36 .Pavlova wrote poetry in German and French, as well as Russian, and
translated poetry from German, French, Polish, and English; Zhadovskaia and
Mordovtseva translated Heine; Gotovsteva translated Lamartine; Khvoshchin-
skaia knew Latin, Italian, and French; Lisitsyna translated the English aestheti-
cian Hugh Blaire; Kul’man knew Greek, Latin, Italian, French, German, English,
Spanish, and Portuguese.
37 .Discussed in Katz, Literary Ballad,21–23. Although Katz refers to Tur-
chaninova as “the obscure poetess” ( 21 ), she was a poet who published in sev-
eral literary journals, as well as a translator, a philosopher, and the author of at
least three books: Otryvki iz sochinenii (v stikhakh)( 1803 ), Natural’naia etika ili za-
kony nravstvennosti ot sozertsaniia prirody neposredstvenno proistekaiushchie, perev.
s latinskogo, stikhami( 1803 ), and Lettres philosophiques de M. Fontaine et de m-lle
Tourtchaninoff(Paris, 1817 ).
38 .It will be noted that the children fare equally badly in the husband’s and
in the wife’s dreams.
39 .Preminger and Brogan, New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics,
322–25. On the twentieth-century elegy, see Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy:
Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1985 ); and Zeiger, Beyond Consolation.
40 .Tomashevskii, Pushkin, 1 : 119. The Russian scholar Vadim Vatsuro also
discusses the elegy as a meditation (see his Lirika pushkinskoi pory: Elegicheskaia
shkola[Sankt-Peterburg: Nauka, 1994 ]) as does Lidiia Ginzburg (in O lirike, 201 ).
41 .Sacks, English Elegy, 3. Monika Greenleaf cites Sacks’s work in her Pushkin
and Romantic Fashion,91–92.
42 .Sacks, English Elegy, 8. Sacks’s androcentricism can be seen in the two
myths he considers central to the elegy, those of Daphne and Apollo and of Sy-
rinx and Pan. In both cases a male divinity attempts to rape a nymph who, to
save herself, transforms into a laurel tree and a reed, respectively, which the male
then mutilates in the name of art. Apollo tears off a branch of the tree to make
the laurel wreath, the traditional prize for poets; Pan similarly breaks off the reed,
drills holes in it, and turns it into a pipe, a musical instrument. Sacks describes
Apollo and Pan as successful mourners, because like the elegist, they create art
out of “metamorphized [frustrated] sexual force” ( 7 ). Melissa Zeiger notes that
Sacks’s two myths of “successful” (male) mourning are founded on the “unre-
marked consumption of women” (Beyond Consolation, 5 ). Such creation myths,
which show the origins of (men’s) art in the violated bodies of women, date from
classical times. See Maikov’s “Muza, boginia Olimpa, vruchila dve zvuchnye
fleity” (The muse, an Olympian goddess, entrusted two sonorous flutes, 1841 ),
in which Maikov condenses and rewrites these two myths by having the (female)
muse give two flutes to Pan and Apollo. While it remains unclear whether the
muse thus tacitly approves the fates of Daphne and Syrinx or displaces them,
Pan and Apollo proceed to use the flutes in a musical duel. That these two myths
affected women writers is suggested by the fact that one of these poets, Elisaveta
Kul’man, in “Korinna” (see appendix), rewrote the Apollo/Daphne myth to
show Daphne’s defeat of Apollo and a woman poet’s triumph over men (see my
“Nineteenth-Century Women Poets: Critical Reception vs. Self-Definition,” 98–
99 ).
Notes to Pages 72–75 247