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

(fettered), umstvennyi korset(mental corset), and prigovor(judicial sen-

tence).^44

 u

$   ,

 #

 #    u

,

'     

[..........]

 

   

  



,

h

(That prisoner of the human realm,

That victim of pitiful vanity,

Blind slave of custom,

[..............]

They have fettered you from childhood.)

( 243 )

 



 # 

u,

(



 

h

(So go, according to your sentence,

Undefended and alone)

( 303 )

 , $

    

, 

 

   u

u

u 

u, 

  u

             -

  , 

 

   

     .

h

(And now at eighteen, she was so used to her mental corset that

she didn’t feel it any more than she did the silk one that she took

off only at night.)

( 249 )

In a series of dreams, Pavlova’s heroine, Cecilia, a marriageable

young woman in Moscow society, discovers a realm of poetry, truth, and

spiritual values beyond the stifling world in which she lives. Although

Cecilia seems very ordinary, the narrator shows us her thwarted poetic

genius, which can only emerge in her sleep. Cecilia, however, cannot es-

cape her lot, and having been given a glimpse of her “legacy: freedom

of feelings and the kingdom of thought” ( 243 ), she must return to what

the reader realizes will be an unhappy marriage and an early death. The

presence of an ironic and passionate narrator commenting on the ba-

nality of Cecilia’s daytime life, a narrator who at the end of the work re-

veals herself to be a woman poet, underlines Cecilia’s wasted possibili-

Karolina Pavlova 157