Hasty , Olga Peters How Women Must Write: Inventing the Russian Woman Poet (review)

Abstract

Slavonic and East European Review, 98, 4, 2020 Reviews Hasty, Olga Peters. How Women Must Write: Inventing the Russian Woman Poet. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2020. xiv + 227 pp. Notes. Index. $39.95 (paperback). Olga Peters Hasty’s How Women Must Write: Inventing the Russian Woman Poet is a wonderful gift to all those interested in Russian poetry and women’s studies. Very well researched, it builds productively on its predecessors and adds significantly to the growing number of superb studies of Russian literature, and of women’s writing in particular, from a broadly understood feminist perspective. I have in mind books by Diana Greene, Jehanne Gheith, Stephanie Sandler and Catriona Kelly, to name but a few scholars, as well as Hasty’s own earlier Pushkin’s Tatiana (Madison, WI, 1999), and Tsvetaeva’s Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the Word (Evanston, IL, 1996). These studies combine questions posed by feminist criticism with a profound attention to the literary tradition they examine and its historical context. Theory and ideology do not overshadow the texts and the persons who created them. This is a general strength of Slavic studies, and of Hasty’s work in particular. Throughout the book, Hasty presents women poets ‘not as passive victims of gender-driven constraints but as purposeful actors negotiating a system rife with disincentives that they turn to advantage’ (p. ix). How Women Must Write offers a series of case studies, incorporating superb close readings of particular poems, which tell several fascinating episodes in the history of ‘inventing the Russian woman poet’. Hasty directs the reader’s gaze to a variety of such ‘inventors’: besides the woman poet herself, they include readers who do not recognize the poet’s subversion of ‘gender biases’; and ‘men who fabricate women poets and their poems’ (p. ix). Hasty’s focus on women as creative subjects, rather than victims, is extremely fruitful and inspiring. The story that Hasty tells, and tells beautifully, spans the Golden and Silver Ages of Russian poetry. It starts with the struggles of the two best-known nineteenth-century women poets, Evdokiia Rostopchina and Karolina Pavlova, who paved the way for the following generations of women; and ends with the triumphs, as well as the tribulations, of the twentieth-century giants, Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva. While Pavlova and Rostopchina succumbed to a rivalry that seems almost inevitable in a literary world inhospitable to women, their twentieth-century heirs managed to build a much more productive and mutually respectful relationship. The book has an elegant palindromic structure: besides an introduction and a conclusion, it consists of three parts of two chapters each. Part one opens with Pavlova and Rostopchina’s polemical poetic exchanges with one another, demonstrating their different strategies in attempting to inscribe themselves into the male-dominated Romantic tradition (ch. 1); and concludes with SEER, 98, 4, OCTOBER 2020 766 Rostopchina’s clever subversion of that ‘male tradition’ (ch. 2). In the middle section of the book, entitled ‘Female Impersonations’, Hasty discusses two literary mystifications which originated ‘in response to male fantasies’ (p. 73): the fictitious poet Cherubina de Gabriak, a joint venture of a real woman poet, Elizaveta Dmitrieva, and her male co-conspirator, Maksimilian Voloshin; and ‘Nelli’, a poet invented entirely by Valerii Briusov. As Hasty shows, both fictions illustrate men’s attempts to control and shape women’s creativity in the Silver Age. Through astute analysis of the poems ostensibly written by ‘Nelli’, Hasty demonstrates that ‘[t]he “new” woman Briusov models in the Nelli poems continues to be sexualized and commodified, only now she is an active participant in this process’ (p. 111). The final part (‘Resistance’) mirrors part one: in an echo of chapter two, chapter five describes Tsvetaeva’s refusal to submit to male authority represented by Briusov; and the last chapter, on Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova’s poetic relationship, ‘responds’ to the first chapter of the book. Hasty combines, to great effect, several theoretical approaches. Besides the feminist attention to the constraints placed on women’s creativity, she incorporates studies of political censorship (Leo Strauss), reader-response theory (Wolfgang Iser) and German mystification theory. She carries her theoretical...