declarations of genre—such subtitles did not keep him from thinking
of these works as poemy.For example, Baratynsky wrote to N. V. Putiate
of Bal(The ball, 1828 ), which he published as povest’ v stikhakh,that he
was writing “novuiu poemu” (a new poema). In addition, extracts from
Balappeared in Moskovskii telegrafunder the title “Otryvok iz poemy,”
and in Severnye Tsvetyunder the title “Otryvok iz poemy Bal’nyi vecher”
(Excerpt from the poemaEvening of the ball). Extracts from Eda( 1826 ),
subtitled finliandskaia povest’,appeared in Mnemosiiain 1825 under the
title “Otryvki iz poemy: Eda” (Excerpts from the poemaEda).^18
I should add that it is important to distinguish between the waypoets themselves titled or referred to their works (my focus here) and
the way critics or scholars later labeled them. For example, the Ler-
montovskaia entsiklopediiastates that Lermontov wrote thirty poemy
(Manuilov, 438 ), while B. M. Eikhenbaum in the 1948 edition of Ler-
montov’s Polnoe sobranie sochineniidescribes twenty-one of Lermontov’s
works as poemyand iunosheskie poemy.In fact, according to Eikhenbaum’s
excellent notes for that same edition, Lermontov himself only used the
term poema for five works. Similarly, Karolina Pavlova’s Dvoinaia zhizn’,
which is half prose, half poetry, was referred to as a poemaduring her life-
time and appeared in a section headed poemyin the 1964 Polnoe sobranie
stikhotvorenii(Complete poetic works). Pavlova herself, however, sub-
titled the work ocherk(sketch).^19 Fowler writes that in the nineteenth
century in particular, generic subtitles constituted an important liter-
ary convention, which authors “used rather exquisitely or disingenu-
ously to suggest unobvious generic ingredients” (Kinds of Literature,
98 ). The generic subtitle that an author chooses, along with that author’s
other references to the genre of the work, therefore, must be considered
a significant part of the work.
Among the women poets we are considering, only Aleksandra Fuks
wrote anything resembling romanticheskie poemy,and those, not surpris-
ingly, differ significantly from Zhirmunsky’s prototype. Within the
genre as Zhirmunsky discusses it—works variously subtitled poema,
povest’, turetskaia povest’,and so on—gender norms for women charac-
ters were as circumscribed as in the epic. Zhirmunsky, hardly a feminist
critic, describes the narrowness of those norms, basing his conclusions
on 120 Romantic poemy and eighty “excerpts from poemy,” a kind in it-
self, that appeared in Russia between 1821 and 1842. The romanticheskaia
poema,according to Zhirmunsky, invariably features a male, disillu-
sioned (razocharovannyi), and complicated protagonist and his female
64 Gender and Genre