!
e ,
[.........]
" [.. .]
.h
(You called me a poet
[.........]
And I [.. .]
Then believed in myself.)Pavlova dedicated Kadril’to Baratynsky, who died in 1844 , the year the
first excerpt from the work appeared in print. It seems likely that
Pavlova intended it to be a response to Baratynsky’s povest’ v stikhakh,
Bal,which rather dramatically recounts the suicide of the femme fatale
Nina after she meets her lover and his new love at a ball. Kadril’,set just
before a ball, tells of more realistic and sympathetic women who suffer
at the hands of unsympathetic men. I shall discuss Kadril’at greater
length in chapter 6.
In contrast to Pavlova, Khvoshchinskaia does not seem to have suf-fered from generic subtitle anxiety—she clearly subtitled her seven-
chapter narrative poem, Derevenskii sluchai(A country incident, 1853 ),
“povest’ v stikhakh.” But this work, too, represents an uncomfortable
compromise between androcentric form and gynocentric content, in this
case the result of Khvoshchinskaia’s ambivalence about telling women’s
stories. Supposedly, the protagonist is Nikolai, a young Saint Petersburg
civil servant. However, the story often threatens to veer off toward his
far more interesting sister, Liza. Another site of tension is Khvoshchin-
skaia’s unexplained female-voiced digressions, which, in contrast to
Pushkin’s in Evgenii Onegin,speculate about parents’ unconscious cru-
elty to children or directly address women readers on the subject of their
experiences in pensions. Khvoshchinskaia is far more successful in her
shorter, untitled narrative poem in which a woman tells a stranger about
the forced marriage of a relative that took place in the 1730 s (“’Vy
ulybaetes’?... Razdum’e ne meshaet’“ [You are smiling?... My pen-
siveness doesn’t prevent me, 1852 ]). This work (discussed in chapter 5 ),
while more fragmentary, powerfully focuses on a woman’s story.^27
Elisaveta Shakhova also chose the term povesti v stikhakhfor threeworks that focus more directly on women than does Khvoshchinskaia’s
Derevenskii sluchai.Shakhova solved the problem of how to tell women’s
stories in a genre that defined women as Other by combining the povest’
v stikhakhwith a second genre in which women’s stories could be told—
68 Gender and Genre