Reading for a Self: Self-Definition and Female Ancestry in Three Russian Poems

Abstract

Lhe Russian Silver Age, like the corresponding Modernist period in the West, witnessed the publication and popularity of an unprecedented number of women writers. The literary movements of the period questioned the previous era's generic, philosophical and stylistic emphases; many of its schools and male poets, however, still considered that women were properly the raw material for writers, Beautiful Ladies or sexual objects, rather than writers themselves. Women poets who came to voice during the Russian Silver Age faced the task of finding and defining a space for women's voices within the literary tradition to which they now had greater access. This required both critical reading of earlier poets (women as much as men) and exploring different ways to define poetic careers and personalities. As part of the ongoing discussion of women writers in Russia, I offer a reading of three poems by women from Russia's Silver Age: Marina Tsvetaeva's Babushke (To [my] grandmother), Sofia Parnok's Zabyla tal'mu ia barezhevuiu (I forgot [my] cloak of Bareges lace), and Mariia Shkapskaia's Chto znaiu ia o babushke nemetskoi (What do I know about [my] German grandmother). Each of these poems works to transform the speaker's female ancestor(s) into sources of identity and authority, helping to determine her own identity and destiny as a poet. The three texts use family relationships to claim psychological space in a poetic tradition dominated by men and male points of view. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point out that the poetics of the Romantic era, defining the poet as a theurge and priest, made it extremely problematic for women writing in English to write and take themselves seriously as poets.1 Jane Taubman applies this insight to the Russian Silver Age, in which women, for the male Sym-