rienced,” and ambivalent, to works of great originality and freshness.
Even the formless and inexperienced works, however, are worth con-
sidering because of what they tell us about the aesthetic problems
women faced.^23
Aleksandra Fuks, in her two povesti v stikhakh, Osnovanie goroda Kazani
(The founding of the city of Kazan’, 1837 ) and Kniazhna Khabiba(Princess
Khabiba, 1841 ), struggled with the gender norms of the romanticheskaia
poema.Both works have women-centered plots and strong women pro-
tagonists whose motives are clearly described. Princess Khabiba rebels
against the femininity and domesticity her clothes-conscious mother
would force on her, eventually disguising herself as a man to run away
to her lover. Fatima, the wise and brave heroine of Osnovanie goroda
Kazani,urges the tsar to move the city because its distance from the river
creates a hardship for the women who have to carry the water. Like Joan
of Arc, she refuses to renounce her convictions, even when threatened
with death, declaring her willingness to die for her people (although,
unlike Joan of Arc, in the end she marries the tsar’s son, who is in love
with her). In contrast to the usual disposable, generally abandoned or
murdered heroines we find in men’s works, both of Fuks’s heroines com-
pletely dominate the emotions of their men. This female power fan-
tasy may have appealed to Fuks’s women readers as much as the “love
them and leave them” fantasy apparently did to men readers. However,
in these works Fuks continues to privilege the male-centered literary
conventions of the genre. Khabiba, an “Eastern” woman in Greenleaf’s
terms, is punished for assuming male privileges of dress and sexual
choice. Fatima, a virtuous “Northern”-type woman, is domesticated by
marrying the khan’s son.^24 Thanks to Fuks’s detailed knowledge of Tatar
culture and history, the result of her ethnographic research, she is able
to create the required “exotic” settings. She depicts much less convinc-
ingly, however, the conversations between men characters, battles, and
army life scenes that she seems to feel obliged to include. These povesti
v stikhakhremain awkward and unbalanced amalgams of male- and fe-
male-based conventions.
Perhaps the clearest example of genre anxiety in relation to the povest’v stikhakhis Pavlova’s Kadril’ (Quadrille), a narrative poem consisting of
a frame and four stories told by women. It was first published in full in
1858 , although sections of it appeared in 1844 and 1851. Despite her con-
siderable poetic powers and great artistic sophistication, Pavlova was un-
able to define for her readers or even apparently for herself the genre of
66 Gender and Genre