SOURCE: Briggs, Anthony D. “Twofold Life: A Mirror of Karolina Pavlova's Shortcomings and Achievement.” The Slavonic and East European Review 49, no. 114 (January 1971): 1-17.

[In the following essay, Briggs alleges that Pavlova was extreme in both her accomplishments and her deficiencies, which are reflected in her novel Twofold Life; her work, he says, is original but meandering, uncertain in its purpose, and contains too much of the writer's personality.]

I

Like several other poets of the mid-19th century who were connected with the theory of ‘pure art’ Karolina Pavlova (1807-93) has clung to her posthumous reputation with remarkable tenacity. She has run the accepted gauntlet. Laughed off the literary stage in her own day, she languished in near-obscurity for half a century and was rediscovered in the age of the Symbolists. Bryusov published her in two volumes in 1915 and, what is more surprising, Soviet editors have re-issued her twice in the Biblioteka Poeta series, in 1939 and 1964.¹

There is much that is distinctive about Karolina Pavlova. She was the first true woman of letters in Russia and remains the leading Russian poetess before this century, with little to fear from her nearest rivals, Mmes Rostopshchina (1811-58), Zhadovskaya (1824-83) and Khvoshchinskaya (1825-89). She had a love affair with Mickiewicz, an unhappy marriage with N. F. Pavlov and a Moscow salon which ran successfully for several years, graced by many of the prominent literary figures of the day. She was German by birth (née Karoline von Jaenisch) and not unknown to famous fellow-countrymen; Goethe is said to have spoken highly of her translating ability, the famous naturalist and traveller Humboldt to have been charmed by her poetic manner. She can claim responsibility for the adjective motyl'kovyy which is frequently applied to works of the Art for Art's Sake movement, for Saltykov-Shchedrin created that term when reviewing a collection of her works (1863) which included the poem Motylyok, a proclamation of the total freedom of art. She anticipated even the pioneer Turgenev in propagating the gospel of Russian literature abroad and did much more than he in the way of translation. A. K. Tolstoy was particularly indebted to her as a translator into German. He acknowledged his debt and she responded more than once with gratitude for his encouragement. As a writer of original verse she was free-ranging and versatile, extreme in the heights of her achievement and in the markedness of her shortcomings. What these are, and how they are mirrored in her work called Dvoynaya zhizn' (Twofold Life), this article will seek to determine.

Her weaknesses as an authoress strike one first of all. She is easy to dismiss as a petty poet who turned out competent verses without much solid content. Her ideas are certainly few and confused; her collected work suffers from diffuseness. She bent to the will of others and tried to respond to the call of her times in a manner which twisted her talent into wrong directions. She broke a golden rule of pure art by allowing into her poetry the obvious intrusion of her own unhappy life. In summary, she was unable to dominate her own talent or to allow it to dominate her. For thirty years Pavlova lived uncomfortably with her own propensity for poetry, at times cherishing it, at times doubting that it had any value, and her break with the muse, a further thirty years before she died, was final. It was the same with everything she touched. Her early love life, her marriage, her finances, her salon, her life in Russia, all, like her art, began well, promised and achieved much, but dissolved prematurely through what seems now to have been an inborn capacity for mismanagement. There is too much in this for it to be a question of long-running bad luck; her life and her work suffered from a lack of purposeful organisation and application.

Although her poetic output was low (four or five poems a year for a quarter of a century, apart from her many translations and poems written in other languages), her subject-matter and method of treatment varied greatly. With Pavlova this range and variety is a weakness. It represents not the wide command of a poetic master, not even the search for fulfilment of a keenly felt potential, but the hopeful and haphazard directing of a poetic beam into many corners, sometimes under persuasion from other people, though almost always (to her credit) avoiding well illuminated spaces. She seems to have been sustained by the hope, vague but not entirely unjustified, that the process might either produce an occasional literary masterpiece or somehow improve an ever-saddening life. She moved through many genres without stamping her personality unforgettably upon any one of them, as did, for instance, Shcherbina on the anthological piece, Fet on the musical lyric and Grigor'yev on the gypsy song. One minor exception is the ‘story in verse’, a miniature morality piece not far removed in manner from balladry but distinctive because of its exemplary intentions. With Pavlova these stories amount to studies in monomania, warnings of what will happen if men lose their sense of proportion; probably the best of them is Rudokop in which an obsessed prospector at last sees the error of his ways, decides to reform himself but is killed in a pitfall before he can do so. Such cautionary ballads exemplify Pavlova's ability to strike an unusual, appealing note as she allows her poetic talent a free rein.

Much less of an impression is created by her long historical poems. These deserve separate mention as much for their own intrinsic weakness as for the serious attention accorded them by Soviet critics. P. P. Gromov's grave consideration of two of her weakest poems, Razgovor v Trianone and Razgovor v Kremle, occupying about one seventh of his introduction to the 1964 edition,² show criticism of a narrow-minded kind. To begin with, the former Razgovor (1848) was written purely in response to a contemporary demand for more meaningful content and lacks all natural poetic impulse. Gromov claims to like it and praises it, clearly for the dubious reason that it discusses the inevitability and justification of revolution. In fact as a poem it has little value, as a dramatic piece (for it is called a ‘conversation’ which hints at some interplay between characters) it has nothing to offer since Cagliostro is too dominant, and as a historical document it is without significance, presenting simply the personal theories of one man put into verse for no good reason. To the western eye the question of involvement or non-involvement in socio-historical issues cannot be a qualitative critical standpoint; for the Soviet critic they are of central importance since opting out of social commentary is artistically suicidal ‘spinelessness’. Later on, in fact, Karolina Pavlova's overall failure as a poetess is assessed in these terms:

… and, properly speaking, she is an artist on a modest scale simply because the great issues of her time scarcely dawn at all in her poetry.³

Razgovor v Kremle is considered by Gromov to be an ‘unconvincing and stillborn’⁴ work because of its neutrality. The poem certainly involves itself in socio-historical issues, and that is accepted as a good thing, but now the call is for the decisive expression of an opinion one way or the other.

The criticisms of these two poems appear to miss the target. Pavlova's undoubted failure in this genre is due to her being involuntarily drawn into a sphere for which her talents did not suit her. Historical poems are difficult to succeed in and Pavlova, as Gromov reminds us more than once, was persuaded by her critics into this alien realm in the fulfilment of an unavoidable duty. Poets can rarely be intimidated into creativity with happy artistic results, least of all those of the school of ‘pure art’. Certainly her political attitude is mixed to the point of ambiguity; Razgovor v Kremle, for instance, is a strongly Slavophile poem which gives too much prominence to an Englishman and a Frenchman, enthusiastic devil's advocates articulate in their anti-Russian views, and then to the arch-Europeaniser, Peter the Great. The uncertainty, however, is due not to insincerity, lack of conviction or mere artistic inadequacy; it stems from a sheer lack of affinity for the genre.

The two Razgovor poems show Pavlova to have been influenced against her better judgment by the contemporary call for purposeful content. In this respect she falls short of the mulish resistance of Fet but is no worse than Polonsky who later in his career seriously infringed the unwritten Art for Art's Sake code to which he had once subscribed. A more serious shortcoming of Karolina Pavlova was to allow the unhappy trends of her own personal life to intrude into her work. The result is an unwelcome, overpainted sense of sadness, sometimes bitterness, frequently bypassing an elegiac melancholy to which no-one would object for an expression of disappointment in life which amounts to the poetess being sorry for herself. Her poetical reflections, her addressed poems, her cycle of love-lyrics are directed by a negative spirit too anxious to condemn, to regret and despair. Finally her own life as a poet is called more and more into question. As early as 1842 she had looked back on a time when poetry was once dearer than her daily bread (N. M. Yazykovu: Otvet na otvet), with the clear inference that now it knows its lesser place. Later poems illustrate an abiding lack of confidence; those which are positive in intent, (such as A. D. B[aratynsk]oy (1858) and Gr. A. K. T[olsto]mu (1862)), conveying relief at her sudden realisation that it has all been worth it, that she is a real poet, merely emphasise the doubts which preceded them and which must quickly return.

Such are Karolina Pavlova's main weaknesses; they should not blind the reader to her real qualities. Her several Art for Art's Sake doctrinal poems (of which the famous Motylyok is the worst, because of its heavy-handed second stanza which explains the metaphor quite superfluously) are a clear and powerful assertion of the independence of poetry, though in a sense they speak the language of the enemy, for they themselves claim that poems should not involve themselves with argument and theory. Certain of the stories in verse (notably Rudokop and Monakh) contain both an interesting story originally combined with a human message; again, though, they are at least semi-didactic and in theory contravene the Art for Art's Sake code. There are fine individual achievements in several other fields. One need only list some of Pavlova's most successful lyrics; ‘My stranno soshlis' …’ (1854), Port Marsel'sky (1861), Vezde i vsegda (1846), Ogon' (1841) Duma (‘Ne raz sebya ya voproshayu strogo …’; 1844), A. D. Baratynskoy (1858), Prazdnik Rima (1855), ‘Nebo bleshchet biryuzoyu’ (1840), Plovets (1855), Serenada (1851) and ‘Eto bylo blestyashcheye more …’ (1856-61) are some examples of first-rate poems taken from different periods of her life and written on widely different subjects and in different ways. If her muse is the least consistent of all the Art for Art's Sake poets, it is also the least repetitive, the most diverse in failure and achievement.

Karolina Pavlova served Russian literature in many ways but her major artistic contribution is right in the middle of the Art for Art's Sake tradition. It lies in the direction of poetic form. Pavlova is an accomplished craftsman and in this respect her talent is unquestionable and consistent. She has been credited with helping to free Russian rhyme from its earlier rigidity⁵ but it would not do to exaggerate her role as a rhymster. Her reputation is based mainly on two poems, the deliberately capricious Vezde i vsegda and the longer Razgovor v Kremle. In both poems all she does is to rhyme Russian words with foreign ones (mir/Shekspir, Kolumb/rumb, shchedro/Saavedra, etc.). This is strikingly unusual but it is still fairly accurate rhyming. There is no question of her introducing merely assonant rhyming and only one poem uses dactylic rhymes (K. S. A[ksakovu] (1847)). Karolina Pavlova should not be classed amongst the revolutionary or virtuoso rhymsters of Russian literature; elsewhere, but for a number of compound but quite regular rhymes, her rhyming is soundly inconspicuous.

More important are her rhythmic innovations which concern primarily various combinations of binary and ternary metres, either within one line forming logaoeds, or simply within the poem as a whole. Here Pavlova made a genuine and important contribution to Russian verse; who can say that Fet's rhythmic innovations were not influenced by a knowledge of her work gained from his visits to her salon?

Above all Pavlova had a true sense of form, that instinct for matching the shape and sound of a poem to what was being said. There are a few lapses. For example, two of her Meditations seem to have an inappropriate metrical basis; ‘Grustno veter veyet …’ has a short line, trochaic trimeter, built into three octaves which rhyme AAAbCCCb and ‘Khot' ustalaya doshla ya …’ alternates iambic tetrameters with dimeters—splendid metres, both of them, but perhaps unsuited to the elegiac mood. Similarly, in Kadril', where each of the four stories is told in a different metre for the sake of variety, two of them seem to have chosen an inappropriate one; Lisa's is in trochaic pentameter, a difficult line to sustain for a long story, whereas Ol'ga's is in iambic hexameter, too long, too stately for a story about a silly young girl's faux pas at her first ball. Similarly again, it is perhaps a waste of good anapaests to use them in a straightforward poetic counter-attack on those people who had turned on her and her mother, accusing them of disrespect when they left Russia on the eve of her father's funeral to avoid the risk of catching the cholera from which he had died. These are examples of Pavlova failing to create a perfect match between form and meaning. The fact that they are quoted at all indicates that she is a most capable craftsman for they are minor infringements, not all of them entirely beyond dispute. It is a tribute to her skill that one may point out these trivialities as (for her) egregious examples of mismatching.

Nowhere is her devotion to artistic form more apparent than in that strange study in metempsychosis, Dvoynaya zhizn'; in no other work does she make such a great effort to unite the form with the narrative. There are hidden effects in that work which give it a precarious unity despite its central dichotomy and its diffuseness on the prose side. In fact, some of the verse, especially in the earlier chapters, rises to the summit of Karolina Pavlova's achievement. The work is highly typical of Pavlova's own manner and that of the Art for Art's Sake school as a whole. It could so easily have been a singularly great piece of literature but disqualifies itself from the highest rank by Karolina Pavlova's besetting shortcomings; a desire to do too much in one short space instead of aiming at a clear goal, and an inability to master and manipulate her own subject-matter. In this case that means arguing through several contemporary issues as well as telling some kind of fictional story, and all this within the impossible task of uniting heaven and earth in a mystical vision. It was an attempt at reconciling several polarities in a single artistic sweep which nearly succeeded in literary terms. It was Pavlova's superb and ingenious craftsmanship that brought her so close to success in so uniquely difficult a task.

II

Twofold Life is an unusual piece of literature, broad-ranging in its purposes, extreme in its strengths and weaknesses, striking in its originality, unorthodox in its use of literary devices. The duality mentioned in the title, inherited from Byron's poem The Dream, runs throughout, determining everything to the work's credit and detriment. In the first place it affects the very definition of the piece which is neither a novel nor a poem (though Pavlova called it a poema) but an attractive hybrid embracing prose and poetry totally dissimilar in content and yet uniquely conjoined.

The prose part of Dvoynaya zhizn' is concerned with the problems of 19th-century Russian society, and especially the position occupied by women; the poetry exists on an entirely separate plane of experience, expressing the mystical longings and adventures of a young girl enjoyed during trances which occur when she is asleep. Each chapter begins in prose, advances the earthbound story-line and ends with Cecily, the heroine, retiring, falling asleep and moving by means of a trance into the higher dimension. After the final chapter, however, it is the authoress herself who takes over the verse commentary to round off her poema and bid farewell.

The story of the prose section is fairly simple, not without interest, even a modicum of tension, certainly not without humour and criticism of contemporary mores. Cecily von Lindenborn has a scheming mother Vera Vladimirovna; her friend and rival, Ol'ga Valitskaya has a mother, Natal'ya Afanas'yevna, who is equally scheming and more resourceful. The Valitskayas, senior and junior, set their caps at Prince Victor, a wealthy new arrival, as a good potential husband for Ol'ga. Cecily's mother would like him for her own daughter though the girl herself falls in love with Dmitry, his impecunious friend. It is Ol'ga's mother who is the prime mover. She discovers Cecily's love, apparently returned by Dmitry, and uses it to ensnare Mme von Lindenborn. Her ruse is ingenious, if balanced on an unbelievable knife-edge. She persuades Prince Victor's grand, aristocratic mother to approach Mme von Lindenborn and speak of the mutual love of her daughter and a certain young person. Naturally assuming the latter to be Prince Victor himself, Vera Vladimirovna makes a grand show of blessing their union, so that she is unable to back down when made aware that Dmitry was the man referred to. So the marriage goes ahead. Finally, Mme Valitskaya's schemes come to nothing when the Prince leaves town without marrying anyone. The story leaves Cecily and Dmitry on the threshold of their marriage.

There is thus plenty of action, though most of it consists in the to-and-fro movements of the plotters and the youngsters as they earnestly pursue the tangled ends of enjoying themselves, manoeuvring themselves into positions of strategic advantage and impressing everyone with their wealth and good taste.

One of the novel's aims appears to be the depiction of high society in colours so vivid as to be almost satirical. The remoteness of the other 98٪ of the Russian people is referred to several times; they stand and watch the comedy of these demi-gods open-mouthed, incredulous amidst their own poverty and rightly regarded as ‘inhabitants of another world’.⁶ There is tacit criticism of the aristocracy also for its over-Westernisation; fashions, governesses, literary opinions, even modern vocabulary (with expressions like mezalians) were assumed and discarded according to standards established in the capitals of Western Europe, not in Russia.

The remoteness of the idle rich from the Russian people and the Russian soil is, however, only a peripheral issue. On its prose side this novel deals primarily with the question of women. All its main protagonists are female, two mothers, two daughters, gossipy friends, subservient domestics. Cecily's father is referred to briefly, but only in passing and to make it clear how much he was under his wife's control; the two male heroes are not literary figures at all, but pasteboard creations moved on and off stage according to the tiresome needs of the plot which called for the presence of two potential husbands-to-be. Without a doubt Karolina Pavlova is unsubtle enough here to overstate, or mis-state her case. Since no men are involved in determining Cecily's destiny, the battle seems like one between the generations, almost a pre-Turgenevan Mothers and Daughters, whereas the authoress is clearly meant to be arguing against the subjugation of the female by the male. Her main argument is that Cecily's life has been moulded, shaped, coloured and polished for her so completely that she is as incapable of as she is debarred from determining her own interests when she comes to a major decision. She was so used to being presented with everything but the truth that she did not know how even to consider the question of whether she really loved Dmitry. She assumed she did. Young women, according to Pavlova,⁷ were like trees in the park at Versailles, clipped and trimmed into columns, vases, spheres, pyramids, any shape at all, just as long as it did not resemble the one which nature had intended. This is probably her main complaint; she was worried that women were married off in a daze, against their will, for reasons of money or prestige, but she was more worried that a girl's upbringing was so unnatural that on the rare occasions when she did have freedom of choice she was still unequipped to do herself justice.

These are the sundry targets on the prose side; to entertain by means of a mildly dramatic intrigue, to criticise the aristocracy for their senseless, expensive and unRussian pursuits and to instruct society in the ways of bringing up young girls, or at least to show how they should not be raised and disposed of. The aims are not clearly spelled out, they are intertwined to a confusing degree, so that it is difficult to know what exactly the authoress is about. What is not in doubt, however, is that the novel has some critical intent. There is too little in the story for it to stand alone spread over ten chapters; there is too much obvious criticism for the novel to claim exclusively artistic intentions.

Parallel with the drama set in the real world is another, entirely separate one, which operates on a mystical plane. At the end of Chapter 1 the spirit of the sleeping Cecily moves into a new consciousness, perceives a tall, strong figure and proceeds through silent space towards him. He kisses her bowed head. From then on they meet regularly in the astral clime and become spiritually united. It is his task to express the accepted doctrine of all mystics, that the lower world of the senses is contemptibly limited and limiting, vain, deceitful and insubstantial compared with the ultimate mystical reality. The dialogue is sometimes curiously down-to-earth. One sympathises with the difficulty of the mystical bridegroom in persuading Cecily of his superiority, but in Chapter 6 his impatience and insistence have a mundane ring:

Ty dumоj timnоy, nimоy
Miny tam isish оdnоgо;
V miny ty viruiss dusоy,
Miny ty lybiss, ni igо.(8)

By Chapter 7 Cecily, whose affairs on earth are beginning to turn out well, shows her first real resistance to her mystic lover. She asks for release; he points emphatically to the emptiness of her life below. Chapter 8 shows them together with the stalemate still unresolved. Suddenly in Chapter 9 the heavenly lover renounces his claim inexplicably and frees Cecily to live out her earthly life in the normal way. He does this solemnly and without grace, seeming as petulant at his own loss as he is downhearted at her greater one; his words verge on the vengeful:

Taк idi z pо prigоvоru,
Tоlsко virоy silsna,
Ni nadiyss na оpоru,
Bizzasitna i оdna.(9)

Little wonder that the first and last lines of that quatrain actually penetrate Cecily's consciousness next day when she is awake, like a song which, as she says, she cannot remember hearing sung.

Such is the end of their relationship until, one assumes, Cecily has lived out her sad earthly life. It was a vague but passionate union, begun in medias res, with no sense of development or progression, with a sudden climax and unexplained resolution. The tension was strong but brief in duration and surprising in its outcome. The conclusion is rationally insupportable. On the plane of mystic love experience is supposedly so heightened that there can be no place for reasoned argument against it. And yet Cecily manages to persuade herself and her partner that, for unspecified reasons, it will be better for her to return to the shackled existence which involves a love-affair she only half believes in and will surely end short of lasting rapture.

However, to tell the story in this way is less than fair. There is a whispering stillness and beauty in the mystical scenes, for the verse in which they are written is most accomplished, and to approach them with the heavy hand of literalness is to destroy without reflection or good reason. This is a key word, reason. These experiences are as antirational as the utterances of the Underground Man, but are recorded in a gentler and more feminine way. Femininity is another key word; the mystic scenes are passive, sensuous and feminine, appropriately the lines of a poetess included in a feminist work. Femininity is the one force which unites the prose and the poetry; the former deals with the treatment of a young girl's body and mind, the latter with her spirit.

From the architectural point of view Karolina Pavlova has achieved here one of her greatest successes. Twofold Life, whatever its main purpose, political, social, sexual or mystical, was conceived and assembled with originality, aptness and even ingenuity.

First and foremost, the union of prose and poetry in one work was an inspired idea in itself, splendidly suited to the ambivalence of the subject matter. In essence it derives from the German writer Novalis but is realised by Pavlova in a more meaningful manner. The prose is simply laid out. Here are the approximate numbers of words per chapter, in hundreds: 14, 15, 15, 15, 18, 21, 30, 18, 15, 6. This is a straightforward and sensible progression begun by four chapters of roughly equal length; then follows another group of four longer chapters of which the middle two are longest of all. The penultimate chapter returns to the length of the first four and a final short one briefly rounds off the sequence. This uncomplicated architectural system is based upon equiponderant units except when it comes to building to the climax of the prose story (chapters 6 and 7) and in the light tailpiece.

In contrast, the poetry is as complicated as this is simple; its keynotes are variety and unusualness. There is no reflection of the climax in the number of lines per chapter: 48, 64, 92, 102, 84, 64, 56, 64, 72, 40. One is struck by the variety of line-lengths and stanza-forms used, in the work as a whole and also within each chapter. There are admittedly no ternary metres (a surprising fact when one considers the potential they possess for conjuring effects of a musical, ethereal nature), but iambs are used in lines of two, four, five and six feet, trochees in lines of four and five feet and additionally there are two unusual lines in Chapters 3 and 4. The latter begins, strangely enough, with seventeen lines in the bylina style, with three stresses freely distributed and a dactylic clausula. The sudden and unrepeated intrusion of these lines has no easy explanation. Perhaps Pavlova was fresh from reading the re-worked byliny of Lermontov, whom she greatly admired. Possibly she was seeking metrical variety for its own sake, though if this be true it is hard to understand why she used no orthodox ternary metres elsewhere in Dvoynaya zhizn'. The incident outlined in this miniature concerns unhappy love. The poem is spoken by a girl who has bought a horse for her beloved so that he may go off to war; the steed has returned without him and she believes he may have gone off with another woman. For what it is worth, this little story aptly prepares the way for the subsequent bleak reflections upon the deceitfulness of love. Conceivably the bylina form, with its long lineage, is used to suggest that this state of affairs (that is, love being unreliable, especially for the woman), is a fact long established by history. Whatever the reason for the intrusion, variational or emphatic, and however winsome the little story itself, these bylina lines jar in the middle of this work. Furthermore the normal association of this style with heroic deeds of history (as subject matter) and with the common people (as narrators) make the intrusive lines all the more out of place in Dvoynaya zhizn', which is above all about an unheroic person, a weak woman, and one remote from the ordinary peasantry.

The unorthodox line used in Chapter 3¹⁰ is more unusual still. It uses a strange form which one might describe as semi-logaoedic. A genuine logaoedic line consists of the regular combination of binary and ternary feet. These lines satisfy that definition, as follows:

Riкa nisitsy, i, sipca, lsitsy …

that is an iamb-plus-amphibrach combination which is repeated -′-′- -′-′-).

These alternate with ordinary iambic dimeters with a masculine ending:

V riкi struy …                                    (-′-′).

There is little reason to question this alternation of logaoeds and iambic dimeters with the lines read as they stand. Unfortunately, Karolina Pavlova has introduced into the logaoeds a feature which militates against their logaoedic nature, that of leonine internal rhyme, in which the end-rhyme repeats the closing syllables of the first hemistich. This happens in all eighteen logaoeds of Chapter 3 and more noticeably still, in four of the last five stanzas of this type the two logaoedic lines rhyme together normally, giving a total of four feminine rhymes per stanza (dalyoko, toka, shiroko, upryoka, etc.). The effect of the internal rhyme is to emphasise the caesura and all but break the line into two independent halves each claiming metrical autonomy. If this is accepted, there are no logaoeds, but merely two iambic dimeters with feminine endings. In other words the stanza might be construed as a sestet of dimeters rhyming AAbCCb (and later AAbAAb), thus:

Riкa nisitsy,
I, sipca, lsitsy
V riкi struy.
Nisity mimо
Niutоmimо
S riкоj ladsy.

It would thus be less interesting. More than that, it would be less appropriate; a long poem written in short lines impels the reader along at a faster rate and is more suited to a turbulent subject than a tranquil scene (see Fet's poem Vodopad). Here the atmosphere is gentle and nearly static; there is a vague floating motion as the persona lies back and looks at the stars. There can be no doubt that Karolina Pavlova was right in using the existing typographical layout which slows down the movement of the stanza and adds an air of mystery through the unusual nature of the odd lines. Whether these may actually be counted as logaoeds is a matter for debate. If only the poetess had left even one of them devoid of its internal rhyme, indeed if only she had left all of them without it, there would have been a real gain.

This chapter shows her metrical virtuosity near its best. The three sections containing ‘logaoedic’ quatrains are separated, first by two conjoined quatrains of iambic tetrameter, then by four of trochaic tetrameter. The section ends with a reversion to iambic tetrameters for eight unseparated quatrains in what amounts incidentally to one of the purest poetic statements of the Art for Art's Sake creed.

The three groups of ‘logaoedic’ quatrains are teasingly similar and yet subtly varied in their repetition of words, half-lines and rhymes within and between stanzas. The whole section is a high point in Dvoynaya zhizn', an example of Karolina Pavlova's well developed capacity for poetic originality and variation. Like much of the Art for Art's Sake poetry, what is being said is vague but uncannily beautiful, all too easily satirised yet inimitable by anyone but another poet of acute sensitivity, almost worthless when weighed in practical terms but possessing an unquestioned charm and a self-proclaiming right to existence. This small group of poems typifies the right claimed by Art for Art's Sake poets, the right to dream and indulge in flights of fancy, to listen to pleasant sounds and re-conjure them in verse, and, above all, to soar above the immediate cares of normal life. As the poetess says (referring to poets):

Oni idut srids pоtrysinij,
Brоsay v mir svоj grоmкij stik;
Im pesns vaznij lydsкik strimlinij,
Im sny nuznij darоv zimnyk.(11)

Having touched upon Pavlova's readiness, in the construction of Twofold Life, to treat ambivalent subject matter, her taste for originality and talent for variety and innovation, the question that remains unsolved is the one which seems, from the evidence, to have concerned the authoress actively before or during the composition of the work: how to manage the transitions from prose to poetry and back again without creating a sudden wrench into a new direction which could even appear humorous. Is there a subtle method of handling the logistics of this prose-poetry situation which will make the transitions appear natural? The method used later in Doctor Zhivago, that of placing all the poems at the end instead of incorporating them into the text, is out of the question here because of the disparate nature of the two stories.

The answer which Karolina Pavlova discovered to this problem may well escape the casual reader throughout; certainly the transitional device used is unlikely to attract anyone's attention before Chapter 3. There, at the end of the prose section, as Cecily falls asleep, appear the first glimmering clues, hidden in the following disjointed impressions:

… ii кaк budtо кacap cilnок … i nis daliко … i tоcnо birig gdi-gdi milsкait,—luna vzоsla …¹²

This is followed by the logaoedic stanza already discussed. The curious thing is that the unusual rhythm of that stanza seems to be anticipated by the immediately preceding prose which is built up of six iambic dimeters, two with masculine, four with feminine endings: (-′-′—′-′-′-′—′-′—′-′—′-′). They have no special grouping and no rhymes (though the word dalyoko is incidentally picked up in a later stanza and used as a rhyme). Thus the phenomenon of an anticipatory rhythmic piece of prose seems to be half realised. In order to avoid reading anything into the text one is impelled to consider also the points of transition in other chapters. Such a study is richly rewarded.

In three chapters, 4, 7 and 10 (the last one, significantly, having no trance at the end), there is no apparent evidence of any anticipatory rhythmic pattern. In a further one, chapter 6, there is some suggestion of such a pattern. The poetry begins with iambic dimeters which alternate dactylic with masculine endings; the most one may claim is that the closing prose words contain a number of iambic dimeters, some with dactylic, some with masculine endings:

‘… sоzvucsy dalsnyi, pоlupicalsnyi …,’ ‘slivaliss strannyi …,’ ‘v slоva tainstvinnyk …,’ ‘vо zvuкi cudnyi …,’ ‘v Egо prizyv, v Egо privit.’¹³

The scheme is not perfect for it is irregular and is interrupted by anomalous monometers such as besed and zhelannyye.

Let it be frankly admitted that if chapters 3 and 6 were to be considered alone the phenomenon would scarcely justify separate identification. It is in chapters 1, 2, 5, 8 and 9 that a pattern of regularly rhythmic prose indubitably anticipates the opening lines of verse and thereby lends credence to accepting the pattern's existence in chapters 3 and 6. Chapters 2 and 9 behave in a similar way. The verse sections begin respectively with iambic pentameters and tetrameters, both alternating feminine with masculine rhymes; the prose text in either case ends in a distinct iambic couplet of the relevant number of feet, the first line having a feminine ending, the second a masculine, thus:

Chapter 2.

Ona spusкalass tikо-tikо-tikо—
I vdrug pо clinam prоbizala prоzs.(14)

Chapter 9.

Krugоm vsi glukо … ni pоra li? …
Ona оdna … cimu zi byts?(15)

(Here and in the ensuing examples the prose lines have been set out in verse to make the point clear.)

Chapter 1 is a little different. The verse begins with four quatrains of iambic pentameter and continues with eight more in iambic tetrameter, all of them unseparated.

In anticipation the text ends with the following quatrain, made up of three tetrameters and one pentameter (line 3):

Tо prоpadal pirid glazami;
Smyкala ik uzi drimоta …
Nо vsi vоprоs v dusi ni zasypal …
Kaк etо bylо? … кtо? … i gdi? …(16)

Chapter 8 improves on this in several ways. Firstly, the metre anticipated is trochaic pentameter, which is less usual and more difficult to disguise in prose; secondly there are five such lines at the end of the prose section, the last four correctly alternating feminine with masculine endings, and thirdly the poetic word chrez is used to begin line 3 instead of the full cherez (in Dvoynaya zhizn' both forms are to be found elsewhere in prose passages but it seems significant that the poetic form is used here to begin a trochaic line). The five lines are:

I vnizapnym vzryvоm, izdaliкa,
Criz prоstоr pоlit prоmcalsy burnyj,
i virsiny sоnnyi diriv
V timnоti mgnоvinnо zasumili,
i оpyts umоlкli, cuts dysa …(17)

The most striking example, however, is in Chapter 5, in which the transitional pattern is so nearly perfect that it not only alternates feminine with masculine endings but actually rhymes the masculine ones. Anticipating quatrains in iambic hexameter, the prose section ends:

Nо ctо-tо izdali svirкalо i svitlilо …
I bylо mnоgо liц i mnоgо tam оgnij …
I mizdu tim v tini, tainstvinnо zavitnоj,
Egо cuts vnytnyj vzdоk pоviyl vnоvs nad nij …(18)

There can be no doubt now that this is an actual constructional device. In half the chapters (1, 2, 5, 8 and 9) the metrical lines discovered in the prose are irrefutably sound, with no anomalous feet or endings or stresses. Clearly the same device is employed, though not without variations, in chapters 3 and 6. Only in three chapters is there no such pattern at all; one is the final one, by which time there has ceased to be a trance introduced at the end of the prose; another is chapter 4 which begins its verse section in any case with tonic lines. Only chapter 8 may be said to lack the device without any good reason.

The constructional artifice thus disclosed is employed by Karolina Pavlova in an appropriate and original manner and yet with restraint enough to provide effective camouflage. It is largely responsible for the fact that the two disparate stories blend with such ease at the end of the prose sections. The movement back down to earth again is easily handled by ending the chapter and beginning the next one, after a suitable pause, with the more workaday prose. Pavlova evidently felt the need to facilitate the recurrent and potentially awkward movement up into the mystical dimension; having sensed the necessity, she dealt with it in a way which does credit to her artistry.

Of all the influences on Karolina Pavlova that of the early German Romantic Novalis (F. L. von Hardenberg, 1772-1801) seems to have been strongest. His search for infinite beauty led to a mysticism which appealed to Pavlova; he too was a poet who in his search for the highest form of spiritual union could not resist poeticising prose. His Heinrich von Ofterdingen is interrupted by several poems and songs, in a variety of metrical and stanzaic forms. There is, however, no evidence of the device of anticipatory poetic rhythms in his prose. This does seem to have been an original idea of Karolina Pavlova. It is incidentally one to which she returned at least once, more than a decade later, in Fantasmagorii. In this short work of four sections the second one lapses into verse after one paragraph assisted by an anticipatory rhythmic pattern (the last words in prose and the first ones in verse falling into iambic pentameters).¹⁹ This seems to be an isolated recurrence; it might even be coincidence. Such anticipatory patterns were created for a specific purpose, and one that was successfully carried through, the unification of disparate entities in Twofold Life.

It is difficult to pass judgment on this novel or poema, whatever it should be termed. It lacks much, notably unity of purpose. It suffers, on the poetical side, from an abstruseness, improbability and an attitude of womanly wishful-thinking, all perhaps inherited from Novalis. There is none of the certainty of its own mystical truth which, for example, the poetry of St John of the Cross enjoys; everything is based upon a voluntary suspension of disbelief which amounts more nearly to a pleasant dream than to a genuine transcendental experience.

As in Pavlova's work as a whole, the faults are obvious enough. What qualities compensate for them are those of the Art for Art's Sake writers at their least pragmatic; a sense of insouciance, a feeling for and love of beauty, and most of all a high respect and talent for artistic form made manifest in scrupulous attention to construction, timing, proportion and sense of occasion.

Thus the poetic novel Twofold Life contains a distillation of Karolina Pavlova's talent, combining its good and bad features, This talent has nothing to do with her involvement in the class struggle or sense of historical progress towards revolution. Both Twofold Life and her art as a whole suffer from diffuseness and uncertainty of purpose and the intrusion of too much of the authoress' own personality; they show her to be wandering somewhat aimlessly yet near to the threshold of great new artistic experiences. These are the shortcomings; if she could have overcome them she might have been a major literary figure of 19th-century Russia. On the other hand, there is much to admire in her work including that most elusive of literary gifts, originality.

The one invariable factor which makes her work unique is its wholehearted femininity. Enigmatic diffuseness, frailty of purpose, emotional involvement with one's own personality, the propensity to infuriate, the love of beauty and its cultivation, all these are traits which have been equated, rightly or wrongly, with the fair sex. They are nevertheless qualities which Russian literature has tended to play down whilst busy creating a noble line of determined women with enough spiritual strength to overcome their inborn sentimentality. Pushkin's Tat'yana, Chernyshevsky's Vera, Turgenev's Natalya and Yelena and all their literary girl-cousins were created by men. Twofold Life stands quite apart in its portrayal of the less decisive side of woman; its every aspect tends towards this, the character of the authoress, the content and manner of the work and its achievement as a piece of literature.

Notes

1. Karolina Pavlova, Polnoye sobraniye stikhotvoreniy; vstupitel'naya stat'ya P. P. Gromova, podgotovka teksta i primechaniya N. M. Gaydyonkova; Biblioteka poeta, bol'shaya seriye, M-L. 1964, hereinafter referred to as Poln. sob. stikh.

2. Poln. sob. stikh., pp. 5-71, especially pp. 39-42 and 48-52.

3. Ibid., p. 67.

4. Ibid., p. 50.

5. V. Zhirmunsky, Rifma; yeyo istoriya i teoriya, Petrograd, 1923, p. 101, refers to her, along with Fet, Grigor'yev and A. K. Tolstoy as introducing approximate rhymes.

6. K. Pavlova, op. cit., p. 290.

7. Ibid., p. 260.

8. Ibid., p. 276.

9. Ibid., p. 303.

10. Ibid., p. 249.

11. Ibid., p. 251.

12. Ibid., p. 249.

13. Ibid., p. 275.

14. Ibid., p. 242.

15. Ibid., p. 301.

16. Ibid., p. 236.

17. Ibid., p. 294.

18. Ibid., p. 266.

19. Ibid., p. 376.