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

2. Literary Conventions

2 Literary Conventions Several literary critics have argued that Romanticism was a malegendered institution. Certainly we find in the Russian poetry of the first half of the nineteenth century such blatantly male-centered Romantic conventions as the friendly epistle (druzheskoe poslanie) celebrating the cult of male friendship, anacreontic odes, and Bacchic poetry.1 Here I would like to consider some of the ways that women poets of this period dealt with two less obvious but more basic androcentric Romantic conventions: poetic representations of the self and of nature. Romantic Self-Representation Both Western and Russian Romantic men poets commonly represented themselves as priests, prophets, and “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” all occupations barred to women. In Russia we find many men poets appropriating God’s voice and authority to chastise men and even rulers.2 For example, in Pushkin’s “Prorok” (The prophet, 1826) the prophet-poet becomes God’s surrogate, able to burn people’s hearts “with the word.” In Baratynsky’s “Poslednii poet” (The last poet, 1834) the poet’s death expresses the ultimate condemnation of a civilization that has rejected both nature and poetry. Other examples of the poet as priest and prophet can be found in Del’vig’s “Vdokhnovenie” (Inspiration , 1822), Lermontov’s “Poèt” (1838) and “Poet i tolpa” (The poet and the crowd, 1828), Khomiakov’s “Poèt” (1827), “Rossii” (To Russia, 1839), “Sud bozhii” (God’s judgment, 1854), and Maikov’s “Sny” (Dreams, 1885). Russian men poets also represented themselves with the trope of the 38 warrior-bard.3 While poetic self-representation as glorifiers of war can be traced back at least as far as Homer, in late eighteenth-century Russia and Europe the bardic tradition gained new life from the ballad revival , with its focus on minstrels, as well as from James Macpherson’s very popular Ossian poems.4 As late as 1919 one literary historian of Russia’s Golden Age hypothesized that all “professional epic-lyric poetry” originates in battle songs and stories (Verkhovskii, “Poety pushkinskoi pory,” in Poety pushkinskoi pory, 16–17). In addition, men poets represented themselves in explicitly sexual terms—as seducers of women or in sexual relationships with desirable female muses or muse surrogates.5 Women poets, in contrast, had few mythic or historical models from which to create female images of the poet. The two most eminent women poets known at this time were the classical Greeks Sappho and Corinna, whose work only survives in fragments.6 Women poets avoided using Sappho as a model, not only because they lacked a male classical education and thus had no direct access to her poetry but also, it seems likely, because men poets and critics used the term russkaia Safo (the Russian Sappho) in sexualizing epigrams and ad feminam attacks. One Russian scholar cites a series of epigrams directed at women poets from the beginning of the nineteenth century that implied they suffered from unrequited love for a particular man poet, as Sappho is supposed to have done for Phaon. Other epigrams encouraged women poets to follow Sappho’s example by jumping from the promontory of Leucas or expressed the epigrammatist’s desire to do so rather than listen to their poetry .7 Such demeaning allusions to Sappho and women poets continued at least into the middle of the century. In 1847, when V. R. Zotov, editor of Literaturnaia gazeta, started publishing Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia’s poetry, he placed the first two selections below a serialized article about Sappho’s career as a courtesan (“Safo i Lezbosskie getery” [Sappho and the courtesans of Lesbos]). In the article, the author, M. Mikhailov, refers to Sappho as “this lamentable mixture of such depravity and such genius ” (“eto plachevoi smeshenie takoi isporchennosti i takogo geniia”), while describing in great detail Sappho’s training as a courtesan, presumably for the delectation of men readers.8 How, then, could women poets represent themselves? As mentioned earlier, some enacted the culturally encouraged but unsatisfying stance of poetessa or “sociomoral handmaiden.” Several wrote poems about the impossibility of being both a woman and a poet in their society or ironically advised women, in poetry, not to write poems at all, or counseled Literary Conventions 39 them to write only those appropriate to poetesses. For example, Shakhova’s “K zhenshchinam poetam” (To women poets, 1845):
тр! Жрби роково ! [. . . . . . . . . . .] На чло вц лавров Давит, колт и тит, Торжтвuт u uров ,—
рдц жко грuтит. [. . . .] h (Sisters! A fatal lot! [. . . . . . . . . . . .] On our brow the laurel crown Presses, pricks and...