takes place in the country, like the svetskaia povest’it depicts the world
as hostile to true feelings, presents marriage as a calculated economic
transaction, revolves around an unhappy love triangle, and protests
“woman’s lot.”^30
The most successful recasting of the povest’ v stikhakhto accommodate
women’s stories is Mordovtseva’s Staraia skazka(An old fairy tale, see ap-
pendix), a thinly-veiled autobiographical work that bears comparison
to Wordsworth’s “personal epic,” The Prelude.Judging from internal bio-
graphical evidence, Staraia skazkaprobably dates from the late 1840 s or
early 1850 s. Mordovtseva probably wrote it around 1848 , when she left
her first husband, or shortly thereafter. Nina, the protagonist, is married
off by her family to a much older man, who abuses her. He takes Nina
from the country to Saint Petersburg, where she has a one-sided ro-
mance with a younger man. When her husband also begins to abuse
their five children, Nina escapes with them back to the country. The
works ends with Nina’s journal, which is composed of philosophical po-
ems—a device that anticipates Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago. Staraia skazka,
despite the genre anxiety indicated in its self-deprecating or ironic title
(An old fairy tale), is a very powerful work, particularly in its subtle de-
scriptions of Nina’s intellectual development and moods. This work de-
serves further study.^31
Ballada
The ballad has been described as a narrative poem of twenty to eighty
lines, characterized by compressed, objective narration, with an em-
phasis on action rather than character. Both motivation and denouement
are often described enigmatically. Other characteristics include an
abrupt opening question, violent plots with supernatural elements, rev-
elation through dialogue, lack of moralizing, and fragmentariness. Al-
though the ballad—an oral folk genre of medieval origin—would not
seem to be an obvious descendent of the classical epic, during the late
eighteenth and the nineteenth century it was accepted as such because
of the polemics surrounding the European ballad revival.^32
In the early eighteenth century English and German collectors beganto publish ballads supposedly transcribed from folk sources, but, in fact,
significantly reworked: Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Po-
etry( 1765 ); Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border( 1802 ); collections by
J. G. Herder, and others.^33 By the middle of the eighteenth century these
70 Gender and Genre