for the critical reception of women poets.^5 What were the most impor-
tant Russian Romantic poetic genres? Scholars of both European and
Russian literature have shown that throughout the period neoclassical
genres remained central for Romantic poets, despite their challenges to
neoclassical values. In Europe as early as 1674 , Nicholas Boileau had
codified neoclassical practice in hisArt poétiqueby distinguishing the
major genres—comedy, tragedy, and epic—from the minor ones—elegy,
ode, sonnet, epigram, and ballad. In Russia, Lomonosov in his “Pre-
dislovie o pol’ze knig tserkovnykh v Rossiiskom iazyke” (Preface con-
cerning the use of church books in the Russian language, 1757 ) modi-
fied Boileau’s hierarchy by designating as high genres odes and epics,
as middle genres tragedy, epistles, and elegies, and as low genres come-
dies, epigrams, and songs. It is true that beginning in the mid-eighteenth
century writers began to defy these rules of “decorum”; previously dis-
dained folk forms became prominent, as the ballad revival in Germany
and England and Macpherson’s Ossian poems extended the concept of
epic to folk material. Poets began to mix genres, as can be seen in the
titles of Wordsworth’s “lyrical ballads” ( 1798 ) or Lamartine’s Médita-
tions poétiques( 1820 ). Victor Hugo in his Préface de Cromwell( 1827 ) even
rejected the neoclassical injunction against mixing the comic and the
tragic, the grotesque and the beautiful. Nonetheless, the genres named
by Boileau and Lomonosov remained vital and very prestigious, even
when combined with folk elements or with one another. For example,
one recent study considers the “principle fixed forms and genres” of
British Romanticism to be the sonnet, the hymn, the ode, the pastoral,
the romance, and the epic, all, except the romance and the sonnet, clas-
sical genres.
The persistence of classical genres is not surprising. Romantic poets,mostly upper-class men, continued to receive classical educations that
included the Greek and Latin canons on which neoclassical genres were
based.^6 So, for example, Byron wrote not only Romantic fragments,
songs, and ballads, but also neoclassical odes, mock epics, and epistles.
Shelley wrote odes, elegies, and epithalamia, as well as ballads and frag-
ments.
Neither classicism nor the medieval popular forms that modified it,however, were indigenous to Russia. Nonetheless, in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century Russian writers enthusiastically and al-
most simultaneously imported both trends from Europe, as the poet and
critic Petr Viazemsky (1792–1878) ironically recounts: “We never had
Gender and Genre 59