women poets projected their earthly longings onto the next life, as they
saw little possibility for consolation in this one. Or perhaps closer emo-
tional ties among women made the final separation of death especially
hard to bear, inspiring fantasized reunions beyond death. Paradoxically,
however, these women poets gain from religion what men elegists, ac-
cording to Sacks, gain from the funerary elegy, a “consoling identifica-
tion with symbolic even immortal figures of power.”^51
One final factor specific to Russian culture must be considered in re-lation to the gender norms of the elegy: the lament, or prichitanie.This
is a Russian folk genre that peasant women traditionally improvised
and performed at funerals, when army recruits left their village (for as
long as twenty-five years), and as part of the wedding ritual, in which
the bride mourned leaving her family and her loss of freedom (volia). The
lament differs significantly from the elegy in function and form. In con-
trast to the classical, male-centered, literary elegy, the prichitanieis oral,
improvised, public, and performed by women. Rather than a private act
of mourning, it voices the grief of a community around life-cycle events.
The prichitanie differs from the elegy in poetic form as well; it is com-
posed in two- or three-stress accentual verse, with varying intervals be-
tween the stresses, as opposed to the more regular metrical verse of the
elegy. In addition, the prichitaniefeatures repeated questions, exclama-
tions, parallelisms, and, in the case of funeral laments, reproaches to the
dead for leaving or injunctions to them to come back to life. The word
prichitaniecomes from the word meaning “to list or enumerate”; the per-
former enumerates all that can be remembered in connection with the
tragic event, in contrast with the elegist’s attempts at synthesis.^52
Whereas the consolation in the lament comes from having one’s grief wit-
nessed by the community, the elegy works through literary tradition to
“reintegrate [the poet’s] destructive solitary experience into the com-
munity” (Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion, 90 ).
Nonetheless, the genres are related in that both address grief, mourn-ing, and consolation, and both are repetitive in form. Monika Greenleaf
describes the elegy as a genre of “repetition compulsion,” which uses
such repetitive conventions as echoing and refrain (Pushkin and Roman-
tic Fashion, 88 ). It is also likely that the lament directly influenced the Rus-
sian elegy. Certainly, Russian writers knew about the lament. Although
the first serious ethnological transcriptions took place in Russia in the
1860 s, laments or references to them can be found in Russia’s epic Slovo
o polku Igoreve(The lay of Igor’s host) and in such works of eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century men writers as Radishchev’s Puteshestvie iz
Gender and Genre 79