Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without the generous help of
many people, groups, and institutions. I am delighted to have this op-
portunity to thank them.
Responses that I received to early versions of this work greatly influ-enced its eventual scope and depth. My thanks to the Women in Slavic
Culture and Literature group at the Summer Research Lab in Cham-
paign-Urbana, to the participants in the Columbia University Seminar
on Slavic History and Culture, to Katharina Brett, and Carol Ueland.
Several people kindly took the time to read various chapters, provid-
ing many valuable insights and ideas: Barbara Heldt, Eliot Borenstein,
Charlotte Rosenthal, Natalie Dehn, Nancy Burstein, Randall Spinks,
Ann Kleimola, Romy Taylor, and members of the New York University
Scholarly Writing Group. I am particularly grateful to those who read
the entire manuscript, offering structural, bibliographic, and other ex-
pertise: Ron Meyer, Catriona Kelly, Sally Pratt, and especially Helena
Goscilo for her transformative and exuberant comments on style as well
as content. None of these people, of course, are responsible for the use I
made of their suggestions.
Jehanne Gheith and Karen Rosneck generously shared Khvoshchin-skaia materials with me. Elena Ermilovna Glafner at Rossiiskii gosu-
darstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI) provided invaluable
help with Khvoshchinskaia’s notebooks. I consider myself very fortu-
nate to know Antonina Strizhenko, who helped me unstintingly and re-
peatedly at Pushkinskii dom. Mikhail Fainshtein graciously opened
doors for me in Saint Petersburg and Moscow on several occasions.
Lina Bernstein kindly sent me material on Elagina. Irina Gordon gavegenerous, meticulous, and expert help with Russian. I am also very
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