ografii Karoliny Pavlovoi,” in Sobranie sochinenii, by Karolina Pavlova (Moskva:
K. F. Nekrasov, 1915 ), xxxi–xxxii.
20 .On literary orientalism, see Martha Pike Conant, The Oriental Tale in En-
gland in the Nineteenth Century(New York: Columbia University Press, 1908 );
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979 ); Joyce Zonana, “The
Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre,” in
Revising the Word and the World,ed. Veve Clark, Ruth-Ellen Joeres, and Madelon
Sprengnether (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993 ), 165–90.
21 .On the povest’ v stikhakh,see Zhirmunskii, Bairon i Pushkin, 237 , 238 , and
Lebedev, N. A. Nekrasov i russkaia poema 1840–50gg., 3 , 18.
22 .It is interesting that Fuks subtitled her works povesti v stikhakhrather than
poemy,despite their epic themes (e.g., the founding of a city) and authentic “ex-
otic” details based on Fuks’s ethnographic research (see especially chapter 2 of
“Kniazhna Khabiba”).
23 .Other povesti v stikhakhby these women poets not discussed here include
Lisitsyna’s fragment (otryvok), “Povest’ Ol’gi” ( 1829 ), in which, strangely, no
character named Ol’ga appears; Shakhovskaia’s fragment “Liudmila” ( 1832 );
Teplova’s “Zhertva liubvi” (A victim of love, 1842 ); and Shakhova’s three other
povesti v stikhakh,which appeared in her 1839 Stikhotvoreniia,“Nevesta (byl’)”
(The bride [a true story]), “Gusar-Zatvornik (povest’)” (The hussar-hermit [a
story]), and “Tri zari ili slepets (povest’)” (Three dawns, or the blind man).
Several scholars have pointed out that literary periodization, like many other
critical categories, must also be reconsidered when we discuss women’s writing.
For example, Elaine Showalter writes, “Insofar as our concepts of literary peri-
odization are based on men’s writing, women’s writing must be forcibly assimi-
lated to an irrelevant grid” (“Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” 33 ). See also
Kelly, History of Russian Women’s Writing, 23 ; and Christine Tomei, introduction
to Russian Women Writers,ed. C. Tomei, 1 : xxiii. While most literary historians
consider the poemato have exhausted itself as a genre by the 1840 s (see Terras,
Handbook of Russian Literature, 234 ; Zhirmunskii, Bairon i Pushkin, 318 ; Lebedev,
N. A. Nekrasov i russkaia poema, 4 ), several of the women’s povesti v stikhakhdis-
cussed here date from as late as the 1870 s. In addition, many of these works ap-
peared long after they had been written because of the difficulty women writ-
ers experienced in getting published (discussed in the introduction). This is true
particularly for the work of Mordovtseva, Garelina, and Pavlova.
24 .In the Tatar legend on which the work is based, the unnamed Tatar hero-
ine is already married and does not undergo any ordeal. A contemporary re-
viewer congratulated Fuks on reworking the “quarrelsome Tatar woman”
(branchivaia Tatarka) into the “most charming Fatima” (Osnovanie goroda Kazani)
(“Literaturnaia letopis’,” section 6 , Biblioteka dlia chteniia 22 [Apr. 1837 ]: 2 ).
25 .Raut,ed. N. V. Sushkov (Moskva, 1851 ), 313.
26 .Pavlova, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, 310. Page numbers of subsequent
citations to this work will be indicated in parentheses in the text.
27 .Khvoshchinskaia, Derevenskii sluchai: povest’ v stikhakh; see also
Khvoshchinskaia’s “‘Vy ulybaetes’?... Razdum’e ne meshaet’” (You are smil-
ing?... My pensiveness doesn’t prevent me), published as the first of her “Piat’
stikhotvorenii,” Otechestvennye zapiski 83 , no. 8 ( 1852 ): 315–17.
Notes to Pages 65–68 245