Countess Polina, we learn, did have a male relative to protect her.However, she could never please her judgmental and dour cousin
Vadim, who oppressed her with his disapproval. To spite him, Polina
flirts with a guardsman at a party. When a count comments on her be-
havior, Vadim challenges him to a duel in which Vadim dies. Thirteen
years later the countess still cannot forgive herself for having caused her
cousin’s death. The fact that Polina is now a countess suggests that she
has married the count who killed Vadim, perhaps as a penance.
The countess in her story sums up the cause of women’s unhappinessin society:
#
—
)
,
[... .........]
*
u
?..h
(The senselessness of a woman’s role—
A mixture of caprice and bondage
[. .............]
Where in the labyrinth of our upbringing
Is the guiding thread?—)
( 366 )In fact, these women have had no guidance. Nadina has no father; her
sick mother only worries about her daughter’s material well-being.
Liza is an orphan dependent on an aunt who resembles an evil step-
mother. Ol’ga, too, has no father. Her mother can neither teach her
what she needs to know nor protect her from being abused in society.
The countess has no mother, only an over-indulgent father and an aunt.
Nor can the harsh and judgmental Vadim give her the guidance she
needs.
In structure Kadril’is a double-frame narrative.^48 Not only do the fourwomen discuss one another’s stories (the first frame), but, as in Dvoinaia
zhizn’,a woman poet narrates the entire work, providing a second frame
in a prologue. By connecting the various narrative levels of the work,
Pavlova reduces even further than she did in Dvoinaia zhizn’the dis-
tinction between extraordinary women—the poet-narrator—and the
“ordinary” woman in society. First, in contrast to the more aloof and im-
personal narrator of Dvoinaia zhizn’, the narrator of Kadril’verges on be-
ing a character. She declares her gender immediately, at the beginning
of the first digression:
Karolina Pavlova 161