and the significance of the break for her work (Karolina Pavlova, 41–44).
One does not find similar discussions of how marital woes affected the
work of unhappily married men writers such as Tolstoy, Del’vig, and
Panaev.
In any case, all of Pavlova’s assets turned into liabilities in the new crit-ical atmosphere that followed the Russian Revolution. Once again
Pavlova was relegated to oblivion, this time as an “unprogressive” poet
with a suspicious upper-class, cosmopolitan background, who had been
dismissed or satirized by the now canonized “revolutionary” critics.
Pavlova’s gender also continued to be a disadvantage, since, as men-
tioned earlier, Soviet literary ideologues tended to ignore or denigrate
women writers. In Pavlova’s case, for many years no criticism about her
appeared in the Soviet Union. Although Soviet editions of Pavlova’s
works appeared in 1937 and 1964 , one suspects this only came about be-
cause Briusov, who edited the last edition of her complete works in 1915 ,
“accepted the Revolution” and therefore could be invoked to endorse
Pavlova. Briusov’s name appears at the beginning and the end of the in-
troduction to the 1937 edition.^28
In the West, however, Pavlova’s cosmopolitan (German) background
and gender contributed to the recovery of her work. Munir Sendich
credits Dmitrij Tschizˇewskij with reviving Pavlova “from a protracted
oblivion in Germany through his article in 1937 ” ( 63 ).^29 That article, how-
ever, like many during Pavlova’s lifetime, discussed her, not as a poet,
but as a translator—here of Pushkin, and probably in connection with
the centennial of Pushkin’s death. Almost thirty years later, however, in
1964 Tschizˇewskij did include a discussion of Pavlova’s poetry in his Rus-
sische Literaturgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts.Since then additional Ger-
man criticism has claimed Pavlova for German as well as Russian liter-
ature, based on the forty years she lived in Germany.^30 In the United
States, Zoya Yurieff, who had attended Tschizˇewskij’s lectures on com-
parative Slavic literature, suggested to her student Munir Sendich that
he “resuscitate Pavlova’s literary work.”^31 Sendich’s dissertation and se-
ries of articles on Pavlova—along with the 1964 Biblioteka poeta edition
of Pavlova’s poetry—laid the foundation for all subsequent Pavlova
scholarship.
Sexual literary politics also played a role in the Pavlova revival. In the1970 s in the wake of a new wave of feminist literary scholarship, Barbara
Heldt not only translated Pavlova’s Dvoinaia zhizn’into English for the
Karolina Pavlova 145