Reinventing Romantic Poetry Studies of the Harriman Institute Reinventing Romantic Poetry Russian Women Poets of the Mid-Nineteenth Century h Diana Greene The University of Wisconsin Press The University of Wisconsin Press 1930 Monroe Street Madison, Wisconsin 53711 www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/ 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU, England Copyright © 2004 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved 54321 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Greene, Diana. Reinventing romantic poetry : Russian women poets of the mid-nineteenth century / Greene, Diana. p. cm.—(Studies of the Harriman Institute) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-299-19104-4 (alk. paper) 1. Russian poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Romanticism—Russia. 3. Russian poetry—Women authors—History and criticism. 4.Women and litera- ture—Russia—History—19th century. 5. Rostopchina, Evdokiia, 1812–1858—Criti- cism and interpretation. 6.Krestovskii, V., 1824–1889—Criticism and interpretation. 7.Pavlova, Karolina, 1807–1893—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title: Russian women poets of the mid-nineteenth century. II. Title. III. Series. PG3051. G74 2003 891.71′309145′082—dc21 2003006491 For Milly Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 1. Social Conditions 21 2. Literary Conventions 38 3. Gender and Genre 57 4. Evdokiia Rostopchina 88 5. Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia 112 6. Karolina Pavlova 137 7. In Conclusion: Noncanonical Men Poets 167 Appendix 177 Notes 219 Bibliography 281 Index 297 vii Acknowledgments This book could not have been written without the generous help of many people, groups, and institutions. I am delighted to have this op- portunity to thank them. Responses that I received to early versions of this work greatly influ- enced its eventual scope and depth. My thanks to the Women in Slavic Culture and Literature group at the Summer Research Lab in Cham- paign-Urbana, to the participants in the Columbia University Seminar on Slavic History and Culture, to Katharina Brett, and Carol Ueland. Several people kindly took the time to read various chapters, provid- ing many valuable insights and ideas: Barbara Heldt, Eliot Borenstein, Charlotte Rosenthal, Natalie Dehn, Nancy Burstein, Randall Spinks, Ann Kleimola, Romy Taylor, and members of the New York University Scholarly Writing Group. I am particularly grateful to those who read the entire manuscript, offering structural, bibliographic, and other ex- pertise: Ron Meyer, Catriona Kelly, Sally Pratt, and especially Helena Goscilo for her transformative and exuberant comments on style as well as content. None of these people, of course, are responsible for the use I made of their suggestions. Jehanne Gheith and Karen Rosneck generously shared Khvoshchin- skaia materials with me. Elena Ermilovna Glafner at Rossiiskii gosu- darstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI) provided invaluable help with Khvoshchinskaia’s notebooks. I consider myself very fortu- nate to know Antonina Strizhenko, who helped me unstintingly and re- peatedly at Pushkinskii dom. Mikhail Fainshtein graciously opened doors for me in Saint Petersburg and Moscow on several occasions. Lina Bernstein kindly sent me material on Elagina. Irina Gordon gave generous, meticulous, and expert help with Russian. I am also very ix x Acknowledgments grateful to Karina Melnikov and Irina Reyfman for advice on Russian, Claudine Verheggen on French, Ron Meyer on translation, and Masha Lykhina on Russian and Russian computers. Any mistakes that remain are my own. Thanks to Mary Zirin for inspiration and to Gloria Rohmann, a friend in need. Ann Kleimola, Clara Evans, Shirley Glade, Ann Kaslow, Lucy Morganstern, and Randall Spinks supplied steady and much appreci- ated encouragement while I wrote and revised. My work was greatly facilitated by two New York University Li- braries Goddard Faculty Support Grants and an International Research and Exchanges Board Short Term Travel Grant. Harvard University Press kindly gave permission to reprint part of “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” which appears in The Poems of Emily Dickinson. I wish to express appreciation to the University Seminars at Columbia University for their help in publication. Thanks to those most knowledgeable reference librarians of the Slavic Reading Room at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana for research help over several summers. Also to my supportive colleagues at NYU’s Bobst Library, who so effectively helped me with my reference questions, interlibrary loan requests, and com- puter problems, and to Chris Holden and the Bates College Library for making it possible for me to work there in very pleasant conditions. And, of course, my thanks to my parents, who made everything pos- sible. A Note on Transliteration, Punctuation, and Abbreviations I use modified Library of Congress transliteration of Russian—in mod- ern orthography—with one exception: men’s names ending in -ii are written as such in the notes (Belinskii) but changed to the more familiar -y (Belinsky) in the text. The reader will notice that many of the poems cited include the Romantic device of suspension points—three un- spaced dots intimating the ineffable—which in the translations appear as three spaced dots without brackets. Suspension points should not be confused with ellipses—the three or four spaced dots in brackets indi- cating that I have left out part of the text. The following abbreviations are used for archival sources: PD Institut russkoi literatury RAN (Pushkinskii dom) RGALI Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva RNB(OR) Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka (Otdel rukopisei) xi Reinventing Romantic Poetry Introduction This study offers some preliminary suggestions toward rethinking Rus- sian Romanticism, issues of canonicity, and the place of mid-nineteenth- century women poets in the history of Russian literature. While the question of whether Russia had a Romantic movement has been de- bated,1 most scholars agree that Romanticism was a pan-European phe- nomenon with national variations, one of which was Russian. René Wellek has defined three underlying elements common to all national Romantic movements, Russia’s included: first, a view of poetry for which the imagination, rather than rationality, is central; second, a view of the world for which nature, rather than a mechanistic universe, is cen- tral; and third, a view of poetic style for which symbol and myth, rather than allegory, are central.2 Here I wish to consider the place of women poets in Romanticism. Several literary critics have characterized Romanticism as a masculine- gendered institution unfriendly to women.3 Certainly, what Bertrand Russell described as the “essential Romantic trait,” “titanic cosmic self- assertion,” would not have been easy for women of the time to develop and express in a society that demanded from them modesty, self- sacrifice, and devotion to the needs of others.4 Moreover, a closer look at Wellek’s three basic elements of Romanticism shows that in practice they, too, are gender-specific. Men poets, in expressing a “view of po- etry for which imagination is central,” personified imagination as a fe- male muse, often depicting her as sexual partner. The “view of the world for which nature is central” means that Nature—troped as silent, femi- nine, mother, and Other—served as an object of interpretation or as- similation by the man poet. The third element, a poetic style for which symbol and myth are central, meant in the case of several influential 3 4 Introduction Romantic poets androcentric or even misogynist myths. For example, in Pushkin we find men engaged in oedipal struggles over the women who “belong” to powerful statues or generals (“Kamennyi gost’” [The stone guest], Evgenii Onegin [Eugene Onegin]). In Byron we find sexu- ally available harem girls (“The Giaour,” “The Corsair”). I suggest that mid-nineteenth-century Russian women poets had to find different ways to relate to the imagination, to nature and to myth and symbol. They had to transform male-defined traditions, genres, and themes in order to be able to address women’s experiences or even to rep- resent themselves as poets. That is, they had to reinvent Romantic po- etry. Ironically, men critics, rather than recognizing these women’s tremendous inventiveness in reworking literary forms, dismissed them as not “real” (that is, men) poets.5 This study, then, examines the poetic practices and achievements of mid-nineteenth-century women poets in relation to the gender-based issues they shared and their various responses to them.6 I base my generalizations on the poetic practices of fourteen significant but gen- erally unknown Russian women poets born between 1799 and 1824: Praskov’ia Bakunina (1810–80), Aleksandra Fuks (1805–53), Liubov’ Garelina (1824–85), Anna Gotovtseva (1799–1871), Nadezhda Khvo- shchinskaia (1824–89), Elisaveta Kul’man (1808–25), Mariia Lisitsyna (d. 1842), Anna Mordovtseva (1823–85), Karolina Pavlova (1807–93), Evdokiia Rostopchina (1811–58), Elisaveta Shakhova (1822–99), Ekate- rina Shakhovskaia (1814–36), Nadezhda Teplova (1814–48), and Iuliia Zhadovskaia (1824–83).7 I will focus on the work of three of these po- ets—Rostopchina, Khvoshchinskaia, and Pavlova—in greater detail. For comparison I refer to the poetic practices of seven prominent Rus- sian men poets born between 1798 and 1820: Evgenii Baratynsky (1800– 1844), Anton Del’vig (1798–1831), Afanasii Fet (1820–92), Nikolai Iazykov (1803–46), Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41), Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837), and Fedor Tiutchev (1803–73). However, since not every man poet of this generation became canonical, we also must consider the poetic practices of contemporary noncanonical men poets. I have cho- sen Pavel Fedotov (1815–52), Eduard Guber (1814–47), Aleksei Khomi- akov (1804–60), Aleksei Kol’tsov (1809–42), Apollon Maikov (1821–97), Evgenii Mil’keev (1815–46?), and Fedor Miller (1818–81), poets whose works have been anthologized but whom literary historians refer to as vtorostepenii (second rank or minor).8 A full discussion of the poetical practices of canonical and noncanonical men poets, however, lies out- side my scope.