5 .Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia
While Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia (1824–89) has been recognized for
the novels and stories she wrote under the pseudonym V. Krestovsky, the
wonderful poetry that she wrote under her own name has been forgot-
ten.^1 There are many reasons for the disappearance of these works from
literary history. First, in the course of her life Khvoshchinskaia herself
seemed to lose interest in her poetry: she neither published nor appar-
ently wrote any poems after 1859 , nor did she collect her more than
eighty published poems, although she published a six-volume edition
of her prose works. Second, much of her poetry still remains unpub-
lished in notebooks, which are now in archives. Third, the poems that
were published during her lifetime appeared in distorted form and,
moreover, did so not in “thick” (tolstye) literary journals, but chiefly in
newspapers. Such works are less likely to become part of the literary
canon since, like newspapers themselves, they tend to be considered
ephemeral. In addition, recovery of such works is not easy, as news-
papers are less likely than journals to be preserved. Other more basic
factors, however, contributed to the disappearance of Khvoschinskaia’s
poetry from Russian literary history.
These factors, I suggest, had nothing to do with the quality of Khvosh-chinskaia’s poetry—which is well worth recovering—but rather with the
gender issues discussed in previous chapters. As we shall see, despite her
ability to ignore or overcome the constraints of gender norms in her ca-
reer, they ultimately affected her reception and reputation as a poet.
Khvoshchinskaia was born in Riazan’ in 1824.^2 Her father, Dmitrii Ke-sarevich Khvoshchinsky, was a civil servant, first working in the de-
partment of horse breeding, then as a surveyor. Her half-Russian, half-
Polish mother, Iuliia Vikent’eva, born Drobysheva-Rubets, was well
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