Middle Ages or knights or Gothic buildings, with their gloom and pe-
culiar impressions; the Greeks and Romans, sad to say, have not weighed
upon us.... But the Romantic Movement, of course, has attracted us
too.... Immediately there were formed among us two armies, two
camps: classicists and romanticists have come into inky combat.”^7
Like their European counterparts, classically educated Russian men po-
ets also combined neoclassical and folk genres. Zhukovsky wrote odes,
elegies, and idylls, as well as translating and adapting thirty-nine Ger-
man and English ballads. Pushkin’s Ruslan i Liudmilacombined a mock
epic with folk motifs. We can surmise the importance of classical and folk
genres—and of genre itself—from Russian Romantic poets’ frequent
use of generic titles for poems. Pushkin, for example, subtitled four
works published during his lifetime “Poemy” (verse epics), and titled
four poems “Elegiia” (elegy), one “Ballada” (ballad), ten “Romans” (ro-
mance), and several “Pesnia” (song) and “Epigramma.”^8 Iazykov, Ler-
montov, Del’vig, Fet, Baratynsky, Maikov, Khomiakov, and Guber also
gave many poems generic titles such as “Elegiia,” “Sonet,” “Duma,”
“Oda,” “Idiliia,” “Pesnia,” or “Russkaia pesnia.”
For the period of 1820 to 1850 , three literary genres, or “kinds,” to useFowler’s terminology, stand out as the most characteristic and significant:
the epic, with its offspring the Romantic poema and ballad; the elegy;
and the lyric.^9
Epic, Poema, Ballada
The epic was the most prestigious of all neoclassical kinds of literature;
many critics also consider it the source of both the poema(verse epic)
and the ballada(ballad).^10 For these reasons the gender norms of the
epic, which applied to both authors and characters, exerted particular
influence.
Various definitions of the epic describe it as a male-gendered genre,written by men, about men, and for men. One scholar writes that the epic
gives voice to “the commonly shared values and aspirations of a large
group of men in a certain place and age.... [T]he action concerns some
crucial episode in the history of a nation or other homogenous group”
(Wilkie, Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition,7– 9). Ezra Pound called it “the
speech of a nation through the mouth of one man” (quoted in S. Fried-
man, “Gender and Genre Anxiety,” 204 ). Mikhail Kheraskov (1733–
1807 ), who wrote the first Russian poema Rossiada(The Russiad, 1779 ),
60 Gender and Genre