sky household with that of the Brontës, because in both cases three sis-
ters, living in provincial isolation, wrote and shared their work with one
another.^10 The most intense relationship in Khvoshchinskaia’s life ap-
pears to have been with her sister Sof’ia, her closest friend. Several bi-
ographers also mention Khvoshchinskaia’s many aunts and women
friends—N. E. Fon Vinkler, M. Andreevna, A. G. Karrik, her god-
daughter Sonia, and Vera Aleksandrovna Moskaleva, with whom she
lived for the last eight years of her life.^11 Even Khvoshchinskaia’s
marriage could be considered an extension of her relationship with a
woman: she told an acquaintance that she had married Sof’ia’s doctor,
Ivan Zaionchkovsky, two months after her sister’s death (in 1865 ) “be-
cause I was afraid of loneliness” (Vinitskaia, “Vospominaniia o N.D.
Khvoshchinskoi,” 152 ). The marriage was unsuccessful; the couple lived
together for only two years, and Zaionchkovsky died abroad in 1872.
It was the atypical and unconventional aspects of Khvoshchinskaia’s life,
however, that preoccupied her biographers. I suggest that Khvoshchin-
skaia’s achievements as poet, author, and critic—an implicit challenge
to gender assumptions about women—made her contemporaries very
uncomfortable. We see this discomfort both in accounts of her life and
in the critical reception that led her to abandon poetry and be forgotten
as a poet.
Biographers dealt with the “unfeminine” anomaly of Khvoshchin-skaia’s success in various ways. The writer A. A. Vinitskaia (1847–1914)
concludes an envy-tinged memoir by suggesting that Khvoshchinskaia
was a moral monster, that is, not a woman at all: “And [her] heart re-
flected neither warmth, nor light, nor any joys at all; nothing animated
it except her own work and literary successes.” In contrast, as we shall
see, Mar’ia Tsebrikova (1835–1917), the feminist social critic and publi-
cist, vigorously defended Khvoshchinskaia’s femininity. Tsebrikova may
well have believed that only in this way could she secure Khvoshchin-
skaia a serious hearing as a writer.^12 Other biographers (V. Semevsky,
Vladimir Zotov) expressed their ambivalence by simultaneously de-
fending Khvoshchinskaia’s femininity and suggesting that she was an
unnatural woman. These discussions of Khvoshchinskaia’s femininity
repay attention because they determined both her literary reception and
reputation and also show the difficulties she confronted as a woman
writer. In addition, the aspects of Khvoshchinskaia’s life that interested
her biographers—her appearance, personal habits, courting and mar-
riage behavior, modesty, and relationship to money—indicate how fem-
Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia 115