men writers by offering them a forum to present their works. It also gave
them a unique opportunity to interact on a more or less equal footing
with men literary gatekeepers who could help them get published. In
addition, such women commanded the power to present their own
works to their men contemporaries, an opportunity they did not enjoy
in the great majority of salons and literary circles, which as we saw in
chapter 1 , were run by men. Women with the temerity to present their
own work, however, often provoked men’s ire. We have mentioned
Druzhinin’s story, “Zhenshchina pisatel’nitsa” (The woman writer) in
which the man narrator literally falls asleep when a woman reads her
work. We have also noted the perceived connection between a woman
presenting her writing and sexual display. In Pavlova’s case, the poet
Nikolai Vasil’evich Berg (1823–84) disapprovingly noted, “At Pavlova’s
literary evenings her works were read without fail,” then sympatheti-
cally described what he perceived as Nikolai Pavlov’s discomfort dur-
ing these readings (cited in Briusov, “K. K. Pavlova,” 282 ). The writers
Dmitrii Grigorovich (1822–99), Aleksandr Nikitenko (1804–77), and
Ivan Panaev (1812–62) in letters and memoirs ridiculed the manner in
which Pavlova read her poetry or complained that she read it too much.
Ivan Panaev, editor of the Sovremennik,wrote in an open letter to
Pavlova, “To spend an entire day in your company, listening to your verses is
such a great pleasureas cannot be quickly forgotten,” his italics alerting
readers to his sarcasm.^8 But even if men insulted those women who pre-
sented their work, they could not help noticing them. It is not a coinci-
dence that the two best-known women writers of this generation,
Pavlova and Rostopchina, both hosted salons.
In salons, too, we see the interplay of money, location, and connections.
To conduct a salon anywhere required money. But those such as
Pavlova’s and Rostopchina’s, located in Moscow and Saint Petersburg,
enjoyed much more visibility, prestige, and renown than did those lo-
cated in the provinces, for example, the salon of the poet Aleksandra
Fuks in Kazan’. While the salons of the capitals became part of the Rus-
sian literary historical record, detailed in the published memoirs of
numerous participants, Fuks’s salon, which lasted twenty-five years,
remains as unknown as her poetry.^9
The final element essential to the success of a salon was literary con-nections. Literary historians often forget or ignore this factor, making it
seem as if salons just “happened.” Let us take, for example, the very suc-
cessful salon that Avdot’ia Elagina (1789–1877) hosted in Moscow for
Karolina Pavlova 139