Reinventing Romantic Poetry : Russian Women Poets of the Mid-nineteenth Century

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(A black book of bright ideas

From the dark little head of my daughter;

With her original talent already acknowledged,

Write, don’t be lazy, don’t spare the ink,

Thrust yourself quickly into the ranks of the inspired.)^6

After Khvoshchinskaia earned her first money as a writer—for the

povest’ (tale) Anna Mikhailovna( 1850 )—Praskov’ia Khvoshchinskaia

recounts that their father gave Khvoshchinskaia a desk, their mother

gave her an inkwell, and they both always provided a corner where she

could write undisturbed. In addition, Dmitrii Kesarevich, at the urg-

ing of Vladimir Zotov, the editor of Literaturnaia gazeta,in 1852 took

Khvoshchinskaia to Saint Petersburg for several weeks to make the lit-

erary contacts necessary to advance her career. In the 1850 s Khvoshchin-

skaia stopped publishing poetry, for reasons that will be discussed be-

low, to concentrate only on prose. She eventually became a highly

respected novelist, critic, and translator who, after the deaths of her fa-

ther and sister Sof’ia, managed with her writing to support her mother,

sister, two aunts, two nephews, and husband.

But if Khvoshchinskaia’s unusual childhood promoted intellectual

self-confidence and the ability to have a successful literary career, it pro-

duced less positive social and psychological effects. One suspects that

social life for Khvoshchinskaia in Riazan’ would have been uncomfort-

able in any case because of the legal judgment against her father as well

as the family’s severe financial problems. In addition, one biographer

states that Khvoshchinskaia’s writing cut her off from conventional fe-

male society (Tsebrikova, “Ocherk zhizni,” 7 ), although, as we shall see,

she always had many close relationships with women relatives and

friends. Khvoshchinskaia herself wrote that her neighbors thought her

crazy, while diady generaly, kuziny freiliny(her uncles the generals, and

her cousins the ladies-in-waiting) considered her writing, especially the

prose, a disgrace to the family.^7 Furthermore, Khvoshchinskaia through-

out her life struggled with severe depression, at least at one point, after

her sister Sof’ia’s death, becoming suicidal.^8 Some biographies suggest

that Khvoshchinskaia often became involved with people who abused

her emotionally and/or financially.^9

Despite Khvoshchinskaia’s unconventional upbringing and its social

and psychological costs, however, in at least one respect her life re-

mained typical for a woman of her time: she lived and wrote in a gy-

nosocial world. The scholar Ol’ga Demidova compares the Khvoshchin-

114 Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia