Khvoshchinskaia’s most often republished poem, appearing at least
seven times, is “Net, ia ne nazovu obmanom” (No, I will not call it an il-
lusion, 1851 ), which critics interpret as her humble acceptance of the fact
that she will never find happiness because she is unattractive.^16
Biographers rarely scrutinize and judge the personal habits of menwriters, although no doubt much could be written about those of Gogol,
Lermontov, and others. However, virtually all Khvoshchinskaia’s biog-
raphers noted disapprovingly that she smoked cigars, a violation of
gender norms. (Russkii biograficheskii slovar’[1900–1918] more circum-
spectly referred to Khvoshchinskaia’s “masculine habits, acquired from
her father.”) Those defending Khvoshchinskaia’s femininity pointed out
that she also loved “women’s work.”^17 The biographer V. Semevsky
writes: “Having become tired of working, N. D. would take up the cro-
chet hook and begin to crochet: she loved all kinds of women’s work very
much” (“N. D. Khvoshchinskaia-Zaionchkovskaia,” 142 ). Semevsky
both defends Khvoshchinskaia as feminine and trivializes her writing
by redefining her “female” pen as a metaphorical crochet hook. This
comparison contrasts with the traditional equation of the “male” pen
with a penis, explicated by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar: “In patri-
archal Western culture, therefore, the text’s author is a father, a progen-
itor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of
generative power like his penis.... The pen has been defined as not just
accidentally, but essentially a male “tool” and therefore not only inap-
propriate but actually alien to women” (Madwoman in the Attic,6–8).
Such metaphors as Semevsky’s maintain the double standard that val-
orizes men’s writing as art while dismissing women’s writing as amateur
craft, not to be taken seriously. One thinks of Vissarion Belinsky’s simi-
lar dismissal of eighteenth-century Russian women poets’ work as “the
poetic knitting of stockings, rhymed sewing.”^18
As for gender norms in the realm of courtship and marriage, Khvosh-
chinskaia’s contemporaries apparently disregarded what we would call
sexual/emotional orientation. That is, they did not question Khvosh-
chinskaia’s femininity on the grounds that she had a series of intense re-
lationships with women and lived with a woman for the last eight years
of her life. Indeed, Semevsky, one of Khvoshchinskaia’s most judgmen-
tal critics, approvingly described that relationship with Vera Aleksan-
drovna Moskaleva as “a most tender friendship” (samaia nezhnaia
druzhba).^19 We find an explanation for these biographers’ apparent in-
ability to imagine a lesbian relationship in the work of Michel Foucault
Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia 117