disabuse the woman, but when it eventually became necessary to do so,
the woman refused to believe she had not been writing to a man.
In the interrelated realms of writing, money, and modesty/ambition,Khvoshchinskaia violated female gender norms by supporting not
only herself but also a large family—including her husband. As noted
in chapter 1 , women who wrote for publication in the mid-nineteenth
century were considered to be engaging in sexual display or prostitu-
tion. In addition, mid-nineteenth-century domestic ideology con-
signed “ladies” to the home, where, financially supported by their hus-
bands, they were supposed to establish a haven from the crass
commercial world. Ladies were not supposed to support their hus-
bands.^24 Several biographers focused obsessively and almost pruri-
ently on how much money Khvoshchinskaia earned from her writ-
ing—one calculated her income for each decade of her life.^25 We d o
not find such a preoccupation, for example, among the biographers
of Dostoevsky, who also struggled to support many family members
with his writing.
Domestic ideology required women to be “modest,” that is, to re-nounce recognition or fame, certainly the fame of publication under
their own names.^26 Khvoshchinskaia along with her sisters appear to
have embraced this aspect of femininity, for which contemporary men
biographers praised her.^27 All three sisters used male pseudonyms for
their prose, separating their feminine “selves” from their masculine-
defined activities and careers. Similarly, all three fiercely objected to
having their biographies published. Khvoshchinskaia wrote to a would-
be biographer: “Pseudonyms have no biographies at all. What is a pseu-
donym? No one. Then what is there to say about it? Nothing” (Bykov,
Siluety dalekogo proshlogo, 187 ). One is reminded of the Emily Dickinson
poem, mentioned in the introduction, which starts:
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you-Nobody-Too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise-you know!
(“I’m Nobody!” in Poems of Emily
Dickinson,ed. T. H. Johnson, 206 )One feels a similar ambivalence in Khvoshchinskaia’s and Dickinson’s re-
nunciation of public identity.^28 In the same letter Khvoshchinskaia wrote
admonishingly, “The inviolability of a pseudonym is one of the most el-
ementary concepts of good (decent) respectable literary society. It is com-
pletely natural in view of the varied causes that can lead a writer to sign
Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia 119