Reinventing Romantic Poetry : Russian Women Poets of the Mid-nineteenth Century

At the beginning of the poem a harsh God decides to test their souls by

throwing them on unfallow ground, telling them not to blame him if

they become despondent:

     

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(And if your lazy spirit becomes despondent

In the terrestrial battle

Don’t in your false grumbling

Blame my love.)

As in the Biblical parable, thorns, the thorns of society, “grew up and

choked” the first soul, Gay. The second soul, Davidson, like the seeds

thrown along the road, perishes in the American wilderness through

lack of nurture. Pavlova imagines that her own fate, like that of the seeds

thrown into shallow soil, will be to grow quickly at first, but then to die

without bearing fruit. This view of the extraordinary woman’s fate is

even darker than the one she presents in “Jeanne d’Arc.”

In Dvoinaia zhizn’,often considered her best work, Pavlova moves

from the fate of the extraordinary woman (the artist) in society, to that

of the “ordinary” woman—the artist manquée—whom Pavlova does

not depict as ordinary at all.^43 She dedicated the work “To you... slaves

of noise and vanity.... Psyches, deprived of wings, the mute sisters of

my soul” ( 231 ), that is, to upper-class women whom society has de-

prived of their creativity and voice. This theme of polozhenie zhenshchiny,

women’s constrained position in society, had appeared in several soci-

ety tales of the 1830 s and 1840 s (for example, those of Elena Gan, Mar’ia

Zhukova, Evdokiia Rostopchina, Avdotiia Panaeva, and Vladimir

Odoevsky), but Pavlova gives a more direct analysis of the causes and

implications of women’s restricted lives. She shows that society, in order

to make young women “marriageable,” condemns them to banal, empty,

soul-destroying lives strictly governed by propriety. As a result, women

lose their inherent creativity and even the so-called good matches they

manage to make—marriages to rich men—bring them nothing but un-

happiness. On a verbal level, Pavlova evokes women’s lack of physical

and mental freedom by creating what Tschizˇewskij calls a “semantic

field” consisting of such words as rab(slave), uznitsa(prisoner), skovali

156 Karolina Pavlova