[.......................]
But the contradiction of those severe brows went wonderfully well
With his gentle lips.)^49
(354–55)The narrator in her introduction presents Pushkin as similarly judg-mental: as the last and most unappealing incarnation of the stern, dis-
appointed, disapproving God (or male “muse” discussed in chapter 2 ),
inimical to women’s achievements. Nor do we find in this depiction even
the redeeming glimpse of tenderness or love we have seen in previous
versions of this figure. As noted in chapter 3 , the narrator imagines
Pushkin condemning her work in advance:
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(Why, shaking your head,
Looking at me so sternly,
Why do you stand before me,
Specter of the bogatyrof singers?)
( 310 )She compares Pushkin with the armored body of the Cid, which, placed
on a horse at the head of the Spanish army, routed the Moors, who did
not realize he was dead. This death-in-life image is echoed by the count-
ess’s comparison of Vadim to Pushkin’s Stone Guest.^50 In these menac-
ing and lifeless depictions the figure seems to have reached his culmi-
nating form. He does not appear in subsequent works.
Pavlora’s Kadril’, in innovative, masterly verse, challenges and rede-fines several literary traditions—the svetskaia povest’,the povest’ v
stikhakh,and the poema—as well as the standard depiction of women
in Russian literature. Critics, however, have ignored this remarkable
achievement. The work deserves a great deal more attention.
In “Za chainym stolom,” the last of these works, and Pavlova’s only pub-
lished short story, cosmology is completely absent. If Kadril’questioned
and rewrote specific plots by men (Baratynsky and Pushkin), “Za
chainym stolom” looks at the assumptions underlying such stories—the
androcentric social and narrative conventions that govern stories about
women—and how those stories are told.
164 Karolina Pavlova