Khvoshchinskaia’s year of birth appears as 1825 in several nineteenth-
century sources: N. N. Golitsyn, Bibliograficheskii slovar’ russkikh pisatel’nits,
262 ;D.D. Iazykov, Obzor zhizni i trudov russkikh pisatelei i pisatel’nits(Moskva:
Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1905 ), 9 : 25 ; Semevskii, “N. D. Khvoshchinskaia-
Zaionchkovskaia”; Tsebrikova, “Ocherk zhizni N. D. Khvoshchinskoi-
Zaionchkovskoi,” in Russkii biografifcheskii slovar’(Moskva and Sankt-Peterburg:
Imp. Russkoe Istoricheskoe obshchestvo, 1896–1918), 21 : 301–3; and even in Mu-
ratova, Istoriia russkoi literatury XIX veka: Ukazatel’, 381. It appears as 1824 , how-
ever, in the most authoritative and most recent sources: the biographical essay
by Khvoshchinskaia’s sister Praskov’ia, “Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia,” and in
the memoir of a close friend, A. G. Karrik, “Iz vospominanii,” as well as in Is-
toriia russkoi literatury, vol. 9 , part. 2 , 234 ; Kratkaia literaturnaia entsiklopediia
(Moskva: Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, 1962–75); Ledkovsky, Rosenthal, and Zirin,
Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, 286 ; and Tomei, Russian Women Writers, 1 :
261. Aleksandr Potapov mentions documents indicating that Khvoshchinskaia
was born in 1822 (Neizrechennyi svet: Deviat’ vekov Riazani: Literatura(Riazan’:
Novoe vremia, 1996 ), 52.
3. One uncle paid for Sof’ia Khvoshchinskaia’s education at the Moscow
Ekaterininskii institut. Other relatives in Saint Petersburg introduced
Khvoshchinskaia into literary circles when she first visited there in 1852. One of
Dmitrii Kesarevich’s brothers helped him to get reinstated in the civil service.
4. Khvoshchinskaia is quoted as writing of her family’s financial problems:
“In this way I was led very early to know life in all its details and poverty, and
people in all their relations and injustices. Our father, while loving and taking
care of us, didn’t keep his troubles from us and didn’t let us grow up ignorant of
life’s difficulties” (Semevskii, “N. D. Khvoshchinskaia-Zaionchkovskaia,” 10 :
50 ).
5 .P. Khvoshchinskaia, “Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia,” viii. This is not to ide-
alize Dmitrii Kesarevich. One gathers from Praskov’ia Khvoshchinskaia’s mem-
oir that he was a hypersensitive, choleric, and irritable person: “Nervous and im-
patient, he was constantly getting irritated. His old friend... was afraid of our
father’s irascible disposition.... The governor tried to calm father down” (vii);
“[N. D.] used to have heated arguments with father” (viii); “This made a terrible,
frightening impression on Father, very suspicious by nature” (vii); “Father was
so agitated by the account of everything he had lived through, that he felt faint”
(ii). Senkovskii writes that in 1888 , the year before she died, Khvoshchinskaia
started writing a story about a young woman exploited by her father (“N. D.
Khvoshchinskaia-Zaionchkovskaia,” Russkaia mysl’ 12 [ 1890 ]: 142 ).
6. The inscription is cited in Semevskii, “N. D. Khvoshchinskaia-
Zaionchkovskaia,” 10 : 53. Khvoshchinskaia wrote, “Ia pisala mnogo stikhov; eto
nravilos’ osobenno moemu ottsu” (I wrote many poems; this particularly
pleased my father) (quoted in Semevskii, ibid. The notebook is now located in
f. 541 , ed. 3 , no. 1 , RGALI).
7. Semevskii, “N. D. Khvoshchinskaia-Zaionchkovskaia,” 10 : 58. P. Khvosh-
chinskaia, “Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia,” ii, and Tsebrikova, “Ocherk zhizni,”
7– 8, also discuss relatives’ and neighbors’ disapproval of Khvoshchinskaia’s
writing.
Notes to Pages 113–114 263