SOURCE: Greene, Diana. “Karolina Pavlova's ‘At the Tea Table’ and the Politics of Class and Gender.” The Russian Review 53, no. 2 (April 1994): 271-84.

[In the following essay, Greene discusses the literary qualities of Pavlova's short story, “At the Tea Table,” and asserts that it overturns the popular paradigm of the upper class woman “victimizing” her male lover. Greene maintains that the story presents women with dignity, exploring power relations and gender and class hierarchies.]

Cora Kaplan's assertion that “the doubled inscription of sexual and social difference is the most common, characteristic trope” of nineteenth-century Anglo-American fiction holds true for nineteenth-century Russian literature as well.¹ While analyses of class politics in Russian literature have been discredited by the excesses of Soviet socialist realism, such an approach to literature can have its uses.² Certainly, in nineteenth-century Russian society several factors served to polarize class relations and also to make them an important and recurring literary theme. First, class differences in Russia were very rigidly defined and maintained; secondly, in contrast to the West, there were very few middle-class women writers to offer a more complex, “decentered” class perspective; thirdly, the draconian Russian political censorship forced protests against social injustice into literature or literary criticism, where they could be camouflaged in “Aesopian” language; and, finally, the Russian intelligentsia—the writing and reading public—was a small, serf-owning, increasingly self-conscious group aware of the abyss their Europeanization opened between them and “the people.”³

Up to the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the period I wish to discuss, Russian writers widely depict love relationships in terms of the interplay between gender and class hierarchies. The heroine's subordination to the hero in terms of gender—her lesser degree of autonomy, mobility, and access to resources—is either underlined or undercut by her class position in relation to him. When the lovers come from completely different social classes the interplay of gender, social difference, and politics is especially clear.⁴

The upper-class man/lower-class woman combination appears more frequently during this period, possibly because of the predominance of aristocratic, serf-owning male writers (Karamzin, Zhukovsky, Pushkin and his pleiad, Gogol, Lermontov, Goncharov, Turgenev). Karamzin used the combination in the service of pathos and sentimentalism in his very popular and much-imitated “Poor Liza” (“Bednaia Liza,” 1790), in which an irresponsible nobleman seduces and destroys a poor and pure serf girl. The popularity of this “woman as victim” paradigm can be seen from the fact that Pushkin, who used it himself in his Rusalka, (The Undine, 1825-32), also travestied the paradigm in two of his Tales of Belkin.⁵ In other cases, the women in this combination are depicted as witches or devils victimizing the upper-class male.⁶ The hero who marries his lower-class love is variously depicted as defective or nobly doing the right thing.⁷

In the less frequent, reverse combination—rich and powerful woman/poor man—writers either ridicule the woman or make her a symbol of a hated yet envied class, themes that do not occur when the male is the upper-class partner.⁸ In both combinations the story is about the transformation of a male hero. The woman merely acts as “foil” or, in de Laurentis's terms, as obstacle or “an element of plot-space, a topos, a resistance, matrix or matter.”⁹ For example, in “Poor Liza,” its title notwithstanding, the true protagonist is the aristocratic narrator who demonstrates his capacity to empathize with a serf.

In this context, Karolina Pavlova's almost unknown story, “At the Tea Table” (“Za chainym stolom,” 1859), is unique. Pavlova depicts upper-class women with dignity, challenges narrative conventions that privilege male viewpoints, and, most unusual for her time, uses the upper-class woman/lower-class man combination to address power relations directly by making parallels between class and gender hierarchies.

“At the Tea Table,” Pavlova's only fictional work exclusively in prose, first appeared in The Russian Messenger.¹⁰ Although it is dated “September 1859, Dresden,” literary allusions and references within the story suggest that Pavlova at least conceived of it in the 1830s or 1840s.¹¹ The story has been largely ignored. Valerii Briusov reprinted it in his 1915 two-volume collection of Pavlova's works, but without discussing it either in his extensive introductory essay or in his annotations.¹²

The Soviets only reprinted the story in 1991 and then without its German epigraph and, as we will see, with confusing introductory and critical notes.¹³ Although Pavlova (1807-93) is generally considered the foremost Russian woman poet of the nineteenth century, the Soviet attitude toward her indicated a great deal of ambivalence.¹⁴ They did publish her complete poetic works twice, in 1939 and again in 1964 as part of the prestigious Biblioteka poeta series. But while these editions included both her poetry and mixed prose and poetry works (A Double Life [Dvoinaia zhizn'] and Phantasmagorias [Fantasmagorii]), they did not include her prose or letters.¹⁵ In addition, the socialist realist introductions to these editions criticized Pavlova as politically and esthetically “unprogressive,” claimed that she contributed very little to the development of poetry, and implied she was hardly worth reading. At best the editors damned her with faint praise as “not first rate but all the same somewhat noteworthy.”¹⁶ What little Soviet scholarship about Pavlova that exists appeared only after she had been rediscovered in the West.¹⁷

This ambivalence in the Soviet attitude toward Pavlova may reflect a conflict between “claiming the classics for the Soviet cause” and downplaying material that could not be construed retroactively to support the Soviet regime (Pavlova was associated with the conservative Slavophiles).¹⁸ Even in the introduction to “At the Tea Table,” which appeared at the very end of the Soviet regime, the editor mentions only one possible literary source for the work: “Soroka-vorovka” (“The Thieving Magpie,” 1848) by the canonized revolutionary Alexander Herzen. It is hard to believe that the Herzen story, which concerns a victimized serf actress, constitutes a major influence on “At the Tea Table,” given Pavlova's decidedly nonrevolutionary politics and the more complex view of gender and class issues that structures her story. Similarly, the editor's interpretation of Pavlova's story as concerning an upper-class woman's capriciousness reconciles the story with socialist realism, but as we will see, misses the point.¹⁹

In addition, despite the Soviet claim that the Revolution “resolved the woman question,” Soviet critics may have given Pavlova less than her due because of her gender. After all, Pavlova's fellow poet and translator Afanasy Fet (1820-92) expressed far more reactionary views than Pavlova, yet unlike her was the subject of several Soviet books and articles. The Soviets even considered Pavlova less important than her husband, Nikolai Pavlov, a literateur whose entire literary output consisted of six povesti (stories). In both the 1955 and 1975 Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia the articles on Pavlov were longer than those on Pavlova, who is described as “Pavlov's wife” and an “authoress” (pisatel'nitsa). Attitudes did not change under glasnost. The notes to the Soviet edition of “At the Tea Table” described Pavlova as a “poetess”—albeit one of “surprisingly varied themes and genres”—to whom several well-known male poets dedicated poems.²⁰ In addition, “At the Tea Table” was reprinted in a collection of nineteenth-century women's prose condescendingly entitled With the Insight of a Sensitive Heart … (Serdtsa chutkogo prozren'em …). It followed a similar collection called Women's Logic (Zhenskaia logika, 1989).

“At the Tea Table” consists of a frame and inner story, a device used by Pushkin in Tales of Belkin (1830), and in Russian prose throughout the 1830s and 1840s. In “At the Tea Table” the frame story takes place in an aristocratic Russian drawing room where several guests converse as they drink tea.

As the frame story opens, the discussion has turned to the position of upper-class women in society. A young man named Bulan protests against women's subordination to men and blames women's infantalizing upbringing for whatever weaknesses they have. A second guest, a countess, agrees. “One would think,” she says,

that almost every woman is brought up by her worst enemy, so strangely do they care for her. She cannot earn money like a man, and by law is virtually deprived of paternal inheritance,²¹ so they instill in her a need for luxuries and the habit of considering wealth a necessary condition for existence. She cannot propose to a man, so from childhood they frighten her with spinsterhood as a shameful disaster, make her incapable of independence, and teach her to look upon it as indecent. A frivolous choice can make her unhappy for life, so they train her to be frivolous and capricious. A momentary attraction is enough to ruin her irrevocably. Knowing this they develop coquettishness in her and the inclination to play with danger, and they repress anything which could give her a serious direction.

(p. 799)

A third guest, Aleksei Petrovich, argues that women's problems result not from their treatment in society but from their weaker nature. Women cannot overcome their bad upbringing because they are physically and morally weaker than men. The double standard exists, he says, because vice destroys women, but not men. When Bulan replies that at least the realm of feeling belongs to women, that a woman will always be touched by frankness and a generous action, Aleksei Petrovich will not even grant this. Challenged to produce an example of a woman's unfeelingness, Aleksei Petrovich recounts the inner story-within-the-story.

Princess Aline, a brilliant and articulate member of Moscow high society, is reputed to be heartless. Two men are interested in her: the middle-class painter Iurii Wismer, whose attentions she avoids, and Trofim Lukich Khozrevskii, a poor fool, who is nonetheless very popular in society because of his sweetness, simplicity, humility, and charming manners. We learn that Wismer's attentions to the princess really constitute a form of harassment; he wants revenge for what he considers her unfeeling behavior toward him when they were both in Rome. In a confrontation he depicts her as having seduced and corrupted him out of pure malice: she prevented him from returning to Russia to see his dying mother, and then flirted with Wismer's best friend, instigating a duel between them. The princess tells Wismer that his is only one, highly prejudiced, side of the story. While she admits and regrets her own frivolousness and egotism, she denies Wismer's right to judge her, or to ascribe negative and untrue motives to her. Furthermore, she points out, he is responsible for his own actions. Not satisfied with this response, Wismer wants to punish the princess. He threatens her with a compromising letter he has obtained. When the princess tells Wismer she thinks him contemptible, Wismer gives her the letter and leaves. His revenge has consisted not in blackmailing her, but in goading her into losing self-control, the attribute she, as an aristocrat, most values.

Aline has been stung by Wismer's and society's judgment of her as heartless and calculating. She decides to prove that she can do something unselfish and generous. She takes as a lover the impoverished, simple, but worshipful Khozrevskii and, in an even grander gesture, decides to marry him. Just before the wedding Khozrevskii confesses to the princess that although he has pretended to be simple, he is, in fact, a brilliant but very poor man who has had to choose between his intellectual abilities and physical subsistence for himself and his mother. After many fruitless attempts to succeed on his own he had figured out that if he acted like a fool, aristocrats would enjoy feeling superior to him and support him as a hanger-on. In this way he has been able to live comfortably and provide for his mother, although he occasionally regrets his lost potential. The princess calls off the marriage, telling Khozrevskii that she cannot bring herself to be the wife of a man who dissembles so well.

We return to the tea party of the frame story where Aleksei Petrovich considers he has proven his point: not only are women morally inferior to men, but even in the realm of feeling, they will not be touched by frankness and generosity. “Do you think,” asks the countess, “that if it were reversed, if Khozrevskii were a woman and the princess a man, that the man would have acted differently?” “I don't know,” answers Aleksei Petrovich (p. 840).

In formal terms, “At the Tea Table” shares the artistry, elegance, and literary sophistication typical of all Pavlova's writing. Pavlova avoids the usual disjunction between frame and inner stories by making the two interdependent. In the frame story Aleksei Petrovich expresses prejudices against women which, as we will see, affect the way he narrates and interprets the inner story. By penetrating the inner story, the frame becomes a necessary part of its meaning.

The plot of the inner story is equally polished. As in many Pushkin works, it is tightly structured by ironically echoing events.²² For example, the actions of the princess's two suitors mirror each other: while the middle-class Wismer in Rome sacrifices his dying mother for his own pleasure, the impoverished Khozrevskii in rural Russia sacrifices his intellectual abilities to keep his mother alive. Even more central to the story's structure, the paradoxical actions of the princess and Khozrevskii mirror and neutralize each other. The princess proposes marriage to Khozrevskii in order to prove her generosity and warmth, but her use of Khozrevskii as a proof to society and herself of her “generosity” only confirms her cold-bloodedness. In a complementary manner, Khozrevskii derails the wedding by proving his intelligence, yet with his ill-considered confession to the princess shows himself to have been a fool after all.

The story's conservative literary values—its formal elegance and tight construction—stand in opposition to its radical deconstruction of social and literary conventions. In her final question, for example, the countess suggests that if the situation were reversed, a rich, powerful man would reject a worshipful, apparently simple-minded woman who indiscreetly betrayed the ability to think. Thus she challenges the conventional meaning that Aleksei Petrovich attributes to the story—that women are inferior to men—and offers her own: men and women have similar natures.

Readers, too, are obliged to question Aleksei Petrovich's interpretation of the story he narrates and wonder if his prejudices have distorted his vision. In his narration Aleksei Petrovich gratuitously makes comments hostile to women, describing “a shower, as sudden and short-lived as a woman's whim” (p. 813), and editorializing, “No one is less inclined toward equality than women. Nothing would get on ladies' nerves more quickly than moral equality with us” (p. 809). In addition, at one point Aleksei Petrovich refuses to give the princess's thoughts because, he says, he will only recount what he has been told directly by those involved. While this statement may seem to add veracity to Aleksei Petrovich's narrative, in fact it merely justifies its one-sidedness. Aleksei Petrovich freely tells us Wismer's and Khozrevskii's thoughts and feelings. Apparently he has heard their side of the story. By excluding the princess's point of view he can reduce her from the subject of her own experiences to the object of others' judgments.²³ Thus the countess's question challenges not only Aleksei Petrovich's interpretation of the story but also the way he has told it. Perhaps told from the princess's point of view the story would be very different.

Beyond the opposing interpretations of Aleksei Petrovich and the countess, however, lies a still more radical interpretation of the story. I suggest that the narrative points out that, in fact, the genders are reversed, that rich, powerful, independent women such as the princess represent an exception, that men control almost all societal resources, and that women, who can only gain financial security and social success through marriage, may well choose like Khozrevskii to renounce their useless intellectual gifts and act like admiring fools to those in power; that is, to men. I suggest, then, that Khozrevskii's story can be seen as an allegory in which Pavlova has reversed the genders of powerless and powerful, and in which she uses class politics to illuminate the more controversial issue of sexual politics.

Within the story Khozrevskii makes a similar use of allegory when he struggles to describe the experience of poverty to the wealthy princess:

I don't know how to explain to you, even a little. … Imagine that on the day of a wonderful ball which you have been looking forward to they tell you that the marvelous gown which you have ordered and which would have eclipsed those of your competitors would not be ready. Imagine that you couldn't find another in which you could go to that ball and that it was essential to you that you go. Imagine how you would ask yourself ceaselessly over and over, what shall I do? … I must resort to this suggestion as the only means to make my story partly comprehensible to you.

(p. 831)

Just as the rich princess cannot imagine the frustrating, agonizing effects of poverty on the talented Khozrevskii, so men cannot imagine the effects of social limitations on talented women's lives. Khozrevskii's story serves as an allegory to help men understand the difficulty talented women experience in society, and perhaps to make men wonder if the intellectual inferiority that they take for granted in women is not assumed for their benefit.

I do not wish to suggest that Pavlova, in using class as an allegory for gender, ignores class inequities. The self-indulgent princess takes her upper-class privilege for granted and can understand neither Wismer's middle-class resentment of it, nor Khozrevskii's vivid account of desperate, inescapable poverty. In addition, on another level Pavlova uses the characters of Khozrevskii and the princess to reveal parallels between class and gender inequities by showing that lower-class men and upper-class women suffer in very similar ways. For example, intellectual ability is shown to be a prerogative of upper-class males only. When the poor Khozrevskii and the princess, a female, try to make use of their intellectual abilities, both encounter ridicule and social stigmatization instead of the recognition they expect and desire. Khozrevskii's schoolmates mock him with the name “umnitsa” (“the clever one”) and the princess complains that intelligent women are considered monsters. Khozrevskii and the princess also complain to each other about their social powerlessness. Khozrevskii must rely on rich patrons (male and female) to help him make his way in the world, while the princess must rely on male protectors such as Khozrevskii to keep other men such as Wismer from insulting her. Ironically, neither Khozrevskii nor the princess can perceive or sympathize with the other's oppression.

Along with challenging conventional class and gender ideology, the narrative challenges the literary conventions that support such ideology. The second epigraph (I will discuss the first below) draws the reader's attention to the artificiality of fictional frames and closures. I have not been able to locate a source for this epigraph, entitled “A Madman's Mullings” (“Rassuzhdenie sumasshedshego”); it may have been written by Pavlova herself:

I would like there to be not one finished story: it's the ending that spoils everything. If you, narrator, have been able to create living people for me and to make me care about them, why on earth do you want to make it somehow essential for them to stop interesting me? Why do you want to leave me nothing for my reveries? An ended story, after all, is a garden enclosed by a stone wall which doesn't allow you to see into the distance.

(p. 797)

To avoid the enclosing stone wall, Pavlova deliberately seems to provide inconclusive endings to both the inner and frame stories. Aleksei Petrovich's narration ends with Khozrevskii's self-pitying, bitter reaction to the princess's note calling off the wedding: “Serves me right … for the first time I was stupid, I didn't hold onto the reins of reason, I expressed what was in my heart” (p. 839). We switch back to the frame story:

“And then what happened?” asked the hostess. “We're waiting for the ending.”

“I'm sorry I must leave your desire unsatisfied,” said Aleksei Petrovich. “I cannot report any kind of ending to you because neither Khozrevskii, nor Wismer, nor the princess died, and because she didn't marry either one” (pp. 839-40). The frame story itself ends equally inconclusively with the countess's question about the reversal of genders and Aleksei Petrovich's reply: “I don't know.” The story deliberately frustrates the reader's desire for resolution in a conventional ending. Instead, it forces readers to “see into the distance” beyond a death-or-marriage ending—the “destruction or territorialization of women”²⁴—that “spoils everything.” In offering another ending for women, one which is neither death nor marriage, the story challenges both literary and social conventions.²⁵

“At the Tea Table” provides a witty counterpoint to its sophisticated treatment of gender and class by citing several other texts that present the same theme more naively. The story's first epigraph, a quatrain from Heine's poem, “Sie sassen und tranken am Teetisch” (“They sat and drank at the Tea Table,” Lyrical Intermezzo, 1816-27) is particularly apt since the poem describes a literary tea and implies a cross-class love story. The quatrain can be translated as follows:

The countess said in a melancholy way:
Love is a passion!
and good-naturedly presented the cup
to the lord baron.(26)

In the Heine poem, several aristocrats at a tea table substitute good manners and decorum for true feelings. The male poet contrasts the aristocrats' inability to understand love with the warmth of his beloved, who, although not present, “could have told so prettily / of your love.” The poet's beloved apparently is absent from the tea party because she belongs to a lower social class, an inference supported by the fact that all the aristocrats are identified by rank, as well as by a long German literary tradition of upper-class male/lower-class female love relations. The Heine poem, then, not only presents the cross-class love relationship as unproblematic but also idealizes it.

The Pavlova story resembles the Heine poem formally. In both cases the cross-class love story is told on a different narrational level from the tea party: in the Heine poem as an apostrophe to the beloved, in the Pavlova story as a story within a story. In addition, the aristocratic guests at Pavlova's tea party at first discuss women's position in society with the same upper-class gentility with which Heine's aristocrats discuss love. The countess smiles at Bulan's ardor in objecting to women's subordinate position, and the hostess, like the countess of Heine's poem, offers him tea, which Bulan accepts. In contrast to the Heine poem, however, the conversation in Pavlova's story soon grows heated, and the cross-class relationship, subjected to both class and gender analysis, can hardly be described as unproblematic, much less ideal.

A second ironic allusion to a cross-class love story—George Sand's 1836 story, “Simon,”²⁷—provides the motivation for Khozrevskii's ill-considered confession to the princess. On the evening before their marriage the princess reads Sand's story aloud to Khozrevskii, a story which, Aleksei Petrovich tells us, “also ends with a somewhat eccentric wedding” (p. 829). He continues that the princess “read with inspiration, admiring that energetic figure Fiamma as if it were her own portrait.” “‘What a masterful sketch of a woman’ said the lovely bride, interrupting her reading. ‘And what a true understanding of noble, honorable love, of the respect for oneself and for another!’” (p. 829).

“Simon” is an idyll set in rural France during the Restoration of Monarchy of 1825. The virtuous and fiercely Republican peasant Simon falls in love with Fiamma, the daughter of the newly restored count. Fiamma, also a Republican, returns Simon's love despite her higher social status, and after spurring Simon on to success in the world as a lawyer, manages to overcome the resistance of her snobbish, decadent father and marries Simon.²⁸ In “Simon” all good is rewarded, all evil punished, peasants are depicted as morally superior to the aristocracy, and social status turns out to be far less important than character: “Nobility resides in the feelings of the Republican soul and not in the arteries,” we are told (p. 158).

In “At the Tea Table” Pavlova gently ridicules George Sand's idealism. The peasant, Khozrevskii, understandably gets carried away by “Simon” and by the princess's apparent approval of it. For a moment he believes that as Fiamma helps Simon redeem his life, so the princess will help him, and he confesses his abilities and his betrayal of them. Of course the princess would not dream of spending years to help Khozrevskii find and prove himself; she only wants to bask in Khozrevskii's uncritical admiration of her and in society's approval for her unselfishness in marrying him. Nor has Khozrevskii indicated that he shares Simon's willingness to make the necessary sacrifices to realize his potential.

A third ironic reference to class and gender in other literary works occurs when Khozrevskii, in commenting on the uselessness of his intelligence, compares himself with Chatskii, the disillusioned hero of Griboedov's Woe from Wit (Gore ot uma).²⁹ Khozrevskii continues that he deserves even more pity than Chatskii, who at least had enough to eat and could leave his tormentors. Khozrevskii's allusion to Woe from Wit, however, undercuts his attempt to depict himself as a suffering intelligent since he resembles the aristocratic and sympathetic Chatskii less than he does Chatskii's rival, the poor and villainous secretary, Molchalin (whose name means “silent”). The reader may wonder if Khozrevskii, who, like Molchalin, presents himself as worshipful, humble, and silent, will similarly turn out to be mercenary and unfaithful in his relations with a rich fiancee. Although Aleksei Petrovich presents Khozrevskii sympathetically, the implied parallel with Molchalin adds an ambivalent note.

How can we account for the unusual treatment of gender and class in “At the Tea Table” and also for the ambivalence with which Khozrevskii is presented? Pavlova's biography suggests some interesting parallels to the story. Certainly she could write from first-hand experience about the social power of money, the powerlessness of poverty, the effects of unequal financial and social position on relationships between men and women, the anomaly of being a rich, talented and powerful woman, and the mockery such women endured.³⁰ In 1827, when Pavlova (born Karolina Karlovna Jaenisch) was 18, the Polish national poet, Adam Mickiewicz, proposed to her but quickly lost interest when a wealthy uncle threatened to disinherit the entire Jaenisch family should the marriage take place. The incident affected Pavlova deeply. In 1836, when she was 29, the uncle died and Karolina Jaenisch suddenly found herself a wealthy heiress, and an attractive match. That year she married Nikolai Pavlov, a former serf who had become famous because of his Three Stories (1835), generally perceived as attacking serfdom. Although Pavlova won much acclaim in the following years for her writing and ran a very successful literary salon, the marriage was not a success. Pavlov, who had married Pavlova for her money, soon stopped writing, gambled with and lost large amounts of Pavlova's fortune, and established a second household with a cousin of Pavlova's by whom he had two children. In 1853, Pavlova left him in a great scandal in which all her (male) literary colleagues took her husband's side and condemned and ridiculed her. Pavlova left Russia, only returning for a few brief visits. Her next relationship, which inspired some of her greatest poetry, also crossed social lines. Boris Utin, a law student she met in Dorpat, was twenty-five years her junior. By 1859, when “At the Tea Table” appeared, Pavlova had settled in Dresden where, because of Pavlov's enormous gambling debts and her own inexperience in managing her estate, she lived in severe poverty. The politics of gender, class, and money played a large part in Pavlova's life, both during the 1840s, to which much of “At the Tea Table” refers, and in 1859, when the story was published.

It may be that “At the Tea Table” allowed Pavlova to express some of her mixed feelings about her own cross-class relationship with her husband: her empathy with the frustrated ambition of gifted lower-class men; her anger and disappointment at her husband's choice to stop writing seriously once they were married and he could live off her fortune; her feeling of betrayal at having been married for her money; a wish that she, like the princess, had perceived her husband's ability to dissemble and had called off the wedding. The story makes several references to Pavlov's Three Stories. Pavlova, who rarely wrote short stories, may have been thinking of and even polemicizing with her husband's work.

“At the Tea Table” echoes several of Pavlov's plot devices. Wismer, like the protagonist of Pavlov's “The Auction” (“Auktsion”) is consumed with the desire to revenge himself on a former lover and adopts the idea of following her everywhere, a plan Pavlov's character only considers. Khozrevskii, like the talented serf in Pavlov's “The Name-Day Party” (“Imenini”), is denigrated by aristocratic whim.

“At the Tea Table” also addresses a recurrent motif in Pavlov's Three Stories: poor or weak men hurt, bested or destroyed by women. In “The Name-Day Party” a serf falls in love with an aristocrat who rejects him when she finds out his position in society. In “The Auction” a rejected lover obsessed with revenging himself on his former mistress realizes with frustration that he cannot affect her for more than a few minutes. In “Iatagan” a mother's gift to her son brings about his execution. In two of the Three Stories women are held responsible for duels in which men are injured or killed. “At the Tea Table,” however, refuses men the status of victim. The princess will not take responsibility for Wismer's decision to duel with his friend. Although Aleksei Petrovich depicts both Wismer and Khozrevskii as the princess's innocent victims, Wismer's innocence turns out to be based on not taking responsibility for his actions, and Khozrevskii's on deceit. On the other hand, Pavlova shows the princess's powerlessness in relation to men: she cannot use her mind, as men of her class can, without being labeled a monster, and must endure Wismer's insults because she cannot physically defend herself. Women, not men, the story insists, are the victims.

Despite the many references in “At the Tea Table” to the 1830s and 1840s, the publication of this story in 1859 in Russkii vestnik seems very appropriate. The death of Nicholas I in 1855 had ended his seven-year “censorship terror,” a reaction to the European Revolutions of 1848. In the more liberal atmosphere that followed the ascension of Alexander II, it once again became possible to discuss publicly such social ills as serfdom and women's position in society, or, as it became known, “the woman question.”³¹

In the year preceding the publication of “At the Tea Table” Russkii vestnik took a lively part in such discussions of class and gender issues. It published a translation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, ran editorials that urged freeing the serfs, and opened its pages to all opinions about “the serf question.” On “the woman question” it published a long and withering refutation by Evgeniia Tur (Elizaveta Vasil'evna Salhias de Tournemir) of L'amour, Jules Michelet's very influential work of romantic misogyny, and ran articles supporting improved education for women.³² Pavlova's story, with its parallels between class and gender privilege, would have been a provocative addition to the debate.

Over one hundred years later “At the Tea Table” remains a compelling work for its literary qualities: Pavlova's elegant use of point of view, narrational levels, symmetrical plotting, and literary allusion. In addition, Pavlova's sophisticated analysis of the parallels (and contrasts) between class and gender oppression make the story seem startlingly modern.³³

The story also raises the question, Who has the power to name or to interpret texts? In “At the Tea Table” both Wismer and Aleksei Petrovich narrate stories concerning women to women and interpret them as demonstrating women's inadequacies. Wismer melodramatically interprets the princess's relationship with him in Rome as the victimization of an innocent and powerless male by an overwhelming and evil female intent on defiling and destroying his sacred love for his mother and his friend. Similarly, Aleksei Petrovich interprets the princess's rejection of Khozrevskii as proof that women are different from and inferior to men. But while both the countess in the frame story and the princess in the inner story express a strong interest in the “facts” (fakty) of these narratives, both, as we have seen, reject the man's negative interpretation and suggest one of their own (pp. 300, 321). That is, they insist on their right to an alternative interpretation of the stories, and by extension, an alternative view of women. On another level, the narration's critique and rejection of the marriage-or-death ending raises the question of whether literary conventions allow women's stories to be told.

Such thinking is very close to the work of Berger, Foucault and others who suggest that the interpretation that prevails in a society—be it of history, literary history, madness or literary works—depends on which individual or group has the social power or privilege to enforce its world view.³⁴ Feminist and minority-studies scholars who challenge canonical views of history and literature are quite aware that they are engaged in reinterpreting oppressive cultural narratives.³⁵ Pavlova's story reminds us that, despite changes in terminology, the terms of the debate over class and gender have remained very constant.

Notes

1. Cora Kaplan, Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), 167. Besides Kaplan, I have used the following works to develop my ideas about what Nancy Armstrong calls the relationship between “politics and poetics,” and about the intersection of class and gender in Russian literature: Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Violence of Representation (London: Routledge, 1989); Judith Newton, Women, Power and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction 1778-1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981); Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt, Feminist Criticism and Social Change (New York: Methuen, 1985); Judith Newton, Mary Ryan, Judith Walkowitz, Sex and Class in Women's History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982); and Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987).

2. See Rufus Mathewson, Jr., The Positive Hero in Russian Literature (Stanford, 1975).

3. See Gregory Freeze, “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History,” American Historical Review 91 (February 1986): 11-36; Kaplan, Sea Changes, 3; Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal, Mary Zirin, A Dictionary of Russian Women Writers (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, forthcoming); and Sidney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia under Nicholas I (Cambridge, MA, 1961).

4. For the sake of clarity I have limited my examples to love relationships between Russians of different social classes. Thus I do not treat déclassé but originally upper-class characters (Aleko in Pushkin's The Gypsies), those of mixed class (Asya in Turgenev's “Asya”), and the many depictions of relationships between a Russian aristocratic male and a non-Russian minority female of the Russian Empire (Pushkin's “Prisoner of the Caucuses,” Lermontov's “Bela,” Gan's “Utballa”), all of which deserve separate study.

5. “Statsionnyi smotritel'” and “Barishnia krest'ianka” (1830). For the Russian folk sources of the seduced and abandoned woman who drowns herself (the rusalka) see Natalie Moyle [Kononenko], “Mermaids (Rusalki) and Russian Beliefs about Women,” New Studies in Russian Language and Literature, eds. Anna Lisa Crone and Catherine Chvany (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1986), 221-38.

6. For example, Lermontov's “Taman” (1840). Tolstoy's “The Devil” (“D'iavol,” 1889), although outside the period, clearly exemplifies the theme of lower-class sexually attractive woman as devil. Sander Gilman discusses the image of the “other” in nineteenth-century Germany as female and lower class (as well as Jewish, black, and mentally and physically ill) in his Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

7. Goncharov, Oblomov (1859); Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (1862).

8. Griboedov's Gore ot uma (Woe from Wit, 1826) Pavlov's “Imenini” (“The Name-Day Party,” 1833) Gogol's “Zapiski sumasshedshego” (“A Madman's Notes,” 1835).

9. Heldt, Terrible Perfection, 13; Teresa De Laurentis, Alice Doesn't (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 119.

10. Russkii vestnik 24, book 2 (December 1859): 797-840. The only other prose fictional work by Pavlova is an uncompleted manuscript entitled “Razdel” (“The Allotment”), which Munir Sendich discovered. See his “The Life and Works of Karolina Pavlova” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1968), 110-12.

11. Sendich, “Life and Works,” 106, suggests the story may have been inspired by an 1838 article in Moskovskii nabliudatel' (The Moscow Observer) about Berlin literary teas of the 1830s. References to the 1830s and 1840s in the story include mention of the “El'skiis'” salon, apparently a satirical allusion to the Elagins, whose salon Pavlova attended during the 1830s and 1840s (Sendich, “Karolina Jaenisch Pavlova and Adam Mickiewicz,” The Polish Review 14, no. 3 [1969]: 69 n. 2). For allusions to the literature of the 1840s (discussed below) and structural and thematic affinities with the svetskaia povest' (society tale), a popular genre of the 1830s and 1840s see R. V. Iezuitova, “Svetskaia povest,” Russkaia povest' XIX veka, ed. B. S. Meilakh (Leningrad, 1973), 169-99. The svetskaia povest' featured an upper-class setting, plots involving a “boudoir … ballroom, and a duel” (Louis Shein, “Short Story,” in Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. Victor Terras [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985], 411), and themes that included protests against the stifling upbringing and limited options of upper-class women (for example, Gan's “Ideal” [1837] and “Sud sveta” [1840]; and Odoevskii's “Kniazhna Mimi” [1834] and “Kniazhna Zizi” [1839]).

12. “Za chainym stolom,” Sobranie sochinenii Karoliny Pavlovoi, ed. Valerii Briusov (Moscow, 1915), 2:335-412. In this paper I cite from the Russkii vestnik edition since it appeared during Pavlova's lifetime and thus more likely reflects her preferences. In the Russkii vestnik edition, for example, the two epigraphs appear together, while in the Briusov edition the German epigraph appears on a separate page, probably a reflection of Briusov's interest in foreign literature. In addition, the Briusov edition has at least one confusing misprint, “kniaginiia” for “grafina,” on page 412. All translations are mine unless otherwise stated.

13. K. K. Pavlova, “Za chainym stolom,” in Serdtsa chutkogo prozren'em … ; Povesti i rasskazy russkikh pisatel'nits XIX v., ed. N. I. Iakushin (Moscow: Sovetskaia rossiia, 1991), 294-333.

14. See Sendich, “Karolina Pavlova: A Survey of Her Writing,” Russian Literature Triquarterly 3 (1972): 229-48, for tributes to her from Belyi, Blok, and Briusov. She has also been an important role model and influence for such women poets as Cherubina de Gabriak (Elisaveta Vasil'eva) (see “Dve veshchi v mire dlia menia vsegda byli samymi sviatymi: Stikhi i liubov',” Novyi mir, 1988, no. 12:139); Sofia Parnok, who wrote a poem to her (Heldt, Terrible, 118-19); and Tsvetaeva, who alluded to a Pavlova lyric in calling a collection Remeslo (see Simon Karlinsky, Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman and Her Poetry [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 107), as did Anna Akhmatova in her poem, “Nashe sviashchennoe remeslo,” (Sochineniia [Moscow, 1986], 1:195).

15. See Munir Sendich, “Ot Moskvy do Drezdena: Pavlova's Unpublished Memoir,” Russian Literature Journal 102 (1975): 57-78; and idem, “Two Unknown Writings of Karolina Pavlova,” Die Welt der Slaven 16 (1971): 47-60.

16. Pavel Gromov, “Vstupitel'naia stat'ia,” Karolina Pavlova: Sobranie stikhotvorenii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1964), 5, 17, 65, 71.

17. Western scholarship on Pavlova includes Munir Sendich's groundbreaking dissertation and subsequent articles on Pavlova; Barbara Heldt, “Karolina Pavlova: The Woman Poet and the Double Life,” A Double Life, trans. Barbara Heldt (Oakland, CA, 1978); and my “Karolina Pavlova's ‘Tri dushi’: The Transformation of Biography,” Proceedings of the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference (Lexington, 1984), 15-24. Recent Soviet criticism includes V. K. Zontikov, “‘Pishu ne smelo ia, ne chasto …’ (Stikhotvorenie Karoliny Pavlovoi),” Vstrechi s proshlym; sbornik materialov TsGALI (Moscow, 1982), 35-39; and E. N. Lebedev's sympathetic introduction to a 1985 selection of Pavlova's poetry, “Poznan'ia rokovaia chasha (Lirika Karoliny Pavlovoi),” in Karolina Pavlova: Stikhotvorenie (Moscow, 1985), 5-38.

18. Maurice Friedberg, Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets (New York, 1962), 83.

19. N. I. Iakushin, “‘Prichudlivo smeshalis' svet i teni’,” Serdtsa chutkogo prozren'em …, 9-10.

20. Serdtsa chutkogo prozren'em …, 552.

21. A reference to the fact that under the 1835 Svod zakonov a sister inherited 1/14 of her brother's share of immovable (real) property and 1/8 of her brother's share of movable property. See Aleksei Vasil'evich Kunitsyn, O pravakh nasledovaniia lits zhenskogo pola (Kharkov, 1844), 9; and Zhenskoe Pravo: Svod uzakonenii i postanovlenii otnosiashchikhsia do zhenskogo pola (St. Petersburg, 1873), 180-81.

22. Pushkin's creation of binary reflecting structures in “Vystrel” and Evgenii Onegin have been described by Norman Henley, “Afterword,” in Povesti pokoinogo Ivana Petrovicha Belkina (Chicago, 1965), 102; and Vladimir Nabokov, ed. and trans., Eugene Onegin (New York, 1964), 1:16-17, respectively.

23. On the significance of excluding women's (or the Other's) viewpoints in narration see Joanna Russ, “What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can't Write,” in Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon (Bowling Green, 1972), 6; and Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanich, 1983), 3-14.

24. De Laurentis, Alice Doesn't, 155. See also Rachel Blau Du Plessis, Writing beyond the Ending (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).

25. Pavlova ended her earlier mixed-genre work, A Double Life (Dvoinaia zhizn', 1848), with both marriage and implied death for the innocent heroine. “At the Tea Table” could be seen as a reworking of the material with an older and wiser heroine who saves herself by choosing not to marry.

26. This and subsequent citation translated by Helen Frink.

27. George Sand, Simon. Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1884). On Sand's tremendous influence in Russia during the 1830s and 1840s see Lesley Herrmann, “George Sand and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Quest for a Heroine” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1979); and V. I. Kondorskaia, “V. G. Belinskii o Zhorzh Sand,” Uchenye zapiski, vol. 28 (38), ed. G. G. Mel'nichenko (Iaroslavl' 1958), 141-65.

28. “Simon” also influenced the plot resolution of Pavlova's A Double Life. In both “Simon” and A Double Life a climactic scene occurs when an outsider pressures a hypocritical parent to allow a child to marry a social inferior whom the child loves. In both works the parent plays for time by claiming the child must be consulted, intending to force the child to refuse the marriage. In both the child fortuitously appears and, asked by the outsider, agrees to the marriage, forcing the parent to consent as well.

29. R. V. Iezuitova comments on the very frequent allusions to Gore ot uma in the society tales of the 1830s, which also links “Za chainym stolom” to an earlier literary era.

30. Biographical information on Pavlova is based on Heldt (“Karolina Pavlova”), Sendich, “Life and Works”; Gromov, “Vstupitel'naia stat'ia”; and B. Rapgof, Karolina Pavlova: Materialy dlia izucheniia zhizni i tvorchestva (Petrograd, 1916).

31. Richard Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia (Princeton, 1978), 29-64.

32. Khizhina Diadi Toma 13, books 1 and 2 (January 1858); Krest'ianskii vopros 14, book 1 (1858): 3-34, 128-54, and 16, book 2 (July 1858): 77-147; “Zhenshchina i liubov' po poniatiiam g. Mishle,” 21, book 1 (June 1859): 461-500; “Mysli ob uchrezhdenii otkrytykh zhenskikh shkol,” 14, book 1 (April 1858): 218-30; “O zhenskoi gimnazii v Moskve,” 21, book 2 (July 1859): 462; and “Nuzhen li u nas uchilishch dlia krest'ianskikh devits?” 22, book 1 (August 1859): 300-305.

33. I am thinking of the current debate around pluralism versus cultural literacy (Alan Bloom, Stanley Fish, E. D. Hirsch, Paul Lauter).

34. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York, 1966); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York, 1972).

35. Lillian Robinson, “Feminist Criticism: How Do We Know When We've Won?” Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Shari Benstock (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 140-49; Gerder Lerner, “Introduction,” The Female Experience (Indianapolis, 1977); Henry Louis Gates, “Introduction: ‘Tell Me, Sir, … What Is “Black” Literature?’” PMLA 105:1 (1/90): 11-22.