meet her lover,

says:

        

!.. /#   !u...

u  ! , #$ $

!..

h

(God is merciful!... He will not forget me...

If he is for us, I will not be afraid of people!.. .)

Such a compartmentalization seems unconvincing to the contemporary

reader. Nonetheless, I would suggest that these women poets’ discom-

fort with a cosmology that cast them as Other also spurred them to find

ways to transform that cosmology, adding a level of philosophical com-

plexity and depth to their poetry absent from the men’s.

The women of this generation faced a daunting array of male-defined

Literary Conventions 55