literary career (1846–57). Of these I placed in various periodical publications
fewer than half. In entrusting her verses to me she always wished to see them
collected in a book. Now such a book, comprised of her best pieces, would fill
out the literary profile of a sympathetic authoress [pisatel’nitsa]” (“Peterburg v
sorokovykh godakh,” 558 ).
36 .Zotov also wrote about Khvoshchinskaia in his memoir “Peterburg v
sorokovykh godov,” Istovicheskii vestnik 5 (May 1890 ): 296–300, and in “Peter-
burgskii vestnik literatury,” Panteon 8 (August 1852 ): 13–21. Even when Zotov
claims to be quoting from Khvoshchinskaia’s letters, one hesitates to accept his
citations as accurate. As late as 1890 he was still rewriting her poems, as can be
seen by comparing three that he published for the first time that year (Istorich-
eskii vestnik,no. 6 , 556–57) with their autograph versions. Those poems all con-
cern the 1848 revolutions: “Sredi bor’by i razrushen’ia,” no. 190 in the notebook;
“Tri slova!” no. 195 in the notebook; and “Opiat’ temno v dali,” no. 191 in the
notebook.
37 .F. 541 , ed. 3 , no. 1 , RGALI. It would appear that the larger notebook is the
one discussed in Anna Chechneva, “‘Gore tselogo mira volnuet mne dushu.. .’:
Tetrad’. I tselaia zhizn’,” in Literaturnaia Riazan’(Moskva: Moskovskii Rabochii,
1990 ), 275–79, an article that describes and cites from it without identifying its
location. It is possible, however, that additional autograph notebooks (e.g., the
notebooks that Khvoshchinskaia sent Zotov) are extant.
38 .Blotting-books (notebooks composed of blotting paper for writing letters,
etc. away from a desk), although perhaps an obscure artifact today, were taken
for granted in nineteenth-century Europe and America, as reflected in the liter-
ature of the time. For example, in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables,in the chapter
titled “Buvard, Bavard” (IV: 15 : 1 ), Cosette’s blotting-book, left open in front of
a mirror, shows Jean Valjean the contents of the note she has just written to Mar-
ius. My thanks to Nancy Burstein for drawing my attention to this example. In
Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs( 1896 ) the narrator writes, “I
reached for my hat, and taking blotting-book under my arm... walked out past
the fragrant green garden and up the dusty road” (New York: Dover, 1994 ), 5.
39 .On Zotov’s 1890 memoir see note 36. Zotov, “Peterburg v sorokovykh
godakh,” 558 , and “Nadezhda Dmitrievna Khvoshchinskaia,” 94.
In the discussion that follows, I identify each poem from Khvoshchinskaia’s
notebook by the number that appears above it. (For convenience, I have changed
these Roman numerals to Arabic.) Although Khvoshchinskaia also numbered
the poems (in Arabic numerals) in the notebook’s table of contents, she appears
accidentally to have skipped several titles, starting with no. 99. Thus, the num-
ber of the poem in the table of contents does not always correspond to its more
reliable number in the notebook itself. Here and elsewhere I assume that
Khvoshchinskaia sent Zotov her poems in the same form in which they appear
in the notebooks.
40 .For example, Brenda Hillman discusses the “intellectual and physical
excitement” created by Dickinson’s “quirkish punctuation” and criticizes the
“pre- 1955 bowdlerized punctuation, all the ‘correct’ periods and commas”
(preface to Emily Dickinson, Poems,vii, xi). See also Brita Lindberg-Seyersted,
Notes to Pages 122–124 267