tional stress from her responsibilities as breadwinner under difficult cir-
cumstances, she also appears to have enjoyed the freedom and respect
her position gave her within her family. In addition, writing prose al-
lowed Khvoshchinskaia to free herself from Zotov’s literary guardian-
ship and to deal directly with other editors.^48
However, Khvoshchinskaia did not give up poetry willingly or eas-ily. Zotov writes that it took him a long time to persuade her to try writ-
ing prose, which she felt neither the desire nor the ability to do.^49 Along
with economic necessity, several literary-historical factors also may have
pushed Khvoshchinskaia from poetry to prose. First, poetry had been
going out of fashion since the 1830 s, making it increasingly difficult
to gain recognition as a poet.^50 In any case, Khvoshchinskaia’s poetry
was not widely praised. In 1852 the influential poet and critic Nikolai
Nekrasov wrote that in Khvoshchinskaia’s poetry “some kind of foggi-
ness and vagueness is noticeable both in the expressions and thoughts.
In addition, Miss Khvoshchinskaia does not have a completely free com-
mand of verse and perhaps too regards rhyme too freely.” He gave sev-
eral rhymes from “’Vy ulybaetes’?.. .’“ as examples.^51 A year later he
concluded a review of Khvoshchinskaia’s verse tales Derevenskii sluchai
( 1853 ) by writing, “We would consider ourselves fortunate if our few re-
marks assisted the authoress of Derevenskii sluchaito bring herself to re-
nounce verse tales (povesti v stikhakh). She has been given everything
necessary to write successfully in prose.”^52 It is hard to believe that
Khvoshchinskaia would have been unaffected by these two reviews,
which appeared in the prestigious Sovremennik.
Even her biographers appear to have been unenthusiastic about herpoetry. In Russkii biograficheskii slovar’we read, “Several of [her poems],
it is true, are somewhat vague and carelessly finished, but their origi-
nality and deep thought and feeling produce a deep impression on the
reader” ( 21 : 302 ). Another biographer wrote of Khvoshchinskaia’s debut
in Literaturnaia gazeta,“Six of these [poems] were printed with her full
name in no. 38 of this publication with a kind, even too kind, note from
the editor” (Semevskii, “N. D. Khvoshchinskaia-Zaionchkovskaia,” 10 :
54 ). A third opined, “In respect to artistry, N. D.’s first [published] po-
ems were weak and distinguished themselves from the mass of pub-
lished versified trash [khlam] only in their ideological content and gen-
uine feeling” (Karrik, “Iz vospominanii,” 12–13). I suspect that much
of the vagueness that Khvoshchinskaia’s contemporaries complained
about can be attributed to Zotov’s rewritings and deletions. I certainly
found the autograph versions of Khvoshchinskaia’s poems much clearer
Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia 135