Rossiada—along with its mock-epic parodies, for example, Vasilii
Maikov’s Elisei ili razdrazhennyi Vakkh(Elisei or Bacchus Furioso, 1771 ),
and Pushkin’s Ruslan i Liudmila (1817–20). Next appeared poemyinspired
by the Decembrist movement that culminated in the abortive uprising
of 1825 ; these poemy,which, like the classical kind, focused on national
destiny, also served as covert calls to overthrow Russian autocracy—for
example, Kondraty Ryleev’s Voinarovsky(1823–25) and Nalivaiko(1823–
25 ). Finally, the Romantic poema,the kind that concerns us here, was in-
troduced by Pushkin—for example, Bakhchisaraiskii fontan(The foun-
tain of Bakhchisarai, 1822 ) and Tysgany(The gypsies, 1824 ). Pushkin’s
first Romantic poemyshowed the strong influence of Byron’s Eastern Tales
(“The Giaour” [ 1813 ], “The Bride of Abydos” [ 1813 ], “The Corsair”
[ 1814 ]), which, as the Soviet scholar V. A. Zhirmunsky has shown, in-
cluded elements of the ballad and the lyric, as well as the epic. The Ro-
mantic poema,however, despite significant generic differences from the
classical epic—and these include a rejection of “public, objective, uni-
versal and heroic” norms—nonetheless inherited from the epic several
of its central characteristics.^14
First, the Romantic poemacontinued the epic’s focus on national des-tiny, but with a very different ideology. Poets replaced the epic’s glorifi-
cation of empire building or the founding of a nation with an implied
approval of revolutionary politics. Byron’s literary influence on the po-
emacannot be separated from his political influence as a well-known
supporter of revolutionary causes. Contemporary readers thus under-
stood in a broader political context one of the central conventions of the
Romantic poema—the hero’s seemingly personal quest for freedom ex-
pressed in his rebellion against authority. Another source for the revo-
lutionary ideology of the Romantic poemamay have been the Decembrist
poema.In any case, Pushkin’s open return to the theme of national des-
tiny in his last poema, Mednyi vsadnik(The Bronze Horseman, 1833 ), sug-
gests that this theme was always potentially present in the genre.
Second, like the epic, the Romantic poema remained a very prestigiousform. V. A. Zhirmunsky maintains that the new genre of Romantic po-
emahad the same significance that the heroic epic did for the neoclassi-
cal eighteenth century. One scholar writes that in Pushkin’s time, “It be-
came almost obligatory for a poet of the new tendency [Romanticism]
to write a Romantic poema.It was, in its way, the final exam of poetic
maturity.”^15
Finally, the Romantic poema inherited from the epic its gender norms,62 Gender and Genre