tives of the vieux regime.(Ernst, “Karolina Pavlova i gr. Evdokiia
Rastopchina” [ 1876 ], 34 )Once famous, now forgotten. (Khodasevich, “Grafinia E. P. Ros-
topchina” [ 1916 ], 35 )It’s understandable that she could not avoid all the conditions of
the society in which she was brought up.... to our current taste
Rostopchina’s verses... sometimes are somewhat mannered...
full of conventions, even prejudices.... Rostopchina occupies
perhaps a modest, but special place in the poetry of the 1830 s and
1840 s. (Romanov, introduction [ 1986 ], 13 , 26 )Circumstances facilitate or constrain, but every oeuvre has its
own internal limits. In her lyric productions of the ’ 30 s and ’ 40 s
... Rostopchina attained it. Her attainments, when repeated,
threaten to turn into clichés. (Ranchin, editor’s introduction
[ 1991 ], 6 )Criticism of canonical writers, in contrast, always asserts the time-lessness of their work, and its inevitable, eternal relevance to the
present:
The consciousness of Pushkin’s supremacy and centralness in
Russian literature and civilization grew apace, unostentatiously,
but irrevocably. The twentieth century received it full grown.
(D. S. Mirsky, History of Russian Literature[ 1926 ], 102 )[Baratynsky’s] poetry is, as it were, a short cut from the wit of the
eighteenth-century poets to the metaphysical ambitions of the
twentieth (in terms of English poetry from Pope to T. S. Eliot).
(D. S. Mirsky, History of Russian Literature[ 1926 ], 106 )A modern reader is involuntarily struck by the immediate im-
portance of this poetry.... He [Baratynsky] posed questions that
will never cease to occupy thinking and feeling people.... “It is
high time that Baratynsky finally get the place on the Russian
Parnassus that has long belonged to him.” Today this wish of
Pushkin has come true. (George Kline, 1985 )^48Lermontov managed to create a fictional person whose roman-
tic dash... [is] of lasting appeal to readers of all countries and
centuries. (Vladimir Nabokov, translator’s foreword to A Hero of
Our Time[ 1958 ], xvii)The creative spirit of a person revealing the world and its beauty,
the subtlety of the perception of the word and the exactness of
its reproduction, these qualities of the poet [Fet] have become
more and more noticeable. Now this lyric poetry is our intellec-
tual heritage, rightly considered the wealth and pride of our na-104 Evdokiia Rostopchina