On Women and Poets: Gender in Cvetaevaʼs Commemorations of Brjusov and Vološin

This article is devoted to an important but understudied aspect of the creative self-affirmations that Tsvetaeva accomplishes in her essays dedicated to other poets, namely her rethinking of gender and how it relates to poetry. The focus here is specifically on how Tsvetaeva cultivates these ideas in ‘Geroi truda’ and ‘Zhivoe o zhivom’ – essays Tsvetaeva dedicated to Valerij Briusov and Maksimilian Voloshin respectively. Skillfully negotiating between the imperative to champion the womanʼs cause on the one hand and what was to her the distasteful feminist separatism on the other, Cvetaeva promotes a natural affiliation of women and poetry that contravenes popular assessments of women poets as aberrations. Not content to be a poetess on a male stage, she seeks to dismantle extant norms and to reconceptualize gender in order to reconstitute the tradition. Ultimately she effects a radical realignment of poetry and gender so as to privilege not only the woman poet, but all women – whether or not they write.