Khvoshchinskaia’s poetic corpus—and there is no reason to believe
that Zotov chose her best or most representative work to rewrite and
publish. We need a scholarly edition of the 205 poems contained in
Khvoshchinskaia’s two notebooks, as well as whatever other notebooks
can be found.
A comparison of twenty-five of the published poems with their au-tograph versions shows that only two (“Uzh vecher” and “Ne mogu ia
priniat’sia za delo”) were published as Khvoshchinskaia wrote them,
and one (“Kladbishche”) with relatively trivial changes. For the rest Zo-
tov changed anything from a final line to twenty-three out of the thirty
lines of “O daite mne pole.” Although these twenty-five poems may
not be typical of Khvoshchinskaia’s work as a whole, even a prelimi-
nary look at their themes—and most contain more than one—shows
Khvoshchinskaia’s range, originality, and power. Eight poems have so-
cial themes: “Byvalo, s sestrami” describes the effects of poverty on a
young woman; “Vy ulybaetes’?.. .” forced marriages; “Bal detskii” the
corrupting effect of balls; “Tri slova,” “Mezh tem,” and “Svoi razum” the
failure of the political revolutions and movements of the 1840 s to change
society; “Uzhasno skorbnyi den’“ and “Mezh tem” the conflict between
generations. Seven are love poems, though often with unusual subjects.
For example, “Uzh vecher” describes a muse/lover with vampirish
overtones; “Ia ne tebe otdam poslednie chasy” the speaker’s refusal to
think of a lost love at midnight on New Year’s Eve; “Dolzhna by ia vchera
poplakat’“ indifference to the final loss of a lover. Three of them directly
address women’s lack of freedom in society (“Druz’ia,” “Dva-tri doma”
[“Dva tri doma” in Zotov’s version], “’Vy ulybaetes’?.. .’“). Three are
metaphysical (“I dlia menia,” “Uzhasno skorbnykh dnei,” “Klad-
bishche”); three invoke diabolical forces (“Dva-tri doma,” “Uzh vecher,”
“Solntse segodnia”).
Of course, we cannot use twenty-five poems to establish howKhvoshchinskaia dealt with the issues, discussed in chapters 2 and
3 , that faced the women poets of her generation—poetic self-
representation; gender and genre; the poet’s relationship with audience,
nature, creativity, and cosmology. However, the way Khvoshchinskaia
treats some of those issues in these poems does shed light on her sub-
sequent career.
It may be significant that Khvoshchinskaia never represents herselfwith the word poètin these poems, nor does she often describe writing
poetry. In “Shumit osennii dozhd’, noch’ temnaia niskhodit” (The au-
tumn rain sounds, the dark night falls), the speaker refers to “getting
Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia 133