indication that she took herself more seriously as a poet than the lan-
guage of her poem might at first suggest.
Similarly, our understanding of Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia’s poem“Kladbishche” (The cemetery, 1859 ) is enriched if we see it in relation to
another Baratynsky poem, his album verse “V al’bom” (For an album,
1829 ), dedicated to Karolina Pavlova. In this poem Baratynsky jokingly
compares albums to cemeteries, in which writers hope for immortality
and dread judgment. Khvoshchinskaia’s five-part poem “Kladbishche”
uses Baratynsky’s comparison as the basis for an extended meditation
on life and death. Khvoshchinskaia’s poem also responds to Lermontov’s
“Kladbishche” ( 1830 ) by echoing his syntax, but not his meaning. Like-
wise, Pushkin’s “K moriu” (To the sea, 1824 ), in which the speaker re-
grets that he was not free to travel abroad, provides a counterpoint to
Shakhova’s “Progulka u vzmor’ia,” (A walk by the seashore, 1839 ; see
appendix), in which the speaker and her friend confront the far greater
lack of freedom they experience as women. Pavlova’s narrative poem
Kadril’ (Quadrille, 1859 ), which she dedicated to Baratynsky, should be
read against Baratynsky’s narrative poems Bal(The ball, 1828 ) and
Nalozhnitsa(The concubine, 1831 , later retitled Tsyganka[The gypsy]).
Both of Baratynsky’s poems have climactic scenes at a ball. Pavlova’s
work, consisting of a conversation among four society women just be-
fore going to a ball, implicitly criticizes Baratynsky’s stereotyping of
women characters as angels (Vera in Nalozhnitsa,Ol’ga in Bal) or as de-
monic, needy destroyers of the men they love and of themselves (Sara
in Nalozhnitsa,Nina in Bal). Rather, Pavlova’s four very ordinary women
in Kadril’more realistically recount how much self-control, courage, and
self-knowledge is required of women to perform successfully in society.
As for theoretical issues, this study raises three in particular. The first
and most basic, which I shall save for last, concerns how we are to eval-
uate these unknown poets. The other two are interrelated: Are these
mostly unknown women poets worth considering at all? And, if so,
what are the advantages of viewing their work through the lens of gen-
der? In fact, questions of gender can explain why these poets are un-
known or have been unknown until very recently.
Only over the last twenty-five years have scholars in many literaturesbegun to challenge literary canons, questioning the bases on which writ-
ers are included in them and who decides what those bases are. Partly
as a result of these challenges—and of the work accomplished in such
disciplines as women’s studies, African American studies, gay studies,
Introduction 11