Reinventing Romantic Poetry: Russian Women Poets of the Mid-Nineteenth Century by Diana s> Greene (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 319 Some recent scholarship has reasserted the hieratic role of the poet by transferringan influentialparadigm about the sacralizationof the tsar to the figure of the poet. It is an approach that risksconfusing two distinct trends joined by cognate vocabulary rather than an underlying cultural grammar. Other researchersmore empiricallysee the status of poetry as a result of the micro-historyof a particularperiod, and the cult of the poet looksincreasingly like a retrospective misreading (here Paul Benichou's seminal work on Romantic poets has a lot to offerRussianists).Is it reallytrue, as Crone states, that 'extremereverenceforpoets and poetry [. . .] has been a constantfeature of Russianeliteculturessincethemid-eighteenthcentury'(p. i)?An enormous body of evidence easily contradictsthis anachronisticstartingpoint of what is really a circular argument. The empresses Elizabeth and Catherine showed Trediakovskiiand Sumarokov anything but reverence, and Pushkin himself was reassuringly rude about many of his predecessors and wrote poems assertingthe statusof the poet preciselybecause exaltationof the poet was not a given. This is the message of recent work by G. S. Smith, S. Sandler, and Andrei Zorin (whosebook on Derzhavin's nineteenth-centuryreceptionis not noted by Crone). Derzhavin's second-hand knowledge of Enlightenment secular values, rather than a Russian cultural legacy, endowed him with a belief in the power of reason and the imagination through which the artist expressed, without discovering, certain existential and philosophical truths. But, as his biographerstell us, he was also a man who liked to be heard, and the tone of authority that accompanies his pronouncements are part of his rhetorical charm if not intellectual certainty, and part of his senatorial grandeur,if not moral independence. Whether or not readersagree with her larger argument, Crone's book provides a valuable guide to reading the poet and, one hopes, will sparkfurtherinterestin thisgreatwriter. StEdmund Hall, Oxford ANDREW KAHN Greene, Diana. Reinventing Romantic Poetry:RussianWomen Poetsof theMidNineteenthCentury .Studies of the Harriman Institute. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2004. xi+ 306 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography.Index. $29.95 (paperback). DIANA GREENE has hereidentifiedand anatomizedaveryinterestingquestion: the place ofwomen poets in RussianRomanticism, a movement in which they are not generallythought to have figured.She exploresways in which women addressedgender-specificelements of Romanticism, namely the personification of imagination as a female muse, the troping of Nature as feminine, and the use of androcentric or misogynist myths, and transformedmale-defined traditions,genres and themes, in order to addresswomen's experiences or to represent themselves as poets. She takes as her corpus fourteen female poets born in the firstquarterof the nineteenth century, and compares theirpoetic practiceswith those of fourteen male poets of the same period, seven of them canonical and seven non-canonical. She aimsto showthe need forinterpretive strategies,such as sensitivityto their ambivalence, that will allow an objective evaluation of women's poetry, and explores the factorswhich account for the 320 SEER, 83, 2, 2005 absence of women poets from the canon. Amongst the lattershe identifiesand explores critical prejudices against women writers, and the women's lack of 'literary social capital' (education, mentors, location in the capitals, and personalconnections which allowed accessto the means of literaryproduction and consumption). Her first chapter addresses the social conditions of the women poets, highlighting the problems of combining writing with marriage and bringing up children, scorn of women who ventured beyond domesticity, exclusion from the men's institutions which provided male poets with mentors and access to publication, and the temptation to settle for being a poetess a handmaiden of the patriarchalorder ratherthan a poet with ambitionsfor art and fame. Her second chapter deals with poetic representationsof the self and nature, showing women's reworkingof androcentric images. The third focuseson theirdistinctiveuse of genre, the redesignof the 'povest'v stikhakh' to accommodate women's stories, and distinctive elegiac and lyric themes. Then followchaptersdevoted to EvdokiiaRostopchina, Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia , and Karolina Pavlova. The final chapter is on non-canonical men poets. Greene concludes that literarycanons are subjectto change, but have so far been dominated by the evaluations of upper-class men, and that understandingof Russian poetry of this period would be enhanced by other views. This isa thought-provokingstudy.Greene opens up a complex of questions, shows their interrelations,and produces a stream of original and persuasive observations and interesting evidence. Her...