create the impression that the ring interests her by reminding her of
the sad day of her wedding.
Perhaps Zotov felt uncomfortable with the poem’s critique of thetreatment of women. In any case, the poem appeared in print with most
of Khvoshchinskaia’s irony softened or removed. For example, the orig-
inal line describing the ring’s owner, “Kak ptichka chto rodom privykla
k kletke tesnoi” (Like a little bird accustomed from birth to a narrow
cage), appeared as “Kak ptichka grustnaia, privykshi k kletke tesnoi”
(Like a sad little bird, accustomed to a narrow cage), blunting
Khvoshchinskaia’s point that the woman was doomed from birth. Zo-
tov also removed Khvoshchinskaia’s emphatic “samim” in line 7 , which
suggests a link between the narrator and the woman in the story.
Her ironic “naznachennyi suprug” (assigned spouse) was changed to
the more neutral “budushchii suprug” (future spouse). In the original
poem, after an unflattering description of the assigned spouse, the in-
complete line “Ona.. .” (She.. .) appeared, suggesting both the young
woman’s horrified reaction to him and also the impossibility of ex-
pressing that reaction or of protesting against the marriage. Zotov re-
moved that line. When, on the night of the engagement party, the woman
says good-bye to the man she loves, he weeps “O tom, chtob ne vinil on,
pylkii i trevozhnyi / Pokornost’ detskuiu chtoby prostil on ei” (About
the fact that he, ardent and troubled, wouldn’t blame her / Would par-
don her childish obedience). The central words of those lines, and of the
entire poem, “pokornost’ detskuiu” (childish obedience), were changed
to “V nevernosti ee” (her unfaithfulness). Instead of being a victim of
her family and society, the woman is now depicted as responsible both
for her own and—seemingly more importantly—also for a man’s un-
happiness. Zotov also changed the line “To byli slezy o blazhenstve
nevozmozhnom” (And there were those tears over impossible bliss) to
“o schast’i nevozmozhnom” (impossible happiness). Clearly, the sexual
implications of the original version were too explicit—especially to have
been written by a woman poet. The information enabling the reader to
deduce that the poem takes place in 1848 remains, however; perhaps
Zotov missed the reference.
Yet even in this bowdlerized form, the poem still retained enoughpower to cause one man editor to criticize it and bowdlerize it further.
Nikolai Gerbel’ included part of the poem in his 1873 anthology,
Khrestomatiia dlia vsekh: Russkie poety v biografiiakh i obraztsakh(An an-
thology for everyone: Russian poets in biographies and examples).
Strangely, in this anthology supposedly devoted to Russia’s best poets,
130 Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia