Virtual Lecture: How Women Must Write:  The “Forced Marriage” Scandal with Professor Olga Peters Hasty

Saturday, April 10, 1:00-2:00pm EDT

Members Free, Nonmembers $8, registration required by Friday, April 9. The Zoom link will be emailed to participants the morning of the program.

On December 17, 1846, Countess Evdokiia Rostopchina’s “A Forced Marriage” appeared in the arch-conservative St. Petersburg paper The Northern Bee.  The poem’s veiled political message had eluded strict government censors. When it came to light, a scandal erupted and Tsar Nicholas I banished the Countess from his court.  As we explore how Rostopchina got this poem into print and the fallout from its publication we see both the efficacy and the vulnerability of strategies she developed in response to political and societal limitations women poets confronted in the culture of the time.

Olga Peters Hasty is a Professor of Russian Literature in Princeton University’s Slavic Department.  She is a co-author of America Through Russian Eyes and the author of the books Tsvetaeva’s Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the Word, Pushkin’s Tatiana, and How Women Must Write:  Inventing the Russian Woman Poet, the last two of which received Barbara Heldt Prizes for Best Books in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women’s and Gender Studies.