love object, the krasavitsa geroinia(heroine-beauty), whose essential trait,
as her name implies, is her appearance. Like her Byronic prototype, she
is either a dark-eyed, dark-haired, “passionate harem beauty”—a vos-
tochnaia zhenshchina(Eastern woman)—or a blue-eyed, golden-curled,
“ideally chaste Christian”—a severianka(Northern woman). In either
case, Zhirmunsky notes, unlike the hero, her “psychological life is never
described, even in those cases when the story’s tragic outcome is moti-
vated by [her] action” (304–7).
Monika Greenleaf further analyzes the Eastern woman in the Ro-mantic poema as an example of the “literary orientalism” that Pushkin
inherited from Byron and Enlightenment Europe. Literary orientalism
contrasted the supposedly “rational, active, dynamically male” West to
an “irrational, passive, decadent” East, a binary opposition similar to the
more general male and female dichotomy (Pushkin and Romantic Fash-
ion, 104 ). Writers depicted all Eastern people as the Other, and Eastern
women—“oriental” and female—as doubly so. Greenleaf notes that in
the Romantic poema“it appears to be of utmost importance that the ob-
ject of love be a non-native speaker of the (male) erotic discourse” ( 113 ).
This principle, she concludes, even extends to Pushkin’s Tatiana, who
writes her love letter to Onegin in French, rather than in Russian ( 254 ).^20
But if these women poets generally did not write romanticheskie po-emy,several told women’s stories in narrative poems and fragments or
wrote povesti v stikhakh(verse tales).^21 In 1828 Baratynsky and Pushkin
first used the term when they jointly published Baratynsky’s Baland
Pushkin’s Graf Nulinunder the title “Dve povesti v stikhakh.” Russian
literary historians subsequently have distinguished this genre from
theromanticheskaia poemaas more realistic, contemporary, and ironic.
Women poets may have found the povest’ v stikhakhless intimidating
and more hospitable to their stories and experiences because of its lack
of classical resonances—for example, Pushkin’s allusions to Ovid in his
romanticheskaia povest’ Tsygany. Furthermore, in contrast to the obligatory
“exotic” settings of the romanticheskaia poema,the povest’ v stikhakhwas
generally set in Russia, an advantage to women poets, who had fewer
opportunities to travel.^22
I suggest that several of these women poets, despite genre anxiety inrelation to the poema and even the povest’ v stikhakh,attempted to re-
design these male-centered genres to accommodate women’s stories,
that is, stories with women protagonists. In the process they rejected
the “distilled” and “clarified” male-centered myths and conventions of
the poema,producing works that ranged from the “formless,” “inexpe-
Gender and Genre 65