Evgenij Baratynskij's narrative poems and 'Evgenij Onegin': The transformation of the Romantic poema

The role of gender and discourse as participants in the dual notions of Romantic idealism and Romantic irony in the genre of the narrative poem is examined. Discourse and the feminine are considered philosophical constants. Romantic idealism is seen as both the female ideal and the ideal of the poetic work. In turn, Romantic irony is seen as the objectification and laying-bare of this ideal. The tool used in this objectification is the Lacanian signifier of male speech.;A detailed analysis of pronominal case markings (deixis) is used to examine the interrelationships of the protagonists and narrators. As the stories progress, the grammatical perspectives employed by each speaker shift, reflecting his/her location within the opposition of the Infinite and the Finite. Their location is further codified through the use of the Greimasian semiotic square, reconstructing through semiotic equations the deconstructed parallel levels of Romantic philosophy.;Within this framework, Baratynskij's three major poemy (Eda, Bal, and Cyganka) are reassessed as increasingly developed expressions of Romantic philosophy and the quest for union with the Absolute, with Cyganka revealing the most complex incorporation of the Romantic constants. Puskin's Evgenij Onegin is presented as an answer to Baratynskij's Eda and Bal (Cyganka having been written later), as well as to his own "juznye poemy," which are seen as both increasingly atypical of Romantic aesthetics and quite persistently Romantic in their gender equations. Evgenij Onegin is seen as a reflection of Puskin's perception of the inherent stagnation of the theories of Romantic literary aesthetics, with a resulting parody of both Romantic idealism and Romantic irony--a distortion of their expression through the use of extensive metanarratorial intrusion, gender reversal, and acquisition of the masculine signifier of language by Tat'jana.