tions, excisions, and suppression of her poetry that Khvoshchinskaia
suffered at the hands of men critics, editors, and publishers. It might be
more accurate to call this sexual-political censorship. I would suggest
that not only Khvoshchinskaia but also every woman poet of this gen-
eration who questioned women’s subordinate position in society expe-
rienced such censorship. Sexual-political censorship was far more de-
structive than the purely political censorship that both men and women
poets endured. Political censors may have removed passages, but they
generally did not rewrite them to reverse their meaning. Political cen-
sors may have had the power to forbid publication, but unlike the sex-
ual-political censors, who were editors, publishers, and anthologizers,
they did not decide what got published, or, like those who were re-
viewers, determine how works would be received. Most significantly, the
political censor reviewed a work just once, but sexual-political censors
reviewed women’s works continually, resulting, as we have seen, in cu-
mulative depredations.
We need only compare the mutilation of the poems examined inthe preceding discussion with the purely political censorship of Khvo-
shchinskaia’s poem “Kladbishche” (The cemetery, no. 9 in “Album
buvard,” published in Illiustratsiia, no. 52 [Jan. 8 , 1859 ], and which Zo-
tov does not appear to have touched at all). Except for a very few punc-
tuation changes, one censored line (“Sud’ba tsarei reshaetsia perom,”
II: 4 [The fate of tsars is decided by the pen]), and one substitution of
“kniazei” (of princes) for “tsarei” (of tsars, III: 20 ), the printed version
of the poem is exactly the same as the autograph. This appears to
beKhvoshchinskaia’s last published poem. It may be that by 1859
Khvoshchinskaia could better control the form in which her work ap-
peared; after the death of Nicholas I in 1855 the censorship eased as
well. Strangely, this poem, which even Gerbel’ praised but did not in-
clude in his anthology, has never been reprinted.
Evaluation of Khvoshchinskaia’s Poetry
There can be no meaningful evaluation of Khvoshchinskaia’s poetry
without reliable versions of her work. Although over the years several
scholars have painstakingly compiled increasingly complete bibliogra-
phies of Khvoshchinskaia’s published poetry, these 85 poems, even
when located and collected, cannot be used to draw any valid conclu-
sions about Khvoshchinskaia’s art.^47 Not only did Zotov rewrite most of
them to varying degrees, but also they represent much less than half of
132 Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia