As with povesti v stikhakh,women poets used the ballad to tell very dif-
ferent stories from men.
The Elegy
In Russia the elegy may be considered a central—or even the central—
Romantic poetic genre. At the dawn of Romanticism, the writer and his-
torian Nikolai Karamzin wrote, “The first poetry was elegiac” (“Pervaia
Poeziia byla Elegicheskaia”), referring to the genre’s combination of
natural surroundings and laments over the loss of love (Grigor’ian,
“’Ul’traromanticheskii rod poezii,” 95 , capitalization is Karamzin’s). The
Russian poet and critic Vil’gel’m Kiukhel’beker (1797–1846) identified
the elegy with Romanticism in “O napravelenii nashei poezii, osobenno
liricheskoi, v poslednee desiatiletie” (On the direction of our poetry, es-
pecially the lyric, in the last decades, 1824 ), an article that criticized Rus-
sian poets for slavishly following European models and writing poems
full of clichés (Grigor’ian, “’Ul’traromanticheskii rod poezii’,” 108 ). Belin-
sky described the elegy as “ul’traromanticheskii rod poezii” (the ultra-
romantic “kind” of poetry) ( 97 ).
Elegy,which comes from the Greek word for lament,confusingly de-scribes two kinds of poem. The first, a poem of mourning and consola-
tion, is based on the classical pastoral elegy expressing “ceremonial
mourning for an exemplary figure.” This tradition extends from The-
ocritus and Bion, through Tasso, Ronsard, Spenser, Milton, and Shelley,
and continues in England and America into the twentieth century. It also
continues as elegiac verses or “poems in the elegiac mode,” dealing with
loss, grieving, and consolation, for example, Gray’s “Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard” ( 1751 ), which was very influential in Russia. The
second “kind” of elegy, based on the Latin love elegy, is a “meditation
on love or death.”^39 This tradition, which Boris Tomashevsky traces to
Pushkin through Ovid, Propertius, Catullus, Horace, and Parny, also in-
cludes Boileau, Chenier, and Schiller.^40 In the interests of clarity and co-
herence, I shall focus on those elegies and elegiac poems of both kinds
that treat loss—whether of love, happiness, or a beloved person—and
consolation.
Like the ballad, both kinds of elegy were imported to Russia in thelate eighteenth century. Early examples include poems by Aleksandr
Sumarokov (1718–77), Aleksei Rzhevsky (1737–1804), and Mikhail Mu-
rav’ev (1757–1807). It was Zhukovsky, however, who popularized the el-
egy, as he had the ballad, with his translation of a European model:
74 Gender and Genre