Vera Ignat&soft;evna Gedrojc occupied a unique position among the
women poets of Russia's Silver Age. Not only did she prefer a
grammatically masculine lyric I
when writing her poetry
(a strategy of female self-representation also employed by
contemporaries like Zinaida Gippius and Poliksena Solov&soft;eva) she
also published all of her work under the masculine pseudonym Sergej
Gedrojc. Recent work on Russian genderlect by Elena A. Zemskaja has
identified some features which are characteristic of Russian women's
colloquial speech. Although identified by Zemskaja on the basis of
transcripts of contemporary spoken Colloquial Russian, some of the
lexical features that Zemskaja isolates as characteristic of feminine
speech appear in Gedrojc's poetry. These lexical features, which
appear most frequently in Gedrojc's love poetry, are more or less
absent from the work of Gedrojc's male contemporaries. Thus, though
possessed of a grammatically masculine lyric persona and pen name,
Gedrojc's lyric I
is distinguished by lexical choices
which may bespeak femininity. The paper documents and explores this
unexpected intersection of masculine and feminine in Gedrojc's love
lyrics.