Romance-A Congenial Form

In the history of Russian criticism the works of P. I. Mel'nikovPecherskii have been repeatedly misinterpreted. A nonrealist flourishing during the heyday of Russian realism, Mel'nikov, who wrote under the pseudonym Andrei Pecherskii, is either derided for his literary nonconformism or regarded as a realist manque.1 This is well illustrated by the treatment which has been accorded the novellas Grandma's Yarns (Babushkiny rosskazni, 1858) and Olden Times (Starye gody, 1857), two of Mel'nikov's most distinctive works. Both are supposedly eyewitness accounts of eighteenthcentury Russian life. In the first, an old woman of high society recalls two extraordinary personages, and in the second, we learn of a prince's untrammeled way of life through an old groom's memories. During the more than one hundred years since their publication, critics and scholars, both those favorably and unfavorably disposed toward Mel'nikov, have tried unsuccessfully to place the novellas in the broad tradition of nineteenth-century realism.2 Their mode, however, is romantic rather than realistic. They are variants of romance, not realistic stories. In the absence of appropriate Russian criticism, it is helpful to turn to Western criticism devoted to the phenomenon of romance-in particular, nineteenth-century ro

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