and queer theorists, who argue that homosexuality as a “new specifi-
cation of individuals” (Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1 : 42–43) or “cate-
gory of identification” (Jagose, Queer Theory, 10 ) only appeared at the end
of the nineteenth century, and lesbianism in the first decades of the
twentieth.^20 Until then, male homosexual acts “were not understood to
constitute a certain kind of individual” (Jagose, Queer Theory, 11 ). As for
nineteenth-century women’s romantic friendships, they were consid-
ered “unremarkable or even praiseworthy” because men’s belief that
“normal women are blessed by sexual anesthesia” made it impossible
for them to perceive such friendships as sexual (Greenberg, Construction
of Homosexuality, 379 , 378 ).^21 Khvoshchinskaia’s short-lived marriage ap-
pears to have satisfied patriarchal norms. In any case, compilers of two
reference works, D. D. Iazykov and I. F. Masanov, listed Khvoshchinskaia
under her husband’s name, Zaionchkovskaia, while four biographers
and bibliographers, Karrik, Semevsky, Tsebrikova, and Chizhkov, re-
ferred to her as Khvoshchinskaia-Zaionchkovskaia, although Khvo-
shchinskaia never wrote under any variant of her husband’s name.^22
Rather, biographers debated the “femininity” of Khvoshchinskaia’ssexual behavior either by defending her as submissive to men or by at-
tacking her for appropriating male prerogatives. Tsebrikova, the cham-
pion of Khvoshchinskaia’s femininity, depicts her as a self-sacrificing,
compliant wife, describing at great length the emotional, physical, and
financial abuse Khvoshchinskaia endured from Zaionchkovsky. Those
attacking Khvoshchinskaia depicted her as a sex-crazed spinster, point-
ing derisively to the fact that she first married at age forty a man thir-
teen years her junior, a circumstance that would have gone unnoted had
Khvoshchinskaia and Zaionchkovsky’s genders been reversed. One
clearly uncomfortable memoirist—“the bride had already passed the
age allotted for marriage and was much older than the groom”—
claimed that Khvoshchinskaia only married Zaionchkovsky at her dy-
ing sister Sofia’s request (Zotov, “Nadezhda Dmitrievna Khvoshchin-
skaia,” 102 ). Praskov’ia Khvoshchinskaia specifically denied this story
(“Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia,” xiii).
Khvoshchinskaia’s contemporaries appeared to consider an evenmore serious violation of gender norms the fact that Khvoshchinskaia
appropriated male prerogatives of language and behavior by verbally
cross-dressing and by “leading a woman on.” Two memoirists describe
Khvoshchinskaia’s correspondence with a provincial woman who, mis-
led by Khvoshchinskaia’s male pseudonym (V. Krestovsky), started a
romantic correspondence with her.^23 Khvoshchinskaia at first did not
118 Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia