Iazykov’s “Elegiia” “Mechty liubvi—mechty pustye!” (Dreams of love
are empty dreams, 1826 ). Such elegies, however, are far more charac-
teristic of the women writers.
How have such differences between men’s and women’s elegies af-fected the literary reception and reputations of these women poets? In
a study of English-language elegies, Melissa Zeiger writes that, tradi-
tionally, the elegy has been considered a male genre. Male mourning
was “accredited” and privileged, she writes, while women’s mourning
was dismissed as hysteria or depression, “doomed to remain speechless,
incoherent or excessive” (Beyond Consolation, 6 ). While Zeiger may ap-
pear to overstate the case, we find some support for her views in a re-
view of Garelina’s Stikhotvorenie Nadezhdy Libinoi( 1870 ). The reviewer
sarcastically writes of Garelina: “[A]nd so the situation of the poor
woman went from exhaustion and despair to the loss of self-control to
the desire, finally, for death” (“Stikhotvorenie Nadezhdy Libinoi,”
Deiatel’nost 178 [Sept. 16 , 1870 ]: 2 ). And “No matter how great the suf-
fering, there still remained enough endurance and pride to hide from
people the pain and tears.... If there was such a strong desire to hide
her pain from people, then why proclaim it in print, and even in a sep-
arate edition of verse?... It is better to amuse oneself and be amus-
ing than to bore everyone with constant complaints about everything,
about fate, people and oneself (“Stikhotvorenie Nadezhdy Libinoi,”
Deiatel’nost 179 [Sept. 17 , 1870 ]: 1 ).
It is hard to imagine a reviewer similarly chiding a man poet for bor-ing everyone with his complaints, or reducing a man poet’s book of po-
etry first to autobiography and then to psychopathology. We also see here
a man reviewer’s inability to conceive that a woman poet might use one
or several poetic personae (as discussed in chapter 2 ). It would appear
that in the elegy, as in other genres, definitions and assumptions need
to be expanded to embrace women’s writing as well as men’s.
The Lyric
The final and most encompassing poetic genre, or “kind,” to be dis-
cussed is the Romantic lyric. Lyricoriginally referred to one of three
modes of literature—a musical mode, sung to the lyre, as opposed to the
epic and drama. In this sense the ballad and the elegy are genres of lyric.
However, since the Renaissance the lyric itself has come to be considered
a genre—a poem with such characteristics as “brevity, metrical coher-
ence, subjectivity, passion”(New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and
Gender and Genre 81