Olga Peters Hasty's How Women Must Write is a meticulous and carefully argued study of the complicated negotiations inherent in the (self-)conception and (self-) presentation of women poets from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. An overarching point lies in the negative effect stereotypes had on women writers both in their own time as well as in subsequent appraisals, not least by scholars of literature. Hasty argues passionately for more nuanced readings that reveal these well-known poets as more complex and less boxed in by contemporary and present-day notions of “how women must write.”
The book consists of three parts. Part I, “Contentions,” maps the minefield of limitations and misapprehensions faced by women poets in the latter half of the nineteenth century. To begin with, women's very appearance in poetry was enabled by the genre's decline in prestige (occasioned by the new dominance of prose). Once acknowledged as poets, women faced meager options for self-presentation: “writing like a man” to avoid being relegated to “women's writing” (for Karolina Pavlova) or “writing like a woman” and embracing stereotypical notions of femininity (Evgenia Rostopchina). Both strategies conditioned reception of these poets’ work and led inevitably to misreadings; Hasty also discusses the unproductive rivalry that divided them. Meanwhile, subtlety pervaded even their polemics: for instance, Pavlova contrasted her own modest “domesticity” to Rostopchina's flighty “cosmopolitanism” in a subversive move that pointed to the political implications of the domestic (vs. public, official) sphere in 1840s Russia. Rostopchina's theatrical streak was likewise grossly misunderstood as high-society frivolity when her many lyric masks in fact reflected her prescient awareness of gender as a construct.
Hasty's readings of Pavlova and Rostopchina present both a depressing range of misinterpretations and an impressive account of the subtle ways their work signified, somehow holding out hope for equally subtle and sympathetic readers. Pavlova reappropriated restrictions to demonstrate admirable restraint and control (though such reticence was often taken to mean she—and other women—had nothing to say). Rostopchina rejected the domestic sphere for independence in society, but was seen as irresponsible and ditzy. Writing about women's experience was thought to evidence deficient creative imagination; although this “straight talk” would subsequently come into vogue with the rejection of Symbolist mysticism and abstraction, it was still assumed that women had a “natural gift” for such documentary aesthetics and were incapable of writing any other way.
The misinterpretations of Pavlova and Rostopchina had much to do with how prominent male critics read and interpreted them. Part II, “Female Impersonations,” bolsters the argument about critics’ gatekeeping and limiting viewpoint—here, they themselves dive into writing poetry as women (as they imagine women should write). While Nelli—a sensitive, highly sexualized fallen woman—was transparently a voyeuristic fantasy of Valerii Briusov, the exotic Cherubina de Gabriak presents a more complicated case, since she was co-invented and co-authored by Elizaveta Dmitrieva and Maximilian Voloshin. While Hasty argues convincingly for Voloshin's overbearing mentorship of Dmitrieva, and for the stereotype-ridden image of Cherubina, this chapter is noticeably lacking in poetic quotations, leaving the question of Dmitrieva's actual literary accomplishment unanswered.
Briusov's and Voloshin's dubious contributions to women's poetry segue neatly into Part III, “Resistance,” which discusses the two critics’ significance for Marina Tsvetaeva early in her career. Tsvetaeva deliberately sidesteps male mentorship, acting as her own best advocate and even cherry-picking contemporary male critics’ observations that accorded with how she saw herself. Moreover, she avoids being misunderstood by using her essays to subtly instruct readers on how to read her work. In her capacious self-conception as a woman and poet, Tsvetaeva is presented as synthesizing the warring versions of femininity Hasty attributes, respectively, to Pavlova and Rostopchina. The fraught binary of “Tsvetaeva or Akhmatova” is likewise one that Tsvetaeva worked consistently to deflect and defuse, by forging bonds with Anna Akhmatova rather than vying with her for the title of “first female poet.” For her part, Akhmatova in later poems articulates a canon with her and Tsvetaeva on equal terms at its center.
How Women Must Write offers a narrative of progression: from the narrow confines within which Pavlova and Rostopchina had to negotiate their writing selves, to Silver-Age-era attempts to box in increasingly prominent women poets by competing mystifications, and finally, the more assured strategies of self-positioning employed by Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova. But the model Hasty describes hardly went away: male gatekeeping and the ghettoization of female poets continued deep into the Soviet period (in both official, unofficial and émigré literary circles) and has perhaps been overcome only recently in post-Soviet poetry, in part through the explicit efforts of feminist poets. Hasty's useful study thus has implications for large swathes of the Russian literary process far beyond the small number of authors treated therein.
