8 .Accounts of Khvoshchinskaia’s depressions appear in P. Khvoshchinskaia,
Semevskii, and Tsebrikova.
9 .Tsebrikova recounts that A. A. Kraevskii, editor of Otechestvennye zapiski,
consistently underpaid Khvoshchinskaia for her work or did not pay her at all;
she also describes the abusiveness of Khvoshchinskaia’s husband. Praskov’ia
Khvoshchinskaia depicts Khvoshchinskaia’s goddaughter, Sonia, and Vera
Aleksandrovna Moskaleva, with whom Khvoshchinskaia lived at the end of her
life, as unworthy of her sister. Praskov’ia Khvoshchinskaia, however, appears to
have been jealous of Sonia and was angry at Moskaleva, who, she claimed, alien-
ated Khvoshchinskaia from her family. In any case, Khvoshchinskaia in the
course of her life managed to free herself from Zotov’s abusive tutelage, from
her husband, and from life in Riazan’. For Khvoshchinskaia’s feelings about Ri-
azan’, see Semevskii, “N. D. Khvoshchinskaia-Zaionchkovskaia,” 12 : 126–27,
and Semevskii, “N. D. Khvoshchinskaia-Zaionchkovskaia,” Russkaia starina
(Feb. 1891 ): 462.
10 .For discussion of the gynosocial world of nineteenth-century American
women, see Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Vic-
torian America(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985 ). For comparison with
the Brontës, see Ol’ga Demidova, “Khvoshchinskaia, Sofiia Dmitrievna,” in Led-
kovsky, Rosenthal, and Zirin, Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, 289.
11. Karrik in “Iz vospominanii o N. D. Khvoshchinskoi” describes the group
of young women that formed around the Khvoshchinskaia sisters in Riazan’.
12 .Vinitskaia, “Vospominaniia o N. D. Khvoshchinskoi,” 155. On the writ-
ers Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Vinitskaia and Mar’ia Tsebrikova, see Led-
kovsky, Rosenthal, and Zirin, Dictionary of Russian Women Writers,714–15, 659–
62.
13 .For a concise explanation of essentialist versus socially constructed the-
ories of gender, see Jagose, Queer Theory,8–9. The following discussion, which
documents changes in the definition of femininity between the late nineteenth
and the early twenty-first century, supports the socially constructed position.
14 .Petr Boborykin, editor of Biblioteka dlia chteniia1863–65, quoted in Se-
mevskii, “N. D. Khvoshchinskaia-Zaionchkovskaia,” 10 : 76–77.
15 .We find similar (and generally negative) sex-appeal ratings in memoirs
and biographies of Karolina Pavlova (see chapter 6 , note 14 ), Anna Mordovtseva,
and Evdokiia Rostopchina.
Ivan Gorizontov, who tutored Mordovtseva’s daughter, described the poet in
the following way: “A[nna] N[ikanorovna] did not at all conform to that stan-
dard by which I measured the female sex; she little resembled a ‘lady’ or even a
woman: her hair cut short, dressed in some kind of dressing gown, loud, dis-
tinct, and firm in speech, with bold, sweeping gestures, with a face sharply de-
fined by large features, she reminded me more of a man than a ‘lady’” (“Fel’e-
ton: Vospominanie ob Anne Nikanorovne Mordovtsevoi,” 1 ). Of course, even if
a woman poet was considered to have sex appeal, that did not protect her from
ridicule, as we have seen in Rostopchina’s case.
16 .“Net, ia ne nazovu,” no. 179 in Khvoshchinskaia’s notebook, first pub-
lished in Otechestvennye zapiski,no. 8 ( 1852 ), also in Panteon,no. 8 ( 1852 ), and in
264 Notes to Pages 114 –117