{"id":138552,"date":"2019-08-07T12:13:08","date_gmt":"2019-08-07T16:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=138552"},"modified":"2019-08-07T13:16:45","modified_gmt":"2019-08-07T17:16:45","slug":"the-double-life-of-karolina-pavlova","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/08\/07\/the-double-life-of-karolina-pavlova\/","title":{"rendered":"The Double Life of Karolina Pavlova"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Karolina Pavlova. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the nineteenth century, when its literature equaled that written in any place at any time in history, Russia had no \u201cgreat\u201d woman writer\u2014no Sappho, no Ono, no Komachi or Murasaki Shikibu, no Madame de Sta\u00ebl or George Sand, no Jane Austen or George Eliot\u2014or so we might say when surveying the best-known works of the age. But we now know this truth to be less than true.<\/p>\n

Karolina Pavlova, born Karolina Karlovna Jaenisch in Yaroslavl in 1807, died in Dresden in 1893 after having lived outside Russia for four decades. She had abandoned her native country not because of czarist oppression but because of hostile criticism of her poetry and her personal life. She died without friends, without family, without money, without renown (not a single Russian newspaper gave her an obituary) but with an unyielding dedication to what she called her \u201choly craft,\u201d which had produced a body of fine literary, largely poetic, works.<\/p>\n

In 1848, when she had completed her only novel, A Double Life<\/em>, Pavlova was not only devoted to art but also enjoyed other, more transient pleasures like love, friendship, and respect, which she was to lose later on. To judge from the irony that pervades her otherwise romantic description in this book about a young girl who has everything, Karolina Pavlova had come to expect little from the world beyond what her own talents and personality could bring to it. The theme of conflict between poet and society had informed the works of the great lyric poets who were her predecessors, Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. <\/p>\n

Pavlova returned to this theme again and again, translating her emotions into verse of abstract classical precision, which her detractors called cold, heartless, and remote from the so-called real problems of life. Even when there was admiration for her poetry, it was mixed with ridicule of her personally. Thus, a letter of her fellow poet N.\u2009M. Iazykov in 1832 contains hints that this extraordinary phenomenon\u2014a woman poet\u2014was somehow ridiculous when reciting her poetry, as was then the custom. In this way was engendered a more subtle conflict than that of poet versus society: that of woman poet versus society and ultimately, of woman versus poet within Pavlova herself.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

As much as any woman of her time could in Russia, Pavlova lived in a man\u2019s world. Her father, Karl Jaenisch, was a professor of physics and chemistry at the School of Medicine and Surgery in Moscow; many university professors in Russia were, like him, of German origin. Jaenisch adored his daughter and saw to it that she received a superb education at home\u2014the only place in Russia where a woman could get a higher education (Moscow University was not officially open to women until 1876, although various so-called women\u2019s courses existed beginning in the early 1870s).<\/p>\n

Her first romantic love was the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, who tutored her in Polish (she already knew French, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, and Dutch, as well as Russian) and was stunned by her literary talent. In the late 1820s, Karolina Jaenisch was already attending the important literary gatherings in Moscow, translating poetry, and writing her own works in German and French. In 1833, her first book appeared\u2014a translation of Russian poets into German called Das Nordlicht<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In December 1836, she married Nikolai Pavlov, a minor figure in the world of letters whose talent soon ran dry. Pavlov\u2019s friend B.\u2009N. Chicherin wrote in his memoirs that Pavlov confessed to having married Karolina for her money\u2014\u201ca social misdemeanor,\u201d Chicherin says, \u201cthat is quite usual and looked upon with indulgence.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Thursdays in their Moscow house from 1839 to 1844, the leading figures of the day attended the Pavlovs\u2019 literary salon. Poets would read aloud from their latest works, and the exponents of the two social philosophies of the age, the Slavophiles and the Westernizers, would gather for sharp debate until their mutual hostility grew too great for social gatherings to countenance. The Pavlovs had a son named Ippolit, who recalled how his mother would often retire from her large and noisy household and compose her verses by speaking them aloud, walking back and forth in her room, repeating, rearranging, and modifying words and phrases.<\/p>\n

An alien figure both because she was perceived as being \u201cGerman\u201d and because she was a woman poet, Pavlova lived above all for her art. The recurrent theme in her relationships with all her famous contemporaries is her need, through their friendship, to confirm her view of herself as a poet. In poetry dedicated to them, she constantly reiterates what she wrote to Yevgeny Baratynsky in 1842: \u201cYou have called me poet,\u2009\/\u2009Liking my careless verse;\u2009\/\u2009And I, warmed by your light,\u2009\/\u2009Believed, then, in myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

But circumstances of her life conspired to undermine this belief. If Pavlov married Karolina for her money, he soon began to gamble it away, sometimes at the rate of 10,000 to 15,000 rubles in an evening. Friends noticed that as her literary fame increased and his declined, he grew jealous: \u201cSoon her poetry will be read more than his short stories. It seems he fears this.\u201d Pavlov set up a separate household with a younger cousin of his wife, whom Karolina had taken in and helped support.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The loneliness of Pavlova\u2019s position was greatly intensified by the fact that, despite the long list of famous men among her acquaintances, most of her male contemporaries disliked her intensely and interpreted her shaky pride as haughtiness, and her love of poetry as theatrical posing. As a Soviet scholar has written: \u201cThe ironic references to Karolina Jaenisch are as frequent as the well-wishing ones, if not more frequent, and the latter in their tone \u2026 invariably include a shade of irony and mockery. The number of epigrams aimed at Jaenisch appear not less in number than the number of album verses full of praise and ecstasy.\u201d To many, Pavlova\u2019s claim to live only for her art seemed a monstrous thing in a woman\u2014or at best something to be indulgently patronized.<\/p>\n

From I.\u2009I. Panaev, the powerful editor and minor writer and publicist, comes the most consistently unfavorable picture of her. He claims to have felt \u201ctimidity\u201d in her presence:<\/p>\n

Before me was a tall, extremely thin lady, stern and majestic in appearance \u2026 In her pose, in her glance was something affected, rhetorical. She stopped between two marble columns, with dignity she inclined her head slightly at my bow and then extended her hand to me with the majesty of a theatrical empress \u2026 Within five minutes I learned from Mrs. Pavlov that she had received much attention from Alexander [von] Humboldt and Goethe\u2014and the latter had written some lines to her in her album \u2026 then the album with these precious pages was brought forth \u2026 Within a quarter of an hour Karolina Karlovna was declaiming to me some verses translated by her from German and English.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By drawing attention to her work, promoting it to an influential man of letters, Pavlova may have thought that she was acting in the normal professional manner, but this way of being a poet<\/em> was perceived as grotesque in a woman. Panaev also relates that Pavlova treated her husband rudely (as well she might have, considering that by then, Nikolai was gambling away her entire estate). Panaev, too, seems to be responsible for the glib slanders against Pavlova\u2019s verse, which followed naturally from his dislike of her personally. Once, when Timofey Granovsky began to praise her poetry, Panaev set him straight by reading a parody of Pavlova, and from then on, or so he claims, Granovsky had nothing further to do with her.<\/p>\n

Panaev\u2019s poem, like all his \u201cparodies,\u201d is actually a satire directing itself at Pavlova\u2019s person, rather than an attempt at parodistic imitations of the qualities of her verse. Another and more genuine parody of Pavlova, called \u201cMy Disillusionment,\u201d by another critic on the left, the poet Nikolay Nekrasov, bemoans the possibility that women might want to give up jelly-boiling and pickle-making for philosophy and literature. One can only regret that Nekrasov, who often expressed in his poetry a voyeuristic sympathy for \u201cfallen women\u201d (as prostitutes of the time were romantically called), was incapable of extending the same sympathy to women of his own class.<\/p>\n

Even Pavlova\u2019s literary friends wrote, if not articles and memoirs, then private letters condemning her as a woman. The Slavophiles appreciated Pavlova as a poet not only for the nationalist content of some of her verses but also for making Russian poetry known abroad through her translations. Yet when Pavlova finally took matters in hand and initiated proceedings that led to her husband\u2019s arrest after he mortgaged her property in secret, even her closest friends turned against her. She could not have foreseen that Pavlov\u2019s reputation as a liberal would bring about a search of his library, which contained some banned books; as a result of this discovery, he was jailed and sentenced to a ten-month exile in Perm. He was later pardoned by the authorities and returned to live with his wife\u2019s cousin, but their friends never forgave Pavlova.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

During the early months of 1853, Pavlova wrote nothing. She left for Petersburg, where her father died in a cholera epidemic. Trying to avoid contagion, she left without attending his burial, and a new scandal arose because of her treatment of the dead man. In May 1853, she settled in Dorpat with her son and mother. In the midst of her distress, she met a law student named Boris Utin, twenty-five years younger than she, who became the profoundest love of her life. Her long poetic silence was broken in January 1854 with a poem that celebrated their meeting and the rare relationship of equals that Pavlova needed to have with men.<\/p>\n

In February 1854, Pavlova\u2019s son, Ippolit, went back to Russia to live with his father and attend university the following year. Pavlova settled in Dresden in 1858 and remained there for the rest of her life\u2014in exile from the language in which she wrote, from the poetic tradition that she had admirably continued, and from the country and the city she loved, scorned by the prominent people she had known best, who at their best were her literary peers.<\/p>\n

Pavlova continued writing. She reminds one of George Sand, who worked eight hours a day regardless of the emotional turmoil in her life. One of Pavlova\u2019s former literary friends, Ivan Aksakov, visited her in 1860 in Dresden, where she was living on a strict budget. Aksakov chose to give a negative interpretation to what might have been a refusal to let her grim life drag her under:<\/p>\n

She, of course, was extremely happy to see me, but within ten minutes, even less, was already reading her verse to me \u2026 This is such a curious psychological subject, it should be studied. It would seem that the catastrophe which has befallen her, a true misfortune experienced by her, the separation from her son, loss of her place in society, name and wealth, her poverty, the necessity of living by her labors\u2014all this, it would seem, would strongly shake a person, leave profound traces on him \u2026 nothing of the sort, she is the same as always, has not changed at all except that she has grown older and everything that has happened to her has only served as material for her verses.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In exile, Pavlova came to view life as a challenge to survive. As she wrote to Olga Kireeva from Dresden on July 22, 1860, when alone and beset by financial difficulties, \u201cI am occupied with the contemplation of an interesting experiment; I wish to see whether everything that befalls me will strengthen me; whether I will withstand it or not.\u201d But even in exile, Pavlova, who was never closed to life, was able to form her last great literary friendship with a man who treated her not as a monster, but as an admired equal\u2014Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, the poet, playwright, and humorist. They met in Dresden in 1860, and she translated his poetry and plays into German so that they could be acclaimed outside his native country. As his letters show, she also helped him with the Russian originals. He in turn secured a pension for her from the Russian government and corresponded warmly and solicitously with her until his death in 1875. Pavlova outlived him by eighteen years and died worse than reviled\u2014she died utterly forgotten.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

To be more than charitable, we might say that Pavlova\u2019s life and art were so badly misread by her contemporaries because she was such a unique phenomenon in Russia. The eminent scholar B. Ya. Bukhshtab writes of how the first century of the new Russian poetry, from 1740\u20131840 approximately, brought forth not one notable woman author. Pavlova\u2019s only contemporary female poet of note, the Countess Evdokiia Rostopchina, was as different from Pavlova as were the cities in which they lived, St. Petersburg and Moscow. Rostopchina\u2019s poetry, aside from being stylistically less interesting than Pavlova\u2019s, reads more like a chronicle of her vastly more successful life.<\/p>\n

This more intimate, domestic sort of poetry (\u201cI am only a woman \u2026 ready to be proud of this,\u201d Rostopchina wrote in her lyric \u201cTemptation\u201d) was and is generally considered appropriate to women writers. Pavlova\u2019s own verse\u2014its feeling restrained, and lyric meditation or elegy being her preferred genre\u2014was considered by her contemporaries, as it was by the modern Russian poet Vladislav Khodasevich, as \u201cabove all not feminine.\u201d Pavlova\u2019s lyrics, such as the cycle of poems inspired by her love for Boris Utin, can hardly be termed cold or abstract, but even when her poems reflect personal emotion, the feeling is both intensified and generalized, as is true in the case of most good poetry.<\/p>\n

The publication of A Double Life<\/em> in 1848, when Pavlova was at the height of her fame as a poet and translator, was a literary event that drew the attention of all the important literary journals of Russia. One chapter of the novel had been published a year before, and the full work was eagerly anticipated. The fact that it was part prose and part poetry seemed to bother no one; the reviewers understood the purpose of this structure and praised the quality of the poetry highly. Even The Contemporary<\/em>\u2019s anonymous reviewer called Pavlova\u2019s new work \u201coriginal in form, in the highest degree remarkable in content.\u201d In one of the peculiar tributes to which women poets are subject, he stated that the poetry was so sharp and energetic that \u201cit is difficult to recognize in it the tender hand of woman.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Double Life<\/em>, a novel in ten chapters, is the story of a young girl named Cecily von Lindenborn, whom we see being trapped into a meaningless life and marriage by the people closest to her\u2014her well-meaning mother; her best friend, Olga; and Olga\u2019s mother, an experienced social manipulator. In the last chapter, Dmitry, Cecily\u2019s suitor, marries her for money. Pavlova does an excellent job of describing this kind of man of little will, who is teased by his friends into a pledge of faithlessness to his marriage even before it takes place. As one of the bachelors says, \u201cWho would want to get married if the blessed state of matrimony made it necessary to give up wine and good times?\u201d<\/p>\n

Like most of the great Russian novels of its time, this one is set in the aristocratic world. Pavlova excels in the topography of social relations: who sits near whom and who walks with whom determine whole years of a character\u2019s life. The breaking of a blossom or closing of the latch on a jeweled bracelet symbolizes a future life broken or encircled.<\/p>\n

Pavlova logically restricts her heroine to the female quarters of this world\u2014enclosed and protected in domestic interiors or carriages traveling from house to house or from house to church. In the rare moments when Cecily steps onto a balcony or rides on horseback, she experiences a short-lived sense of exhilaration and of control over fate: \u201cShe gave herself over to the joy of riding horseback, to the attractions of this living force, this half-free will that carried her off and that she was guiding.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, it is in the most secluded place, in her bedroom, that Cecily is the least constrained. Here, we see the revelations of her mind freed from its mental corset (to use Pavlova\u2019s image). Every chapter has the same structure, with some variation\u2014a day of society\u2019s vanities and cruelties followed by a night of dreams. Each chapter begins in prose and ends in verse, with the verse expressing a kind of interior monologue to reflect the double life that Cecily leads. The sections linking them are often in rhythmical prose and describe a state of drowsing, between reality and dream. There are other links as well: she dreams about people she hears about in the drawing room by day and thinks in her waking hours of what she has seen in her dreams. Finally, dreams and waking have an inverse emotional correlation; the better that Cecily\u2019s real life seems to become as her marriage approaches, the greater the anguish expressed in her poetic dreams.<\/p>\n

Pavlova, as unabashedly as any of the nineteenth-century male writers that were her contemporaries, makes clear in her fiction her own preferences and values in life. Thus, the novel\u2019s attitude toward poetry is the measure of the society of the novel. When a poet suffers and is ridiculed, society is condemned. Even Cecily dares set her creative mind free only in dreams; in her waking life, she knew \u201cthat there were even women poets, but this was always presented to her as the most pitiable, abnormal thing, as a disastrous and dangerous illness.\u201d She describes men posing as carefully as women in society (they are equal in vanity); but her men have a particular crudeness that her women are free of, and some of her women have certain attractive virtues that her men at best only seem to have\u2014\u201cthat violent female daring which is so far from manly valor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pavlova possesses a romanticism that is characteristic of her time but mixed with an ironic sense of reality. We are told repeatedly that Cecily\u2019s love for Dmitry is good even if Dmitry himself is not. Cecily\u2019s mysterious sickliness both enhances her worldly beauty and brings her closer to the other world of which she dreams. The novel begins in the spring, when Cecily dreams of love, and ends in the autumn, when she is married. The coming winter is strongly implied.<\/p>\n

The strength of this novel, as of Pavlova\u2019s view of life, is that both merge these romantic concepts into an ultimately clear realism. The countless ironic touches in A Double Life<\/em>\u2014from purely lexical ones, such as the use of the word satisfied<\/em>, to larger metaphors, like the one comparing marriage to a mother pushing her daughter out of the window onto the pavement below\u2014prevent the reader from becoming too lost in the enjoyment of the details of how rich aristocrats live. Similarly, as much as we could wish a happier ending for Cecily, Pavlova leaves her, and us, with the one weapon against life that does not destroy life: consciousness. The double awareness that this is the way things are and ought not to be, and the high quality of Pavlova\u2019s narrative and poetic style, are themselves a vivid protest against the destiny of women.<\/p>\n

And the first sentence of the first chapter (\u201c\u2009\u2018But are they rich?\u2019\u2009\u201d) is the best opening line of any Russian novel. In Russian, it takes only two words: \u201cA bogaty<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Barbara Heldt is professor emerita of Russian at the University of British Columbia. Her books include <\/em>Koz\u2019ma Prutkov: The Art of Parody (1973) and <\/em>Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (1987).<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>A Double Life<\/a>,<\/em> by Karolina Pavlova, translated by Barbara Heldt (Columbia University Press), part of the Russian Library series.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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