the Gothic tale. The result, however, is an awkward combination of sty-
listic effects, plot, and characters seemingly from Pushkin, Lermontov,
and Ann Radcliffe. Lidiia, in Perst Bozhii(The finger of God), dies on her
wedding day as the result of a family curse. Elena in Strashnyi krasavets
(The frightening handsome man) is pursued by a diabolical Greek. In
Izgnannik (The exile), a story with incestuous overtones, Ida falls in love
with her sister’s fiancé. She sacrifices herself for him by marrying his
evil old miserly uncle, who would otherwise forbid the match. Although
Shakhova’s experiments were not successful—and she was not nearly
as good a poet as Pavlova and Khvoshchinskaia—she recognized the im-
portance of combining the androcentric povest’ v stikhakhwith a gyno-
centric genre.^28
Iuliia Zhadovskaia, while working on a much smaller scale than ei-ther Pavlova or Khvoshchinskaia, wrote two successful women-
centered narrative poems. Like Shakhova, Zhadovskaia combined her
povest’ v stikhakhwith other narrative genres more open to women’s sto-
ries: the green world fantasy—which Annis Pratt (Archetypal Patterns in
Women’s Fiction) describes as an archetype in narratives of women’s de-
velopment—and also the svetskaia povest’(society tale). In the green-
world fantasy the female protagonist lives in an ideal natural world un-
til she becomes “marriageable,” at which point she is forced into the
constraints of society. This archetype appears in Zhadovskaia’s “Otryvki
iz neokonchennogo rasskaza” (Excerpts from an unfinished story, 1859 ).
Nadezhda, the protagonist, enjoys an idyllic life in the country, reading
good books with her adoring widowed mother, listening to her nanny’s
fairy tales, taking long walks alone at night, and swimming in the moon-
light. This idyll is shattered when a neighbor insists on taking Nadezhda
to a ball. On the way, the neighbor berates Nadezhda for her reluctance
to go into society and makes fun of her pensiveness. The excerpt breaks
off here.^29
The second work, “Poseshchenie” (The visit, 1849 ), has no genericsubtitle but resembles the povest’ v stikhakhin its contemporary Russian
setting and ironic narration. Zhadovskaia tells of a young woman who
is not at home to receive a visit from the man she loves. He, upon learn-
ing she is to be married, leaves town before he can receive her note beg-
ging him to save her from the marriage being forced on her by her family.
Here, as Pavlova would in Kadril’,Zhadovskaia makes use of the svet-
skaia povest’,or society tale, a prose genre of the 1830 s and 1840 s in which
upper-class writers often called attention to women’s disadvantaged po-
sition in society. While, unlike the svetskaia povest’,Zhadovskaia’s story
Gender and Genre 69