blame, telling the surviving duelist when he reproaches her that he must
take responsibility for his own actions including his decision to duel
with his friend.
As I have discussed elsewhere, in “Za chainym stolom” Pavlova hasan audience of women question the biases and one-sidedness of men’s
stories about them. On a formal level the work questions the very nar-
rative conventions that produce such stories, such as the death-
or-marriage ending. In one of the story’s epigraphs Pavlova writes, “I
would like there to be not one finished story; it’s the ending that spoils
everything.... An ended story, after all, is a garden enclosed by a stone
wall that doesn’t allow you to see into the distance.” Pavlova, in fact, dis-
penses with the death-or-marriage ending. In the story itself Aleksei
Petrovich concludes, “I cannot report any kind of ending to you because
neither Khozrevsky nor Wismer nor the princess died, and because she
didn’t marry either one.”^52 In offering another ending for women, nei-
ther death nor marriage (the “destruction or territorialization of
women”), the story challenges both literary and social conventions.^53
Until the 1980 s critics and scholars discussed Pavlova’s work only interms of its connections with the male literary tradition, at best grant-
ing Pavlova, as an “extraordinary woman,” the status of honorary man.
As I hope to have shown, however, in these works at least, Pavlova, who
knew she was extraordinary, did not write as an honorary man but “as
a woman.” She emphatically rejected the idea of any essential gulf be-
tween extraordinary and ordinary women, depicting extraordinary
women as very human and ordinary women as extraordinary. Pavlova’s
movement in these five works from cosmology to a sophisticated anal-
ysis of the cultural and literary assumptions that hamper women in so-
ciety showed her growing interest in the conditions that all women
shared. It seems likely that Pavlova read and was influenced by Russian
and European women writers as well as men, and I suggest it would
be worthwhile to examine her work in the context of women’s literary
traditions.
166 Karolina Pavlova