Evgeniia Tur’s 'Antonina' and the Byronic Hero

• In Event: 19th-Century Women Writers in Context I: Gan, Pavlova, Zhukova, and Tur in European, Theoretical, and Romantic Contexts

Abstract

One of the main challenges facing those working on mostly-forgotten Russian women novelists is how to situate their works within a literary tradition, whether the larger male-dominated cannon or that of women’s writing. I discuss Evgeniia Tur’s Antonina as a re-writing of the “Byronic hero” made famous in Lermontov’s Pechorin. Whereas the aristocratic, financially independent Pechorin is driven by some sort of existential angst, Antonina’s comparable rejection of the world--a no less uncompromising struggle to assert her will than that of Lermontov's protagonist—stems from the restrictive and humiliating conditions of her existence—as a pauper, woman, orphan, governess, and even later, as a wealthy married woman. The goal of this paper is to contextualize this insight in terms of the psychological novel, or more specifically (because psychological novels are very difficult to characterize), in terms of the “Byronic hero," that continued to represent a specific type of psychological –character and novelistic discourse.

Author

• Marcus C. Levitt, U of Southern California