Pushkin’s novel, influenced not only by Shakespeare, but also by Lord Byron (1788–1814), the series of historical novels by Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) originally known as the ‘Waverley novels’,79 and an 1818 volume of Nikolai Karamzin’s monumental twelve-volume Istoriia gosudarstva Rossiiskogo (History of the Russian State, 1816–1826), the Russian version of Raphael Holingshed’s Chronicles, the source of Shakespeare’s history plays,80 depicts a typically stereotyped Romantic heroine. In Little Zinnobers Chizhova once again emphasizes the disparity between truth and illusion, contrasting the clichéd description of the ‘shining eyes’ of Pushkin’s heroine Masha, as she falls romantically in love with the handsome young Lieutenant Grinyov, with the ‘shining eyes’ from starvation of people in
