40 .Mellor points out that British women often dismissed their men contem-
poraries: “Although they read the canonical men Romantic poets with interest
and some approval, they often dismissed them as amoral, self-indulgent, or in-
comprehensible” (“Criticism of Their Own,” 31 ). One thinks of Khvoshchin-
skaia’s judgment of Pushkin: “For me it was always offensive when our criticism
began by comparing Pushkin with Byron and then put them on the same level.
Here’s someone to whom can be attributed all which was attributed to the lat-
ter, only still more cheaply, and basely: deliberate atheism (and cowardly sanc-
timoniousness at the same time), filthy sensuality, etc. You know, after all, how
I love him, our master. Please, for a minute, don’t argue (I, after all, swear that I
recognize him as an ‘artist’), not forgetting that they are contemporaries—that
Byron could be one of his teachers, compare them now and tell me whether I
am not right, if harsh? Here’s an exemplar of vanity, vainglory, of a worshiper of
success and of a passion for his own success” (Quoted in Semevskii, “N. D.
Khvoshchinskaia-Zaionchkovskaia,” 11 : 100 ). Khvoshchinskaia’s Russian is
even more obscure than this translation suggests. I suspect that she had diffi-
culty clearly expressing such heretical views about Pushkin, knowing that they
would evoke negative reactions.
41 .Belinskii, “Zhertva: Literaturnyi eskiz. Sochinenie g-zhi Monborn [Mont-
borne],” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 1 : 225. First published in Molva 10 , nos. 27–
30 ( 1835 ): 9–20.
42 .On the German-based “Romantic irony,” see Anne Mellor’s English Ro-
mantic Irony (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980 ), and Maxim D.
Shrayer, “Rethinking Romantic Irony: Pusˇkin, Byron, Schlegel and The Queen of
Spades,” SEEJ 36 , no. 4 ( 1992 ): 397–414.
43 .Unfortunately, Kulka himself creates, in Hélène Cixous’s terms, a “binary
hierarchical opposition” (see chapter 2 ) between male art and female kitsch.
Kulka defines kitsch as “anti-art” and genders it as female, with references to
“soap operas” ( 16 ), “emotionally charged subject matter,” “mothers with ba-
bies, children in tears, sentimental leanings” ( 26 ), “romanticized melodramatic
tales written for young Victorian ladies,” “supermarket novels,” and “cheap ro-
mance” ( 97 ). All his references to art and artists, however, are male.
Chapter 1. Social Conditions
1 .In general the position of women in Russia during the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury closely resembled that of women in the rest of Europe and the United
States, judging by laws and prescriptions, which may not, however, entirely re-
flect social reality. For a five-country comparison, see my “Mid-nineteenth-
century Domestic Ideology in Russia,” in Women in Russian Culture,ed. Ros-
alind Marsh (Oxford: Berghahn, 1998 ), 78–97. Barbara Clements notes that
throughout the period “the injunction that women subordinate themselves to
men... was applied to all women regardless of social rank” (“Introduction: Ac-
commodation, Resistance, Transformation,” 3 ). This is not, however, to ignore
the privileges upper-class Russian women enjoyed in relation to women and
men of other classes. For a discussion of the similarities and differences between
Russian class and gender hierarchies, see my “Karolina Pavlova’s ‘At the Tea
226 Notes to Pages 17–21