Ia gor’kii kubok ves’
Do kapli vypila.h
(I drank the entire bitter cup
To the dregs.)
( 340 )The countess also prays in vain that Vadim will survive the duel, and we are
told she has spent many nights crying in front of the icon. That icon, reflected
in a mirror, is the last image of the poem, perhaps a reminder of more enduring
values than those of society. The issue here for Pavlova, however, is not religious
but ethical—women’s ability to be, in Suzanne Fusso’s words, “moral agents”
(“Pavlova’s Quadrille,” 124 ).
48 .On frame narratives, see Charles Isenburg, Telling Silence: Russian Frame
Narratives of Renunciation(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993 ).
49 .Pavlova’s recurring cruel but loving male figure is reminiscent of the
Gothic hero, whom Tania Modleski traces in women’s writing from Charlotte
Brontë (Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre) to contemporary Harlequin Romances. Mod-
leski attributes the popularity of such texts, which depict “the transformation
of brutal (or indeed, murderous) men into tender lovers,” to “the insistent de-
nial of the reality of male hostility towards women,” and the need for readers to
“constantly return to the same text (to texts which are virtually the same) in or-
der to be reconvinced” (Loving with a Vengeance, 111 ).
50 .See Fusso, “Pavlova’s Quadrille,” 125–26, on the similarity between the
countess’s depiction of Vadim and the narrator’s depiction of a stern, disap-
proving Pushkin.
51 .Karolina Pavlova, “Za chainym stolom,” Russkii vestnik 24 , no. 2 (Dec.
1859 ): 799. I cite this version of the text, which presumably Pavlova approved,
rather than Briusov’s edition in Sobranie sochinenii, 2 : 335–412, or the late-Soviet
edition (which left out one of the work’s two epigraphs) in Serdtsa chutkogo
prozren’em., ed. N. I. Iakushin, 294–333. Perhaps Pavlova, of German descent and
living in Dresden in 1859 , identified with both countesses; in Russian the word
for countess is the German-derived word grafinia.For Russian women’s unequal
inheritance rights, to which the countess alludes, see chapter 1 , note 4.
52 .Pavlova, “Za chainym stolom,” 797 , 839–40. Rostopchina, too, at the end
of Dnevnik devushkiequates marriage with death. The novel ends with the hero-
ine, Zinaida, seriously ill. The narrator tells us that it does not matter whether
Zinaida dies physically of the illness or dies morally by recovering and marry-
ing the man to whom she is engaged but whom she does not love.
53 .De Laurentis, Alice Doesn’t, 155. See also Rachel Blau Du Plessis, Writing
beyond the Ending(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985 ).
Chapter 7. In Conclusion
- In addition to the collections of poetry listed in the bibliography (many of
which include useful biographical and critical material about the authors), I have
Notes to Pages 161–168 277