[In the following essay, Fusso argues that in Pavlova's narrative poem Quadrille, she offers a feminine critique of Russian Romanticism by presenting post-Romantic heroines with inner lives that are represented in vivid detail.]

Does a writer's gender matter? Literary criticism, especially Western literary criticism, has in the last twenty-five years answered yes, devoting much thought and study to the question of the specific, distinctive character of writing by women. Writers, on the other hand, are often heard to answer no, and interviews with women who are writers often include some version of the sentence “I am not a woman writer, I am a writer.”¹ It is not clear how Karolina Pavlova would have answered the question, because although she was deeply concerned with the psychology and problems of women, her literary models were all men, and she explicitly placed herself in a poetic fraternity that included Iazykov, Baratynskïj, and Pushkin, among others.² The latter circumstance was of course dictated by the situation of Russian literature in the mid-nineteenth century; there were no major female literary models for the young Pavlova to emulate. But although the rules of the Russian literary world often forced Pavlova to strive toward genderlessness or even toward maleness, the rules of the Russian language, in which participles and adjectives reveal the gender of the speaker, ensured that Pavlova's femaleness would become a literary fact within her poetic works. Even her major exercise in prose, A Twofold Life (Dvojnaia zhizn', 1848), includes a poetic epilogue that reveals, independent of all extratextual evidence, that the author of the entire work, the bitingly satiric prose as well as the dream lyrics, has been a woman.

The Russian literary world of the 1840s, in which Pavlova came of age as a writer, was a world of parody and epigonism, as dying Russian Romanticism either writhed in comic contortions or stiffened into moribund cliché.³ The literary fact of Pavlova's gender enabled her to keep the Romantic hero alive a bit past his generally accepted date of death: in many of her poems, the feminine gender of the lyric speaker lends new meaning and depth, based on the position of women and especially women writers in Russian society, to the poet's alienation and separation from the crowd. When in 1854 Pavlova writes, “Mnogo v zhizni ia vstrêtila zla, / mnogo chuvstv ia istratila darom, / mnogo zhertv nevpopad prinesla” (I [feminine] have met much evil in life, / I have wasted many feelings in vain, / I have made many inopportune sacrifices), the lines breathe not just of Romantic disillusion but of sociological realism.⁴

Pavlova's Quadrille (Kadril', written between 1843 and 1851 but not published in its entirety until 1859) acknowledges the death of Romanticism at the outset, rejecting the exotic landscape of Byron and Chateaubriand for a domestic scene in Moscow:⁵

Prоsli vооbrazinsy cary;
Davnо ni vоzmusayth sna
Ni аndaluzsкiy gitary,
Ni grоkоtansi Niagary,
Ni glavh аlspijsкikh bylizna.
Privyкla кh sкrоmnоj y кartiny,
Kh uidininnоmu trudu,
I vzоramh vidh lybimyj nyny—
Dity visilоi vh sadu.

(310)

The charms of imagination have passed;
My dreams have long ceased to be agitated
By Andalusian guitars,
Or the roar of Niagara,
Or the whiteness of the Alpine peaks.
I have grown used to a modest scene,
To solitary labor,
And my favorite view today—
Is a cheerful child in the garden.

The work itself, however, is cast in the quintessential Russian Romantic genre, the poèma (narrative poem), and dedicated to the master of that genre, Evgenïj Baratynskïj. As in her lyric, in The Quadrille Pavlova uses femaleness to reinvigorate a seemingly lifeless literary mode.⁶ For while Lermontov and others had already permitted narrator, hero, and implied reader to ironize Romantic myths, one figure had been left out of the joke: the Romantic heroine, who was allowed only to adore and be destroyed by the Byronic hero, not to see through him.⁷The Quadrille is a coda to the Romantic poèma, a work whose raison d'être is to offer a feminine perspective on the death of Russian Romanticism.

The structure of The Quadrille represents a striking innovation in the genre of the Romantic poèma as canonized by Pushkin, Baratynskïj, and Lermontov: the lone male hero is replaced by a collective of four women. Iurij Mann has astutely observed that the Romantic poèma incorporates the mood, style, and fabula of the elegy while shifting the artistic subject from ia (I) to on (he).⁸ In The Quadrille Pavlova moves this progression one step further, from on to onê (they, feminine). Moreover, the four heroines are just past the crucial marriage age without having died or attained perfect happiness, as the standard Romantic heroine must. Like the lyric speaker in most of Pavlova's poems, the heroines look not forward but backward, and are obsessed not with romantic love and the prospect of marriage, but with the moral assessment of their lives and the society they live in. In this regard The Quadrille is more original than A Twofold Life, which maintains the convention of ending the heroine's story at the moment of marriage. Judgment is passed on her life not by herself at a more mature age, but by the author and the mysterious male mentor who appears in her dreams.⁹

The word “quadrille” appears not only in the title but also near the beginning of the work, when the heroines Nadine, Ol'ga, and Liza have gathered at the home of the countess Polina before a ball: “I iazychkam svoim dal voliu / ocharovatel'nyj kadril'” (And the enchanting quadrille / Set free their little tongues; 309). The metaphor of the quadrille, a dance performed to music that alternates time signatures of 2/4 and 6/8, is subtly carried out in Pavlova's alternation of meters from iambic pentameter to trochaic pentameter to iambic hexameter against a background of iambic tetrameter.¹⁰ One aspect of the metaphor, however, seems at first glance not to work: the word “quadrille” actually implies four couples, four women plus four men, while Pavlova's “enchanting quadrille” includes only the female half of the set. The men do appear in the stories each heroine relates about her own past. In each case, however, some version of the standard Romantic hero is shown to disintegrate, leaving a woman bereft of her dreams; the male component of each pair has vanished into thin air. As one heroine puts it, “S nim vdvoem ia shla uzh, kak odna” (I walked together with him as if I were alone; 335).

In each of the first two stories, Nadine's and Liza's, the hero rejects the heroine in favor of money. On the eve of her arranged marriage to a fat, bald landowner, Nadine is confronted by a young, handsome robber who wishes to steal the diamond necklace her fiancé has given her.¹¹ In an impassioned speech Nadine begs him not to take the necklace, which she had planned to return to her betrothed in exchange for her freedom: “V tom larchikê ne tol'ko blesk bogatstva, / V nem budushchnost', nadezhda, zhizn' moia!” (That little case holds not only the gleam of riches, / It holds my future, my hopes, my life! 323). The reader of Romantic literature expects the dashing robber not only to spare the necklace but to spirit off the beautiful Nadine in its place. But this “razbojnik bez chuvstva i bez takta” (robber without feeling or tact; 324) takes the necklace and flees without a word, and Nadine has to settle for a mundane marriage in which she is, to the reader's surprise and perhaps dismay, moderately happy.

Liza's story echoes that of her namesake in Pushkin's “Queen of Spades”: she is an exploited and downtrodden companion to a capricious old lady. This Liza, however, is rumored to be the heiress to her aunt's fabulous fortune. A neighbor's son, Aleksêj, comes from Moscow and produces the expected result: “Luch liubvi blesnul mnê blagodatno, / … Gimn mechty sred' vnêshnej, vialoj prozy” (The ray of love shone blissfully on me, / … The hymn of dreams amidst outer, faded prose; 328). Liza is deprived of a dramatic denouement: the aunt does not disinherit her, as the reader half expects, nor is the fortune a fabulous one. It consists of the prosaic sum of fifty-seven thousand rubles. Like Nadine's robber, Aleksêj definitively leaves the world of Romanticism and enters the world of capitalism and realism when he rejects Liza and ends up with a somewhat richer wife in Odessa. Thus the first two narratives in The Quadrille bring two Romantic stereotypes into the gritty sphere of economic realism: Karl Moor becomes a common burglar, and Poor Liza becomes Not-Rich-Enough Liza.

The last two stories, those of Ol'ga and the countess, deflate the Romantic hero in subtler and more original ways. Here it is the Romantic hero's rhetoric, not his behavior, that is exposed. Ol'ga's story is a deceptively simple anecdote that calls into question the entire concept of Romantic love at first sight. At her first ball the naive boarding-school girl is passionately courted by a man whose character is utterly unknown to her but who has all he needs to recommend him, a suitable appearance: “Byl skhoden s Ánglïjskoj kartinkoj iz kipseka / On i osankoiu i pasmurnym licom” (He looked like a picture from an English keepsake book / Both in his bearing and in his gloomy face; 344). The young man, “tak pokhozh na Ánglïjskago lorda” (so like an English lord; 347), who apparently has already been struck by Ol'ga's beauty in a previous encounter on the street, pours out his feelings to her in a speech that might be found in any conventional Romantic poèma:

Vash tysith sкrytnay, dusivnay bоrsba
I razuma, i silh lisinnagо raba!
Da, tajnu tyzкuy vamh оbhyvly y prymо:
Nu da, y vash lybly; zacymh? ni znay samh;
Lybly vash gоristnо, bizumnо i uprymо,
I, vоpriкi vsimu, prinadlizu y vamh.

(344, 345)

You are amused by the secret spiritual struggle
Of a slave deprived of reason and strength!
Yes, I will reveal to you a grave secret:
Yes, I love you; why? I myself do not know;
I love you sorrowfully, madly, and stubbornly,
And despite everything, I belong to you.

Ol'ga's reaction to this speech is conditioned by the man's appearance: “Vostorzhennyj poryv byl tak emu k licu, / Gustye volosy lezhali tak krasivo / Vdol' blêdnykh shchek ego!” (This enraptured outburst was so becoming to him, / His thick hair lay so beautifully / Alongside his pale cheeks! 346).

It is significant that Ol'ga's suitor resembles “a picture from an English keepsake book.” Anne K. Mellor, in a study of women's role in English Romanticism, discusses such annual illustrated gift books as “early versions of the modern coffee-table book” that “systematically constructed through word and picture the hegemonic ideal of feminine beauty. … In steel engravings of exceptionally high quality, they promoted an image of the ideal woman as specular, as the object rather than the owner of the gaze.”¹² Characteristically, Pavlova chooses to focus on the sociologically anomalous case: here masculine, not feminine, beauty is objectified, as Ol'ga's gaze reduces the value of her suitor to the two-dimensionality of an engraved illustration.

Contrary to the rules of propriety but in full accordance with the rules of the poèma, Ol'ga allows the stranger to ask for her hand at the end of their first dance. When she finally bothers to make inquiries about her suitor, she finds that he is a madman who is known for asking every young lady he meets to marry him. Here Pavlova ingeniously lays bare the metaphor “I love you madly” and in doing so offers a critique of Romantic love as a whole. Ol'ga's encounter with the madman is a compressed parody of Vêra's whirlwind romance with Eleckoj in Baratynskïj's Gypsy, but Pavlova mercilessly exposes the insanity of passion ignited by a glance.¹³ In Pavlova's universe it is no longer a virtue to say “I love you; why? I myself do not know” (345). Behind such irrationality lies not headstrong passion but the chaos of true madness.

The countess's story completes the process of destroying the Romantic hero in the eyes of the Romantic heroine. The countess reluctantly tells the tale of how she caused the death of her beloved cousin Vadim in a duel through her flirtation with a dashing Guards officer. The officer is a hero in the mold of Lermontov's Pechorin. Like Pechorin, he uses the threat of his own death in battle as a seduction technique:

Я ydu ranо, na razsvyty;
Я оtpravlyyss na Kavкazh:
Umru vh bоy ils lazarity.
Nо dajti mny, mоly y vash,
iyi upitssy sladкimh ydоmh,
Otradnymh slоvоmh, milymh vzglydоmh
Vh pоslydnij nasladitssy razh!

(363)

I am leaving early, at dawn;
I am setting off for the Caucasus:
I will die in battle or in a field hospital.
But allow me, I beg you,
To get drunk on the sweet poison one more time,
To take pleasure for the last time
In a consoling word, a dear glance!(14)

The countess agrees to meet the officer at dawn, but the power of his rhetoric, which worked so well for Pechorin over the course of an entire novel, does not survive even this brief rendezvous:

Mny snоva gоvоrits оnh stalh
O smirti оth Cirкissкоj puli,
Kоtоrоj оnh pоdstavith gruds;
I оba, zakоtyvh vzdоknuts,
Uкradкоj my sligкa zyvnuli.

(367)

He again began to talk to me
Of death from a Circassian bullet
To which he would expose his breast;
And both of us, wishing to sigh,
Yawned furtively instead.

In her depiction of this “bal'nykh zal geroj” (hero of the ballrooms; 359), Pavlova uses another text by Lermontov, the poem “Ne vêr' sebê” (“Don't Believe Yourself,” 1839). Lermontov's poem is a sarcastic address by the “crowd” to the lyric poet, urging him to stop trying to market his “obedient melancholy” to a society that has silently borne worse suffering than he has:

Ni vyrs, ni vyrs siby, mictatils mоlоdоj,
                    Kaкh yzvy, bоjsy vdоknоvinsy …
Onо—tyzilyj bridh dusi tvоij bоlsnоj,
                    Ils plynnоj mysli razdrazinsi.
Don't believe, don't believe yourself, young dreamer,
                    Fear inspiration like the plague …
It is the oppressive delirium of your sick soul
                    Or the irritation of captive thought.(15)

Pavlova evokes this poem through a number of verbal echoes, beginning with the “bred dushi” (delirium of the soul):¹⁶ “I nachal bred dushi miatezhnoj … / On izlagat' krasnorêchivo” (And he began to eloquently expound … / The delirium of his rebellious soul; 367). In Lermontov's poem the jaded audience to the soul's delirium is the crowd; in Pavlova's poèma it is the once sighing, now yawning Romantic heroine, a wised-up Princess Mary. The countess's final verdict on the officer vividly evokes the end of Lermontov's poem:

… Mny svоj vzdоrh
Zdyss nish, кaкh cоpоrnyj aкtirh,
Girоj salоnnyj. Vh sкladnоj ryci,
Bоltalh оnh zdyss mny naizusts
Prо nirazgadannuy grusts,
I prо lybоvs, i gibils vh syci,
Sh trudоmh liss, vh prоdоlzinsi dny,
Svоj zarh pоddylsnyj sоkrany.

(369)

… Here the salon hero
Talked his nonsense to me
Like a prim actor. In a well-shaped speech,
He chattered lines learned by heart
About enigmatic sadness,
And love, and death in combat,
And he only had trouble keeping his counterfeit ardor alive
For the course of a single day.

The metaphor of the actor is taken from Lermontov:

Pоvyrs: dly nikh smysоnh tvоj plach i tvоj uкоrh,
                    Sh svоimh napyvоmh zaucënnymh,
Kaкh razrumyninnyj tragicisкij aкtirh,
                    Makaysij micоmh кartоnnymh.

(33)

Make no mistake: your laments and reproaches,
                    Those tunes learned by heart, are as ludicrous to them
As a rouged-up tragic actor,
                    Waving a cardboard sword.

Lermontov's “mech kartonnyj” (cardboard sword) is present in Pavlova's text both through its metonymic association with the actor and its near-rhyme with “geroj salonnyj” (salon hero). In the first story of the poèma, Nadine dreams of “nezhdannyj gost', Ispanskïj caballero, / pod myshkoj mech, na golovê sombrero” (An unexpected guest, a Spanish caballero, / With a sword under his arm and a sombrero on his head; 322). By the last story, the sword has turned to cardboard; Romantic rhetoric is dead.

In The Quadrille, Pavlova successfully demolishes Romantic stereotypes, but she also provides a new literary model in their place: the model of a female character capable of reasoning and moral reflection. Especially in the countess's story, Pavlova offers the rudiments of a heroine who is an independent moral agent, who escapes the virgin-whore dichotomy that so stubbornly determines the nature of female characters in Russian literature both before and after The Quadrille.¹⁷ The countess's coming to maturity is played out in relation to her cousin Vadim, a strong, morally influential, but ultimately oppressive male figure comparable to the dream mentor in A Twofold Life. The countess shrewdly locates the moral dilemma of women in the “beztolkovost' zhenskoj roli— / smês' svoevol'ia i nevoli” (senselessness of woman's role— / A mixture of caprice [svoevol'e, literally “self-will”] and bondage [nevolia, literally “lack of will”]; 366). When the only alternatives are a discipline imposed from outside (nevolia) or an irrational rebellion against that discipline (svoevol'e), there is no latitude for individual moral judgment and responsibility. In fact we see both Nadine and the countess defining their freedom purely in opposition to the constraints that have been imposed on them; their freedom has only negative content, as the opposite of what authority figures want them to do (321, 365-66).¹⁸ If the “salon hero” represents an opportunity to express the countess's svoevol'e, Vadim is the living embodiment of her nevolia. Appropriately enough, her self-will causes the death of her moral enslaver, as Vadim dies defending her honor against the slander of a German count.

Just as the Guards officer is associated with the poetic world of Lermontov, Vadim emerges from the world of Pushkin: “Byl i Onêgin on, i Lenskïj” (He was both Onêgin and Lenskïj; 358); “Khrania vse tot zhe vid surovyj, / Sidêl kak kamennyj on gost'” (With ever the same stern expression, / He sat like the Stone Guest; 355).¹⁹ Within the text of The Quadrille, both Vadim (in the countess's story) and Pushkin (in the author's prologue) appear as prizraki (phantoms), stern judges from beyond the grave.

Vadim:

I zakоtylоss vh ztоth cash
I upriкaysij, i sladкоj,
I nizabvinnyj prizraкh svоj,
Kоts кaкh-nibuds, pоluuкradкоj,
Izh tyni vyzvats grоbоvоj.

(353)

Stоylh оnh, blydnyj prizraкh grоba,
Mirtviцh grоzysij i nymоj.

(370)

And at that time she wanted
To call out of the darkness of the grave
Her unforgettable phantom,
Reproachful and sweet,
He stood, pale phantom of the grave,
A threatening and mute corpse.

Pushkin:

Zacymh, кacay gоlоvоy,
Taкh strоgо na miny smоtry,
Zacymh stоiss piridо mnоy,
Prizráкh Pyvцa-bоgatyry?
Vsi strasinh ty pyvцоvh druziny,
Kaкh rati mavrоvh mirtvyj Sidh.

(310)

Why, shaking your head,
Looking at me so sternly,
Why do you stand before me,
O phantom of the Bard-bogatyr [legendary giant-knight]?
You are ever terrifying to the troop of bards,
Like the dead Cid to the host of Moors.

Significantly, Vadim's story is cast in the meter that Pavlova acknowledges to be Pushkin's property, iambic tetrameter. The scenario of Vadim's duel is reminiscent of the one in which Pushkin died: after receiving a fatal wound in defense of a frivolous but beloved woman's honor, Vadim waves off the witnesses in order to take aim at his foreign adversary before collapsing.

Vadim's duel differs in one important particular from that of Pushkin and d'Anthès, and from that of Onêgin and Lenskïj, and in fact from virtually all famous Russian duels, both historical and fictional: Vadim's duel is witnessed by the woman who has ostensibly caused it. The countess's dawn rendezvous with the officer has placed her in a garden pavilion from which she secretly observes the primal scene of Russian literature, the all-male ritual of single combat:

Vh окnо y, slоvnо prоtivh vоli,
Glydyla, i оth ryzкоj bоli
Drоzayay szimalass gruds;
Glydyla y, ni vh silakh vzglyda
Spustits sh bizvystnagо оbryda,
Ni vh silakh trоnutssy, dоknuts.

(369)

As if against my will I looked through the window,
And from sharp pain
My trembling breast contracted;
I looked, powerless to remove
My gaze from the unknown rite,
Powerless to move or breathe.

Women are almost always the ostensible pretext for duels, but are always kept in ignorance of their own role in them. Thus in Eugene Onegin it is Onêgin, not Ol'ga, who struggles with guilt over Lenskïj's death. It is society, not Pushkin's wife, that is excoriated in Lermontov's poem on Pushkin's death, “Smert' Poèta” (“Death of a Poet,” 1837). By witnessing Vadim's duel, the countess becomes conscious of her own complicity in it, assumes responsibility for it as an independent moral agent, and finally escapes the sterile oscillation between nevolia and svoevol'e.²⁰

The urge Pavlova displays in The Quadrille toward dismantling Romantic myths and depicting a new type of rational, reflective, experienced female character is essentially the urge of a writer of prose. Pavlova was forced to emigrate from Russia in the 1850s and was effectively excluded from participation in Russian literary life thereafter; if she had stayed, she might have made the thinking female character her contribution to the development of Russian prose. The Quadrille is a late example of the Romantic poèma, but it could also be read as an early example of the psychological novel, with special emphasis on the psychology of women.

In the apostrophe to Pushkin in the author's prologue to The Quadrille, Pavlova seems to acknowledge that by choosing the form of the poèma and by making iambic tetrameter its basic meter she has limited herself to a role defined by her male predecessor:

Uzili dumh mоikh оbmany
Uvlics dirznuth mоj dytsкij stikh
Vh zavytnyj mirh tvоij Tatsyny,
Vh mirh svytlykh оbrazоvh tvоikh,
Gdy оblacalh mictu-цariцu
Ty vh lucizarnyj di[b.thetav][b.thetas]irambh
I кlalh ij vh gоrduy disniцu,
Kaкh zvucnyj mich, svоj mоcnyj ymbh?
Uvy! gdy tоth, vh оtcizny цylоj,
Ktо bh mоgh, кaкh ty nipоbydimh,
Vladyts tipirs, vh nadizdy smylоj,
Tvоimh оruzsimh zоlоtymh?
Srazinnyj smirtiy nizdannоj,
Dоspykh ty cudnyj vzylh sh sоbоj,
Kaкh vh starinu bulats svоj brannyj
Vh svоy grоbniцu bralh girоj.

(310)

Is it possible that the illusions of my thoughts
Dare to carry off my childish verse
Into the cherished world of your Tat'iana,
Into the world of your bright images,
Where you clothed your empress-dream
In a radiant dithyramb
And placed in her proud right hand,
Like a ringing sword, your powerful iamb?
Alas! Where is the person in the whole fatherland
Who can, invincible like you,
Now wield, in bold hope,
Your golden weapon?
Struck down by unexpected death,
You took your marvelous armor with you,
Just as the hero of old
Took his martial steel with him into the grave.

Pavlova deftly exploits the paronomasia of mech (sword, masculine) and mechta (dream, fantasy, feminine) to create a metaphor of feminine imagination dependent on a masculine prosodic weapon. The vision of the feminine mechta armed with the masculine mech is similar to one of the favorite metaphors of the women in The Quadrille, the familiar image of the woman warrior whose battlefield is society:

… my, rysass udalо
Na rоls оpasnuy svоy,
Dоlzny, кaкh ryцari vh bоy,
Ni pоdnimats sh liцa zabrala,
Ni dats izh ruкh upasts коpsy

(350)

… having daringly decided
To take on our dangerous role,
We must, like knights in battle,
Not lift the visor from our faces,
Not let the lance fall from our hands

Both Pavlova and her characters choose as their somewhat ironic ideal the masculine role of warrior, encased in armor and wielding sword or lance.²¹

The “ringing sword” of Pushkin's “powerful iamb” is a more durable weapon than the cardboard sword of Romantic rhetoric. But for all its ironic brilliance, The Quadrille has about it the sense of a dead end; it is an unmistakably epigonic work. The impasse reached by Pavlova in this last of the last of the Romantic poèmas is reflected in a remarkable passage near the beginning of the work, in Nadine's story. Clearly alluding to Eugene Onegin, Nadine scoffs at the idea that it is harmful for young girls to read novels and that it is safer for them to stick to their embroidery. Nadine herself had no books to read, but her own untutored imagination possessed an innate power equal to that of any book:

Nо dumay, ctо niкaкоi ctinsi,
Ctо niкaкоj by plaminnyj pоeth
Ni mоgh vо mny razvits vооbrazinsi
Taкh, кaкh оnо, vh tisi tykh ynykh lyth,
Vh umy bizh dyla vоzrastay sкrytnо,
Svоbоdnо rasцvylо i samоbytnо,
Glukikh pustyns rоsкоsnо-diкij цvyth.
Vy znaiti, pокuda nasi palsцy
Pо кisiy sкоlszyth ili taфty,—
Kaкh pagubnо-blagоpriytny pylsцy
Sirdicnymh snamh i mоlоdоj micty!

(314-15)

But I think that no kind of reading,
That no ardent poet
Could have developed my imagination
The way that it, in the stillness of those young years,
Growing secretly in an idle mind,
Freely and originally blossomed,
The luxurious wild flower of the deep wilderness.
You all know, while our fingers
Glide over muslin or taffeta,—
How fatally propitious is the embroidery frame
To heartfelt dreams and young fancies [mechta]!

Only someone who has spent long hours doing embroidery can appreciate the aptness of Pavlova's psychological insight here: with hands engaged and mind free, the seamstress often finds herself (or himself) at the furthest edge of fantasy without being aware of any mental effort to get there. In the context of a Romantic conception of creativity that places a higher value on supposedly free invention than on imitation of models, Nadine's fantasies are very different from the fantasies of Tat'iana in Eugene Onegin, the product not of an empty mind in which imagination can grow “freely and originally,” but of a mind filled with prefabricated plots gleaned from her reading. Pavlova takes the idea one step further, which oddly turns out to be a step backward:

Mny niznaкоmh bylh i Manфridh, i Lara,
Nо mny фantaziy, pоeth nymоj,
Ikh sоzdala; i vsydu pridо mnоj
Svirкalh srids grizh dusivnagо ugara
Dvukh mracnykh glazh vzоrh grоznyj, nо rоdnоj.

(315-16)

I knew nothing of Manfred or Lara,
But fantasy, that mute poet,
Created them for me; and everywhere before me
There gleamed amid the dreams of my soul's ecstasy
The threatening but dear gaze of two gloomy eyes.

This passage makes a grandiose claim for the feminine imagination: a young girl raised in the provinces who has read no books has created the heroes of Byron all on her own, in her own “idle mind.”²² Nadine's mind has not needed fertilization by Byron's books in order to give birth to Manfred and Lara. The sad aspect of the passage is that the products of her imagination, although free of outside influence, are identical to the products of Byron's imagination. This outcome undercuts the assertion that her imagination grew “freely and originally.” (What it says about Byron's originality is another question.) Nadine is doomed, just like Tat'iana, to people her fantasies with heroes invented by Romantic writers, even though she has not read them.

There is a similar tension between imaginative freedom and enslavement in Pavlova's conception of The Quadrille. The critique of Russian Romanticism that Pavlova offers in this poèma is the work of a writer who is groping toward the new techniques of psychological realism. The character of the countess—the embryo of a post-Romantic heroine—to this day awaits her full development in Russian prose, which has remained untouched by Pavlova's experiments. So why have these bold innovations remained unnoticed and unexploited by writers and readers? Perhaps because they are hidden in a poèma, a form that belonged to the 1820s, died in the 1830s, and was not ready to rise again until the first decades of the twentieth century.

As the above discussion may indicate, I cannot agree with Barbara Heldt that The Quadrille contains “life stories of disillusionment, guilt and helplessness,” or that “for Pavlova it is a given that women are not agents of their own destiny.” Also off the mark, I believe, is the labeling of The Quadrille by the Soviet commentator N. Kovarskij as “straightforwardly didactic.”²³ What Pavlova seems to be working toward in The Quadrille is closer to the rationalism that Anne Mellor identifies as the hallmark of English women's writing in the Romantic period, especially Jane Austen's “novels of female education, novels in which an intelligent but ignorant girl learns to perceive the world more accurately, to understand more fully the ethical complexity of human nature and society, and to gain confidence in the wisdom of her own judgment” (53). The great male writers of the second half of the nineteenth century—Tolstoj, Dostoevskïj, Turgenev—created many complex, psychologically profound female characters. But even the most interesting of them, such as Anna Karenina, Nastas'ia Filippovna, and Anna Odincova, are described from without, not from within. When we think of Levin we find ourselves inside his thoughts, sharing his moral and philosophical struggles. When we think of Anna we see a gleaming portrait of a woman with white shoulders and black ringlets, but we have little sense of her as an independent, reasoning moral agent. Readers who long for a more vivid, detailed representation of the inner life of female characters in nineteenth-century Russian prose may be forgiven for thinking that gender does matter, and that Russian literature's loss of Pavlova was impoverishment indeed.

Notes

1. See, for example, a recent interview with Dubravka Ugrešić: “The ideals feminism aspired to—the right to be different, female identity—in cultural practice were transformed into vulgar sex-labeling. … In literary criticism, for example, whereas before I was treated as a writer, now (because literary critics learn quickly) I am treated as a ‘women's’ writer; whereas before my writing was placed in a wider cultural context, now I am placed only in the context of my female colleagues' literature” (Priscilla Meyer, “Scholarship and Art: Interview with Dubravka Ugrešić:,” Cross Currents, no. 12 [1993], 199).

2. For a discussion of Pavlova's relationship with her male contemporaries, see Barbara Heldt, “Karolina Pavlova: The Woman Poet and the Double Life,” introduction to her translation of Karolina Pavlova, A Double Life, 2nd ed. (Oakland, Calif.: Barbary Coast Books, 1986), i-xxii. See also her discussion of Pavlova's poetry in Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 111-15.

3. For the purposes of this discussion, when I use the term “Romanticism” I am referring mainly to the Byronic or Lermontovian type of Romanticism, with its familiar hero, whom Sarah Pratt has called “the personification of alienation, seething emotion, and bitter wit” (Russian Metaphysical Romanticism: The Poetry of Tiutchev and Boratynskii [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1984], 217). Catriona Kelly briefly discusses Pavlova's position within Russian Romanticism in its waning days in her History of Russian Women's Writing, 1820-1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 98.

4. Karolina Pavlova, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenij, ed. N. M. Gajdenkov, Biblioteka poèta, Bol'shaia seriia, 2nd ed. (Moscow-Leningrad: Sovetskij pisatel', 1964), 170. All citations from Pavlova's works are from this edition. All translations are mine.

5. Compare Pavlova's poem of 1843 (the year in which she began writing The Quadrille), “Vchera listy izorvannago toma” (“Yesterday I found the pages of a torn-up book”): “Kto ozhivit v dushê bylyia grezy? / Kto snam moim otdast ikh prelest' vnov'? / Kto voskresit v nikh lik markiza Pozy? / Kto k prizraku mnê vozvratit liubov'?” (Who will enliven former reveries in my heart? / Who will return the charm to my dreams again? / Who will resurrect in them the face of Marquis Posa? / Who will return to me my love for a phantom? [115]).

6. See Iurij Mann's summary of critical opinion that Lermontov's Demon (1839) and Mcyri (1838-39) are the last Romantic poèmas, in his Poètika russkogo romantizma (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), 197. As one critic writes, “Before the Russian Romantic poèma yielded its place to realistic prose, it managed to flame brightly one last time before burning out. Mcyri and Demon were that last outburst of the Romantic epos” (A. N. Sokolov, quoted in Mann, Poètika russkogo romantizma, 197). Thus even at the beginning of her work on The Quadrille in 1843, Pavlova was coming very late to the genre of the poèma. Mann's discussion of the dedication as an organic part of the poèma is relevant to The Quadrille; Pavlova's dedication to Baratynskïj purposefully places her work at the end of a well-defined tradition (Mann, Poètika russkogo romantizma, 151, 157-58).

7. A major, if brief, exception is found in Tat'iana's exposure of Onêgin as a “parody” in chapter 7 of Eugene Onegin.

8. Mann, Poètika russkogo romantizma, 153. See also Mann's discussion of Baratynskïj's experiments with a female Romantic hero in Eda, 179-81.

9. Pushkin and Baratynskïj offer brief glimpses of heroines who have passed the age of marriage. Tat'iana in chapter 8 of Eugene Onegin is a married woman in whom it is hard to discern the Romantic young lady she once was. Perhaps more interesting in this context is Vêra, the heroine of Baratynskïj's Cyganka (The Gypsy Woman, 1829-31, 1842, also known as Nalozhnica [The Concubine]). After the death of her beloved, Vêra's personality is deadened: “Vêrin vzor, / Ne izmêniaia vyrazhen'ia, / ne vyrazhaet nichego. … Utrachen Vêroj molodoiu / Il' zhizni cvêt, il' cvêt dushi” (Vêra's gaze, / Without changing expression, / Expresses nothing. … Young Vêra has lost / Either the flower of her life, or the flower of her soul” [E. A. Baratynskij, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenij, 3rd ed., ed. V. M. Sergeev (Leningrad: Sovetskij pisatel', 1989), 304, 305]). Cf. Pavel Gromov, introduction to Pavlova, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenij, 1964: “Cecilia in A Twofold Life doesn't know what awaits her in the near future; the four women who tell their stories to each other in The Quadrille have already crossed that decisive threshold—marriage—and the first bitter realization of the discord and disharmony of woman's lot is already behind them” (44). As Barbara Heldt has pointed out in a personal communication, the society tale often involves a frame narrative in which a woman looks back on her younger self. Sources for The Quadrille might be found more readily in this genre than among Romantic poèmas. See also Kelly, History of Russian Women's Writing, 103.

10. See the entry on “quadrille” in Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1980), 15:489-91. For a discussion of the relations between dance and gender and sexual expression in Russian literature, see Stephanie Sandler, “Pleasure, Danger, and the Dance: Nineteenth-Century Variations,” in Russia—Women—Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 247-72.

11. Nadine devotes three lines to the robber's appearance: “Muzhchina strojnyj, molodoj, prekrasnyj, / Vysokïj stan, vzor derzostnyj i strastnyj, / I chernaia, gustaia boroda” (A shapely, young, handsome man, / Tall, with a daring and passionate gaze, / And a thick black beard [322]).

12. Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), 111.

13. In The Concubine, Baratynskïj gives particular prominence to both the motif of “love at first sight” engendered by a chance encounter on the street and the motif of “loving madly” (see, for example, 279, 281, 305).

14. Compare Pechorin in “Bela”: “‘Farewell. I am going away. Where am I going? How should I know! Perhaps I won't have to spend a long time chasing after death from a bullet or a saber stroke: then remember me and forgive me.’ … He had hardly touched the door before she jumped up, began to sob, and threw herself on his neck” (M. Iu. Lermontov, Sobranie sochinenij v chetyrekh tomakh [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965], 4:24).

15. M. Iu. Lermontov, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenij, 2 vols., ed. E. E. Najdich (Leningrad: Sovetskij pisatel’, 1989), 2:32-33. The poem was published in Otechestvennyia zapiski in 1839 and in Lermontov's collection of 1840.

16. Among other important words used in both Lermontov's poem and Pavlova's lines on the Guards officer are fraza (phrase, in the sense of empty rhetoric), pechal' (sadness), and ukor (reproach).

17. In his poèmas Baratynskïj is particularly fond of playing a sweet, virginal girl against a sexually experienced femme fatale, and the same duality is obsessively explored by Gogol and Dostoevskïj, among others. See Barbara Heldt's discussion of male constructions of female characters in Russian literature (Terrible Perfection, 12-62). Mann remarks that for Baratynskïj's heroine Nina in Bal (The Ball, 1825-28), immoral behavior is the equivalent of the Romantic hero's alienation and challenge to society (187); Pavlova firmly rejects for her female characters such a route to individuality (see the brief appearance of the dishonored woman in The Quadrille, 349).

18. Kelly notes that The Quadrille deals with “women's degree of responsibility for their own fates” (103).

19. See Alexander Lehrman's essay on Pavlova's poetics (in this volume) for a discussion of the Onêgin stanza embedded in the text of The Quadrille. The connections between Vadim Checkij and Chackij in Aleksandr Griboedov's Gore ot uma (Woe from Wit, 1823-24, published 1833) have yet to be explored.

20. See Susan Amert's discussion of Anna Akhmatova's response to Lenskïj's duel and Ol'ga's betrayal in her superb study In a Shattered Mirror: The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 162-64. On contemporaries (and others) who did blame Pushkin's wife for his death, see Stephanie Sandler, “Pushkin's Last Love: Natal'ya Nikolaevna in Russian Culture,” in Gender Restructuring in Russian Studies, ed. Marianne Liljeström, Eila Mantysaari, and Arja Rosenholm (Helsinki: Slavica Tamperensia, 1993), 209-20.

21. For more references in The Quadrille to the ballroom as the battleground on which women are like soldiers, see 339, 360, 361, 362, and 364. See also the passage omitted from the final version, in which the women are called “chetyre rycarskïia zhëny” (four knightly women [578]). The metaphor of the feminine subject in armor is also applied to the city of Moscow: “I budto v ledianyia laty / Odêta divnaia Moskva!” (And wondrous Moscow [fem.] / Seems to be clothed in armor made of ice! [309]). The word “quadrille” also carries out the metaphor; it originates from the Spanish cuadrilla, a small company of cavalry that fights in the form of a battle square (cuadro). An archaic meaning of “quadrille” is “one of four groups of knights engaging in a tournament” (Webster's Second International Dictionary, 1951).

22. The “mute poet” is an important theme in Pavlova's poems, notably “Est' liubimcy vdokhnovenïj” (“There are favorites of inspiration” [1839]). (See the essay by Ginger Lazarus in this volume.) Unfortunately Pavlova later spoils the bold conceit that Nadine has independently invented Romanticism without reading any books: “V tot zhe mig / Ia vspomnila moikh liubimykh knig / Svidêtel'stva, chto v mïrê zhil razboem / I ne odin prekrasnyj chelovêk” (At the same moment / I remembered the testimony of my favorite books / That more than one excellent fellow / Made his living in the world through brigandage [323]).

23. Heldt, Terrible Perfection, 112; Kovarskij, introduction to Karolina Pavlova, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenij, ed. E. Kazanovich (Leningrad: Sovetskij pisatel', 1939), xxiii.