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

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(As if everything for which we passionately ask

Were in vain.)

(“Duma,” 1840 )

The word “naprasno” occurs less frequently in men’s poetry.^62 Some po-

ems depict death as a desired goal or a means of transcendence.^63 Such

themes occur rarely, if at all, in the poetry of their male contemporaries.

Reception

We have looked at some differences in the way these women poets ap-

proached the most characteristic Romantic poetic genres: the poema,the

ballad, the elegy, and the lyric. How did such differences affect the re-

ception of their work? As mentioned in the introduction, it seems likely

that men literary gatekeepers—publishers, critics, editors—ignored

women’s poetry or found it irrelevant or meaningless because they had

no knowledge of the experience it evoked. For example, as mentioned

in the introduction, Belinsky pronounced Teplova’s poem “Sestre” (To

my sister) rebiacheskii(puerile), one suspects because canonical men po-

ets generally did not write poems to family members, although all four-

teen of the women poets did.^64 In addition, the debate about women’s

writing (discussed in chapter 1 ) appears to have fostered a conde-

scending or hostile attitude among men reviewers toward women

poets.

Contemporary reviewers, as I have shown elsewhere, reduced several

of these women poets to then-current female stereotypes: Kul’man to a

virgin martyr, Zhadovskaia to an object of pornographic fantasy,

Teplova to a wallflower, Pavlova to a masculine woman, and Ros-

topchina to a whore.^65 And, as discussed in chapter 1 , it would appear

that at least some negative nineteenth-century attitudes toward women

writers persisted into the twentieth century, continuing to affect the crit-

ical evaluation of these poets.

Is it possible to expand the definition of Romanticism—which, as we

saw in chapter 1 , has been considered a male institution—to include the

work of women writers? Romanticism has been described as encourag-

ing “revolutionary political ideas” (Harmon and Holman, Handbook to

Literature, 452 ), expressing “an extreme assertion of the self” (Drabble,

Gender and Genre 85