How Women Must Write: Inventing the Russian Woman Poet by Olga Peters Hasty

Abstract

Reviewed by: How Women Must Write: Inventing the Russian Woman Poet by Olga Peters Hasty Hilde Hoogenboom HOW WOMEN MUST WRITE: INVENTING THE RUSSIAN WOMAN POET, by Olga Peters Hasty. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019. 248 pp. $120.00 hardback; $39.95 paperback; $39.95 ebook. In her prize-winning book, How Women Must Write: Inventing the Russian Woman Poet, Olga Peters Hasty establishes new connections among four major women poets. She pairs Evdokiia Rostopchina (1811-1858) with Karolina Pavlova (1807-1893) in the nineteenth century and Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) with Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) in the twentieth century. The pairing of these poets is a cultural habit that Hasty finds useful if problematic because critics pushed women poets to compete with each other. In a major reconfiguration of this dynamic, Hasty shows that Tsvetaeva broke the competitive cycle, as she aligned herself with Pavlova's ideal of the poetic craft and wrote poems and letters to Akhmatova. Poets in Russia occupy a prestigious place in literature and among feminist scholars. In her groundbreaking study Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (1987), Barbara Heldt argued that Russian women writers found their voice most convincingly in poetry and autobiography rather than fiction. Heldt singled out Rostopchina, Pavlova, Tsvetaeva, and Akhmatova among her pantheon, as does Hasty. In her new work, Hasty applies the lens of gender to these well-known writers and their anthologized poems. For her opening chapters on Rostopchina and Pavlova, Hasty builds on Diana Greene's Reinventing Romantic Poetry: Russian Women Poets of the Mid-Nineteenth Century (2004), which asks how class and gender affected the education, publication, and reception of fourteen women poets, especially Rostopchina, Pavlova, and Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia. Hasty calls her critical method "deep reading"—a Russian twist on close reading (p. xi). In a culture used to reading between the lines for hidden political messages, readers have failed to imagine that women wrote [End Page 403] political poetry. They have also failed to detect women poets' subversive messages about gender. Hasty argues that readers at the time missed those messages because they imposed their own gendered censorship. They did not recognize how women poets subverted gender norms and engaged in "skillful negotiation" over the "multifaceted indeterminacy" of the term "woman" (p. 3). Women poets found their voice and agency through coded dialogue with each other. They protested against men's stereotypes of women's poetry, which "inhibited their unmediated self-realization" (p. 10). Hasty draws on an eclectic mixture of methodologies: the close reading of New Criticism; Wolfgang Iser's reader response theory from the 1970s; masquerade theories from the 1980s; and notions of women's agency that arose from feminist and Marxist rebuttals to structuralism. Rostopchina, like Akhmatova two generations later, embraced writing as a woman. It is Rostopchina's poem "How Should Women Write" (1841) that provides the book's title and its conundrum: women poets reveal "the feminine world" that must remain "modestly veil[ed]" (p. 62). Hasty deduces that in this poem, Rostopchina is asserting that men cannot decode women's poems because they have declared that women should only write about their hidden inner world. But the dictates of male culture did not always succeed in shaping how women wrote. Rostopchina's next poem eluded the censors, was soon confiscated, and cost her access to the royal courts of Nicholas I and Alexander II. She published her incendiary poem "A Forced Marriage" (1845), which alluded to Poland's political submission to Russia, in a conservative journal that likely had misunderstood the political subtext—not because she was a woman but because she chose to submit it to a conservative journal. Hasty shows that Pavlova and later Tsvetaeva presented themselves as poets first and women second. Pavlova famously dubbed Rostopchina an acolyte of George Sand in "We Are Contemporaries, Countess" (1847), after her political scandal. Hasty interprets this as an attack on Rostopchina as a feminist when it was most likely aimed at her liberal politics. Sand's politics and relationship with the Polish pianist and composer Frédéric Chopin galvanized Russians. Presenting herself as a dutiful wife, Pavlova declared she was a purely intellectual poet in the...