important, as the balance and harmony of a work’s elements, the inner
logic of its structure and style. “A perfectly unified work of art... can
only be spoiled but not improved by alterations of its constitutive fea-
tures” (Kitsch and Art, 65 ). He identifies complexity as concern for de-
tail, richness, contrast, and variety. Intensity he describes as expres-
siveness, vitality, and vividness of presentation. “The more intensive the
work, the more complex and diverse elements have been unified within
its bounds, the better it is.... The degree of intensity can be thus con-
ceived of as the degree of specificity or the degree of aesthetic func-
tioning of the work’s constitutive features” ( 46 , 70–71).^43 Although one
can imagine many other aesthetic standards—Kulka’s echo Paul
Lauter’s “formalist virtues” mentioned earlier in this discussion—these
at least do not exclude women’s art by definition. As we shall see in chap-
ter 3 , it is possible to define a major Romantic genre, the lyric, in gender-
neutral terms as well. Having discussed the methodological, theoreti-
cal, and common European bases of this study, let us now turn to the
specific conditions these women poets experienced in Russia.
20 Introduction