Although contemporary critics often praised her poetry for successfully communicating powerful, unaffected emotion and thought, Iuliia Zhadovskaia's prose frequently elicited indifference or even sharp criticism from reviewers. Her briefly sketched characterizations, simple plots, and tendency to incorporate stylistic features considered more appropriate to poetry frequently baffled critics. Though appealing to readers, her poetry also diverged from contemporary standards and displayed a loose poetic form, inattentiveness to rhyme, and thematic subjectivity, suggesting a greater affinity with earlier Romantic and later modernist writers than with the emerging realistic literary mode of her own age. Zhadovskaia innovatively reworked Romantic stylistic and thematic conventions but also followed the lead of other contemporary writers by experimenting boldly with depictions of the everyday life of common people. Her imaginative refashioning of different literary influences, trends, and subject matter created a valuable link in the development of Russian literature from Romanticism to Realism in the...