down to insipid, dull work” (“Priniat’sia... za blednyi, vialyi trud”). An-
other poem begins, “Ne mogu ia priniat’sia za delo” (I can’t get down to
the matter [business] at hand, no. 161 in the notebook, published in Za-
zdravnyi fial: Al’manakh na 1852 god, 7 ). Only in “Uzh vecher”—a poem
suffused with a sense of guilt and evil—does the speaker actually seem
to be engaged in writing poetry. Similar feelings pervade the “dra-
maticheskiaia fantaziia” (dramatic fantasy) Dzhulio(Julio, no. 70 in the
notebook, published in Panteon 3 , no. 5 [May 1850 ]), which concerns an
artist. (As I did not compare the published version with the autograph,
I cannot consider this a reliable text.) In this work, written in iambic pen-
tameter, a shepherd who wants to be an artist leaves his fiancée and aged
mother—who accuse him of selfishness and insanity—to go to the city
and study painting. After five years he returns to his village, a failure as
a painter, to find his fiancée married to another and his mother dead.
But while Khvoshchinskaia does not depict herself positively asapoet in any of this material, in several of the twenty-five poems
(“Uzhasno,” “Mezh tem,” “Bal destskii,” “Svoi razum,” “O esli by iz
slov,” “Tri slova,” “Kladbishche”) she assumes the role of social critic.
In the largest group of these poems Khvoshchinskaia’s implied audi-
ence as society in general. Fewer poems appear to be addressed primar-
ily to women (“Byvalo, s sestrami,” “Bal detskii,” “Solntse segodnia”)
or to men (“Druz’ia, vam istinno,” “’Vy ulybaetes’?.. .’“). As for cos-
mology, all these poems express a tension between apathy/hopeless-
ness, on the one hand, and the knowledge that work can and must
bedone in the world, on the other. Depression and even despair pre-
dominate in many of these poems: “Bal,” “I dlia menia,” “Uzhasno,”
“Druz’ia,” “Est’ dni,” “Net, ia ne navozu,” “Dva-tri doma,” and “Solntse
segodnia.” However, implicit in others (“O daite mne pole,” “Byvalo,
sestrami,” and “Kladbishche”) is the belief that nature is good and heal-
ing, that God intends people to enjoy life, and that one must work to im-
prove society. This poetic orientation, I suggest, explains in part how
Khvoshchinskaia was able to make the transition to socially engaged
novels and stories.
Let us return, then, to our original questions: Why did Khvoshchin-skaia give up writing poetry for prose, and why has her poetry been lost
to literary history? From an economic standpoint, it might seem obvi-
ous that Khvoshchinskaia stopped writing poetry because she received
no money for it, and because after her father’s death in 1856 her family
depended for its survival on the money she could earn writing prose.
While Khvoshchinskaia experienced a great deal of physical and emo-
134 Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia