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

“Za chainym stolom” develops further several themes from Kadril’.

The discussion about women’s nature now takes place between men and

women at tea instead of exclusively among women before a ball. A

countess again leads the conversation, but this countess expresses more

self-confidence and less ambivalence about women. Her analysis of the

inadequacies of women’s upbringing seems like an expansion of her

counterpart’s terse diagnosis in Kadril’.

Kadril’:

The senselessness of a woman’s role—

A mixture of caprice and bondage. ( 366 )

“Za chainym stolom”:

One would think that almost every woman is brought up by her

worst enemy, so strangely do they care for her. She cannot earn

money like a man, and by law is virtually deprived of paternal

inheritance, so they instill in her a need for luxuries. She cannot

propose to a man, so from childhood they frighten her with spin-

sterhood as a shameful disaster, make her incapable of inde-

pendence, and teach her to look upon it as indecent. A frivolous

choice can make her unhappy for life, so they train her to be friv-

olous and capricious. A momentary attraction is enough to ruin

her irrevocably. Knowing this, they develop coquettishness in

her and the inclination to play with danger, and they repress any-

thing that could give her a serious direction.^51

Unlike her counterpart in Kadril’,the countess in “Za chainym

stolom” does not denigrate women. Here it is a man, Aleksei Petrovich,

who argues that women are physically and morally inferior to men. To

prove his point, Aleksei Petrovich tells of a princess who discovers that

her fiancé, apparently sweet, humble, and simple, is in fact a poor, bril-

liant, and ambitious man using this pose among aristocrats to support

himself and his mother. The princess calls off the wedding, telling her

fiancé that she cannot bring herself to become the wife of a man who dis-

sembles so well. The countess responds to Aleksei Petrovich’s story by

suggesting that women do not differ from men at all. She asks him, “Do

you think that if it were reversed, if [the man] were a woman and the

princess a man, that the man would have acted differently?” Aleksei

Petrovich is forced to admit he does not know.

Pavlova also further develops the motif of the coquettish woman who

causes a duel in which a man dies. However, Princess Alina in “Za

chainym stolom,” unlike the countess in Kadril’,refuses to accept all the

Karolina Pavlova 165