SO FI A KH
VO
D N A K L O F Y K T L CI O F Y R T N OC U SH
CH
IN
nF
SK
db
A
n T ra
te sla
a igm
Sel
AY
ra
o yN
rov o v a
INTRODUCTION
I
n the 1860s, unbeknownst to Russian readers, at the same time as they were reading Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, Russia had its own trio of writing sisters. Like the Brontës, the Khvoshchinskaya sisters wrote under male pseudonyms, endured hardships, and lived in the provinces, in the city of Ryazan, about 120 miles southwest of Moscow.1 The Brontë sisters became well known not long after their deaths, thanks to Elizabeth Gaskell’s myth-making Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), written at the request of their family to protect their reputations. The story of the Khvoshchinskaya sisters remains to be told.2 This silence is a familiar situation for women writers, but the sisters bear some of the responsibility. Nadezhda (1822–1889), Sofia (1824–1865), and Praskovia (1828–1916) refused requests to print their names and biographies, although writers and editors knew who they were and encouraged them to write under their own names to promote their works. After Nadezhda’s death, despite having given her word to remain silent, Praskovia wrote a brief “family chronicle” for Nadezhda’s collected works in 1892, in a riposte to critics who portrayed the sisters as leading a gloomy life as they supported
xii \
Introduction
their greedy family. Praskovia explained that they used pseudonyms because provincial society was suspicious of women writers, and in the capital St. Petersburg, “there were few women writers and they hid behind pseudonyms and their labor was considered improper, not feminine.� Praskovia did not explain what did not need to be explained to readers at the time, namely that these were important considerations for the Khvoshchinskaya sisters and their family because they were nobles. Indeed, most Russian writers, the characters they created, and the readers who enjoyed their works were from the nobility. This fundamental fact is essential to understanding their lives, their works, and the comedy of manners in City Folk and Country Folk. The Khvoshchinskys were a large old noble family that dated back to 1615 and the reign of the first Romanov, Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich, who gave them land in recognition of their military service. Their father, Dmitry Kesarevich Khvoshchinsky, served as an officer and then retired to marry Yulia Vikentyevna Drobyshevskaya-Rubets. With the help of his family, he bought an estate with a distillery and turned his attention to distributing alcohol and breeding horses. The family, however, lost their estate, livelihood, and reputation when Khvoshchinsky was falsely accused of embezzlement. The fourteenyear case was resolved in 1845, and he was then able to join the civil service as a land surveyor for the treasury. Nadezhda worked as his clerk, managing the office and copying plans (like her heroine in the novel Ursa Major). In 1850, Nadezhda switched from publishing poetry to novels, and later criticism, dramas, sketches, and translations to support their extended family, which included the three sisters (a fourth sister had died in 1838), a brother, and their father’s five spinster sisters (who appear in fictionalized form in various works).
Later their brother married, and his wife and two sons, who would be the family’s only descendants, lived with them while he served as a military officer. After their father’s sudden death in 1856, Nadezhda convinced Sofia not to take a job as the director of a gymnasium (an elite high school) in Samara but to remain at home and publish her writing.3 In 1862, Nadezhda compared their division of labor within the family to branches of government: “Sofia is reflection and counsel. Pasha is executive power. I am the treasury.”4 Central to their story is the extraordinary intellectual, creative, and emotional bond between Sofia and Nadezhda, who was regularly compared to George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, and George Sand.5 After a brief career of nine years that showed her equally considerable talents and promise, Sofia died young, while Nadezhda’s writing career spanned nearly five decades (1842–1889). She remains the most important nineteenth-century Russian writer that most Russians have never heard of. Praskovia wrote two tales and four short stories (1864–1865, 1879) that were republished twice as a collection, In the City and in the Country (1881, 1885). Before Sofia died in 1865 at age 41 from abdominal tuberculosis, she informed Nadezhda that she did not want her works to be republished. Of her two novels, ten novellas, and seven published sketches (1857-65), City Folk and Country Folk, which was included in a Soviet anthology in 1987, is her only work to be republished since her death. An article about her work by the radical critic Dmitry Pisarev was not published. A single rogue obituary for Sofia appeared in The Illustrated Gazette, published by Vladimir Zotov, their supporter and (unfortunately overly intrusive) editor of Nadezhda’s poetry.6 The obituary revealed the true identities of both Sofia and Nadezhda behind their respective pseudonyms, Iv. Vesenev and V. Krestovsky. With the death Introduction
\ xiii
xiv \
Introduction
of her soulmate, Nadezhda despaired: “I could be alive for Sofia, enjoy myself together with her, seek out people for her sake. Without her, I cannot live, there is no gaiety, I don’t know people.”7 Six weeks later, she married a twenty-seven-year old doctor, Ivan Zaionchkovsky (1838-72), moved to St. Petersburg, began writing for the newspaper The Voice, and stopped writing novels for two years. But by 1870, with Ursa Major, Nadezhda was the most well-respected and well-paid novelist after Turgenev and Tolstoy in the “thick” journals where most Russian literature was initially published in serial form.8 In 1876, Ivan Kramskoi painted her portrait in the series commissioned by Pavel Tretyakov of Russia’s most important cultural figures, which included Tolstoy, Ivan Goncharov, and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. To this day it is in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Like the Brontë sisters, as children Sofia and Nadezhda were inseparable, and they were constantly working on family literary projects. With Nadezhda as editor, they created a weekly journal, “The Little Star,” for their father. They also liked to stage dramatic scenes. Like their mother, who was educated at the home of a wealthy relative, the daughters were well educated, initially at home, in Russian, literature, Latin, and drawing. Thanks to a wealthy uncle, Sofia attended the St. Catherine Institute for Young Noblewomen in Moscow from 1835 to 1843, and did not see her family during that time, as was customary. She graduated with an education in Russian, French, German, and English, and as the best student, received a gold medal that entitled her to an official position as teacher or the right to run a private school, known as a pension. This same uncle invited Nadezhda to Moscow for a year, where she studied French, Italian, and music. She also learned German and continued to read and translate from these languages for the rest of her life. Back home, in Sofia’s absence, Nadezhda took
up with a family friend her age, with whom she wrote poetry, tales, and three novels in the spirit of Walter Scott and Casimir Delavigne’s Marino Faliero, which they first translated from French. When Sofia returned home in 1843, Nadezhda already had begun to publish her poetry through their contacts in Moscow. Sofia wrote “The Cemetery,” an imitation of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”9 When a friend, Princess Alexandra Shchetinina (later the second wife of Alexander Pushkin’s editor and publisher Petr Pletnev) asked whether she was going to publish her writing, Sofia replied (in French) that, “there is nothing more terrible than to see your own words, your own thoughts published in a book, read by the whole world, judged by the whole world, criticized, and never does one see the faults of one’s pen so well as when one sees it leaving a bookstore, still smelling of the odor of printer’s ink. No, there is no road steeper, rougher to travel than that of the poor poet, and I have one under my eyes now, who is an acquaintance of mine.” In 1845, Sofia wrote her that she and Nadezhda were painting an eighteenth-century landscape of a hunting scene with forty dogs from the era of Louis XV; Nadezhda added that Sofia needed models for her painting.10 The family archive, discovered in a relative’s home in Ryazan in 1979, contains caricatures of all the wellknown men writers, most likely by Nadezhda.11 Beginning in 1852, once Nadezhda had begun to publish fiction, she traveled to Moscow and St. Petersburg to meet her editor Andrei Kraevsky at the liberal and later radical journal Notes of the Fatherland, which was her publishing home until it was closed by the censors in 1884. From 1857, once Sofia had launched her career as well at Notes of the Fatherland, they went together and separately nearly every year to Moscow and for several months at a time to Introduction
\ xv
xvi \
Introduction
St. Petersburg, staying with relatives and later renting rooms. There they met with editors, who encouraged them to move to St. Petersburg, and with writers, including Nadezhda’s friend the conservative poet Nikolai Shcherbina. They went to concerts and to the theater, and had access to the Hermitage Museum and the Imperial Academy of Arts to draw and paint. Their friend Alexandra Karrik, a feminist and the wife of the British photographer William Carrick, described Sofia as a small, thin blonde and as nearsighted; on first acquaintance, she appeared to be a cold society woman. In 1858, Sofia quickly became friends with the painter Alexander Ivanov, who had returned from Italy to exhibit his famous painting The Apparition of Christ Before the People at the Academy; she even agreed to go to Italy with him as his student.12 However, he died that same year and she visited him several times during his illness. Sofia painted his portrait, which Kraevsky sold for her to the industrialist and collector Vasily Kokorev for his gallery in Moscow, the first public collection of Russian art.13 Through Zotov and Kraevsky, she sought commissions among the aristocracy. In 1859, Sofia traveled to Europe, to Germany, Switzerland, Paris, and perhaps England; the paper of four letters to Kraevsky is embossed with a crown and the name of the city of Bath.14 In August 1860, she took a painting to St. Petersburg in the hope that it would be selected for the Academy exhibition.15 In 1861, Sofia wrote to Kraevsky, “We are reading many journals. What an abundance of women writers there is at the present time.”16 That same year, as journals proliferated and fought for readers, Nadezhda reported that, “There are journals, that is, their editors, some of whom have sometimes never even seen me, who love me greatly: all are proposing to me. This year I have forgotten how many I have refused.”17 Among those she
refused were the Dostoevskys (for the journal Time) and another celebrated female author, Evgeniia Tur. Life as women writers agreed with the sisters because their careers coincided with the end of the Crimean War and the great reforms of the reign of Alexander II (1855–1881). He ended Nicholas I’s three decades of repression, which had long throttled literary publication and had become even stricter after the European revolutions of 1848. In addition to reforms in the judiciary, administration, military, and education, in 1861, the serfs were emancipated. Less censorship led to a period of glasnost with fewer restrictions on publications. The Russian literary market finally began to expand to meet the demand of an increasingly literate population that wanted to read Russian literature in addition to the mostly French, English, and German literature—both in translation and in the original—that Russians had long been reading. In Russia, in 1830, there were around 260 productive writers, with about 300 by 1855, and 700 by 1880. As there were more writers, the number of women writers increased disproportionately, from 3.5 percent of productive writers in 1830, to 10.4 percent in 1855, and 16.1 percent in 1880.18 The enormous changes in noble life brought by Alexander II’s reforms, viewed from the perspective of the provinces, provide the setting for City Folk and Country Folk and Sofia’s other works. With more newspapers, journals, and books, professional writers like the Khvoshchinskaya sisters could begin to earn a living by publishing in greater quantity. Dostoevsky, a poor businessman, relied on his brother and then his wife, who was also his stenographer, to handle publishing, while Tolstoy was adept at the business of literature, and his wife, who was also his copyist, learned from Dostoevsky’s wife how to make money self-publishing.19 As in England in the eighteenth Introduction
\ xvii
xviii \
Introduction
century, Russian publishers realized that biographies helped sell books. Both men published fictionalized autobiographies. Unfortunately, the Khvoshchinskayas, who did all their writing and copying themselves, were not businesswomen. Forced to rely on others to handle their publications, they remained poor.20 City Folk and Country Folk depicts a slightly glamorous pseudoautobiographical portrait of the two writing sisters as the Malinnikovs, who are thirty and thirty-five years old (Sofia and Nadezhda were thirty-eight and forty). They own a poor local estate but spend most of their time in St. Petersburg, where they write for journals and publish books under pseudonyms. Their father supplemented the meager earnings from their estate with a civil service job in town and when he transferred to St. Petersburg, the sisters audited classes with their brother at St. Petersburg University. (Their own brother had attended the Polotsky Cadet School.) Women auditors were common from 1855 to 1863, when officials ended the practice, leading to protests. St. Petersburg and Moscow Universities, which were mostly limited to those nobles who could afford the annual fifty ruble fees, were the norm for Herzen, Turgenev, and other men writers. After 1863, women, mostly noblewomen, began going abroad to university. Indeed, by 1873, of the over 300 Russians studying at the University of Zurich, 104 were women.21 Like the Khvoshchinskaya sisters, the Malinnikovs translate from French and German to make money, love books, and know other writers. Poor, they return to the country after eight years (like Sofia after she graduated), where nature amazes them; they work all the time, except for going to the theater, and will remain spinsters. This fictional autobiography of the sisters is given in the disapproving account of a traditional mother, who represents local opinion. She and other neighbors are afraid of
being portrayed in the Malinnikovs’ fiction, as the Khvoshchinskaya sisters’ neighbors were in Ryazan. With the occasional exception of Nadezhda and a few others, women novelists have been mostly written out of Russian literary history in English.22 In 1891, the bibliographers Prince Nikolai Golitsyn and Sergei Ponomarev recorded over 1,900 women who participated as writers, translators, and publishers in all subjects and aspects of the Russian literary market.23 This is about half of the number found in nineteenth-century English literature, long recognized for its women writers.24 The current Russian bio-bibliographic dictionary of nineteenth-century writers will include over 3,500 writers, with approximately 12 percent women.25 These women completely disappeared in the twentieth century as the Bolsheviks nationalized the works of fifty-seven writers, all men, for publication in greater quantities than Soviet literature. The People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) issued lists of forbidden “bourgeois,” “religious-moral,” “historically idealized,” “mystical,” “humorous,” and “adventure” novels and authors that included various women writers.26 Without the Russian critical editions that foster research on their male colleagues, nineteenthcentury women writers lie buried in literary history, in research libraries and archives. At the same time, many continue to believe in the nineteenth-century Romantic ideal of genius as the measure of a nation’s greatness and promote only a chosen few men.27 ɷɸɷ City Folk and Country Folk is a panorama of provincial noble estates set in the summer of 1862 during the beginning of the emancipation of Introduction
\ xix
xx \
Introduction
the serfs. Like the novels of Nadezhda, her rival Nadezhda Sokhanskaya, Alexander Pushkin, Evgeniia Tur, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, Leo Tolstoy, and many others, all of Sofia’s works touch on different aspects of the lives of the nobility, whether they are abroad in Europe or in St. Petersburg and Moscow or on their provincial estates, which were settled with the serfs that provided the money to support their lifestyles. Indeed, Pushkin, Sokhanskaya, Turgenev, and Tolstoy were among the one hundred thousand nobles who, together with the state, owned approximately fifty out of the sixtynine million people (70 percent) who were serfs.28 By comparison, the United States had four million slaves in a total population of thirty million. The serious side of City Folk and Country Folk requires an understanding of who Nastasya Ivanovna Chulkova, her relative Anna Ilinishna Bobova, and her neighbors Erast Sergeyevich Ovcharov and Katerina Petrovna Repekhova-Dolgovskaya are and the situation they all find themselves in. The comedy turns on the fact that everyone depends on Nastasya’s well-run estate, traditional Russian hospitality, and Christian virtue for shelter, food, loans, and kindness. Although they are all poor and indebted, they are so blinded by their relative noble wealth and status that none of them feels any gratitude toward Nastasya. Nor does she feel deserving of thanks, until her daughter Olenka reminds her of her good deeds and their neighbors’ hypocrisy. Nastasya takes heart by telling herself that she too is a noble; in fact, like the Khoshchinskaya sisters, she is from an ancient noble family. The Russian service nobility was unusual in a number of important ways. In 1722, Peter the Great instituted the Table of Ranks for military, court, and civil service, a system designed to expand and professionalize the military and administration of the Russian
empire that existed until 1917. Although the Russian nobility was only 1.5 percent of the population, it was Europe’s largest, with around 750,000 nobles in the 1860s, compared to, for example, 5,500 noble landowning families in England around 1850, and in 1914, 250,000 nobles in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.29 Service to the state and emperor was initially obligatory for twenty-five years, and after 1762, no longer required. Nevertheless, like Sofia’s father and brother, and like most writers, nobles still served, however briefly, to gain rank and status, which was independent of noble titles.30 In City Folk and Country Folk, Erast graduates from Moscow University, with rank, and takes a civil service job in name only in the governor’s chancellery. Non-nobles could advance to personal and hereditary nobility as officers and civil servants. Women had the rank of fathers and then husbands, but could have their own rank through the court and later as teachers and doctors. Finally, nobility derived not from economic class, but from an elaborate system of legal privileges.31 Hereditary noble privileges for women as well as men included the right to own land with serfs (until 1861), preference in service and the right not to serve (after 1762, suspended between 1796 and 1801), freedom from corporal punishment (until 1863, suspended between 1796 and 1801), exemption from poll tax (until 1883), and the right to be judged by peers and to travel abroad (with permission).32 After 1848, for example, Nicholas I recalled Alexander Herzen from abroad (he refused to return) and no longer allowed nobles to travel easily to Europe. Erast regularly travels abroad in a noble lifestyle that Sofia also parodied in How People Admire Nature (1959), which she wrote upon her return from Europe. Russians’ excitement in traveling abroad reflected a noble privilege that they once again enjoyed after the death of Nicholas I in 1855. Introduction
\ xxi
xxii \
Introduction
The instability of a system where non-nobles could become nobles and privileges could be suspended, as they were under Paul I (who reigned from 1796 to 1801), put an emphasis on ancestry and refined, educated behavior, especially knowledge of foreign languages, to show status. In the theater of noble status, ancient noble lineage was especially visible through the titles of prince and princess, which could no longer be bestowed after 1722. In City Folk and Country Folk, Anna, the sanctimonious cousin, is blinded to Nastasya’s virtue by her own sense of self importance, which she derives from her past relations with princesses and bishops. In nineteenth-century Russian noble culture and literature, estate management becomes an important alternative form of national service for noblemen, while absentee landowners are viewed as derelict in their duties to the peasants and Russia by failing to oversee invariably corrupt stewards and peasant commune leaders. As estates became the new literary stages of noble culture, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Goncharov and others aligned love and estate management. Women writers such as Sofia, Nadezhda, and Evgeniia Tur became more interested than men writers in noblewomen as landowners and in the mÊsalliance, love that transcends class boundaries.33 Most nobles were relatively poor; among those who owned land with serfs, also known as souls, fewer than twenty-five serfs (only men were counted) meant owners worked with their serfs, while those with fifty or one hundred serfs, like Nastasya in City Folk and Country Folk, lived modestly; those with five hundred serfs, like Erast, were comfortable; and those, like Turgenev, who owned five thousand serfs, were among the 3 percent who owned 40 percent of serfs. Three-quarters of estates had fewer than one hundred serfs
(which added up to 20 percent of the total number of serfs owned by nobles), and therefore order in the countryside rested on the country folk, like Nastasya, who could not afford to live elsewhere.34 Most serfs were mortgaged. Nastasya, unlike Erast, manages a wellordered estate. Like his parents, who lived beyond their means in their Russian version of the European lifestyle, Erast is an absentee landowner living in St. Petersburg, Europe’s third largest city after London and Paris, and in Europe, while his estate declines. These are the city folk. He takes refuge in and transforms Nastasya’s new bathhouse into an elaborately theatrical study for himself as a noble writer, who does not write for money but because he has something to say. In an earlier tale by Sofia, “Lyskovo Village” (1859), Maria Petrovna Karpova learns to write in the process of trying to save her Edenic estate of twenty-five souls in a one-hundred-year lawsuit; the estate later goes to ruin to provide pocket money to an absentee landowner.35 In their letters, Sofia and Nadezhda often mention reading and talking about the peasants, which is reflected in their fiction. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 was very different from the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation in the United States that proclaimed slaves “henceforward shall be free.” Russian peasants remained legally tied to the land, for which they paid the government redemption payments of (very) approximately 150 percent of the value of the land for forty-nine years, while the government advanced the money to the nobility and erased noble debts. Redemption payments were generally less than the initial “temporary obligations” referred to in the novel’s first paragraph. This led some landowners to delay conversion to permanent agreements on land for two decades. These injustices led to peasant disturbances, a radicalized Introduction
\ xxiii
xxiv \
Introduction
intelligentsia, and the populist and revolutionary movements. Payments finally ended and peasants gained freedom of movement after the Revolution of 1905.36 City Folk and Country Folk also alludes to these problems in the description of the Toporischevs’ estate, where the villages were burned three times (by the peasants). Erast does not make any agreement with his restless serfs because he little understands the details, and delays are to his advantage. Nastasya, on the other hand, tries to discuss their adjacent land holdings. Meanwhile, he writes and lectures her on finances and property, unable to recognize her expertise. In 1861, Sofia published a short, anonymous biography of Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749–1802), whom she portrayed as an extraordinary, incorruptible statesman whose progressive arguments against serfdom could only now be considered. Radishchev was exiled to Siberia after his exposé of serfdom, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1789). Published despite having been rejected by the censors in 1859, Sofia’s article led to the closure of Illustration, edited by Zotov, even though several articles had recently appeared about this forbidden writer.37 City Folk and Country Folk opens with praise for the humble provincial civil servants who, like Nastasya, have a direct responsibility to deliver justice to the peasants. Later, in her popular Ursa Major, set during the Crimean War, Nadezhda used Radishchev as a model for an exemplar of noble civil service, Nikolai Stepanych Bagriansky, provincial director of the Chamber of Government Property, responsible for 150,000 government serfs and recruitment of serf militias. In one of the most extraordinary scenes in Russian literature, Nastasya, faced with an insurrection of her house serfs, dares to go to their kitchen, where she successfully reasons with them and treats
them humanely. Sofia translated John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), which laid out a program for liberal government with the greatest freedom for the individual from government control. Without naming Russia, he exempts backward societies, arguing that “despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians.” Rousseau and others had long considered Russian autocracy despotic. Mill argues that liberal government can only be attained when mankind is “capable of being improved by free and equal discussion” and has “attained the capacity of being guided to their own improvement by conviction or persuasion.”38 Through Nastasya’s enlightened persuasion of her peasants, Sofia offers a rebuttal to those who argued that Russian serfs were not ready for freedom. Nastasya and Olenka are unusual Russian heroines in that they are emphatically not extraordinary.39 While Nastasya is traditional, Olenka is an ordinary high-spirited young woman who gets impatient with her mother and teases a potential match in an hour-long game of tag. They are also not readers, a signal trait of noble heroines since Pushkin’s Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, who reads the sentimental classics and peruses Onegin’s library for clues to his Romantic persona. In the “woman question,” the debates over women’s emancipation and education that coalesced around 1860, the Khvoshchinskaya sisters were contrarians. While they disagreed with antifeminists, they also argued with feminists. Nastasya embodies their argument against feminist women, who thought women should have education and careers at the expense of marriage and family. In letters, conversations, essays, and fiction, the sisters argued for self-sacrifice and duty to family, in opposition to the Darwinian struggle of the survival of the fittest.40 Olenka’s concern for her mother demonstrates their belief that decency and common sense are more important than Introduction
\ xxv
xxvi \
Introduction
education. In an essay, Nadezhda noted that men writers liked to portray women who read (their) novels and are educated by men.41 Olenka expresses the sisters’ views against such hypocritical feminist men writers as Erast, who appears to argue for women, while telling them they should be obedient to religious, parental, and patriarchal authority. In a striking scene, the sickly Erast grabs Olenka and kisses her, and she shoves him away: “Apparently Olenka really was stronger than he” (160). It rejects a central concern of both the French antifeminist Jules Michelet and the feminist socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon about women’s fundamental inequality to men because of their physical weakness; beginning in 1860 this and other aspects of the woman question were addressed by the radical Mikhail Mikhailov in numerous journal essays that the sisters deplored.42 Aside from talents for plot, original characters, and theatrical comedy, Sofia’s writing is undergirded by serious interests in history, philosophy, and politics, and overlaid by a gift for various voices. The Khvoshchinsky family, like most noble Russian families, read literature aloud together, and they also celebrated the publications of their novels by reading them aloud. The sisters’ differing literary styles reflect the importance of theatricality and orality. In City Folk and Country Folk, the opening captures the tensions between the city and the country through language. The repetitions in the first sentence and elsewhere reflect a country cadence with a warm, honest folksiness that contrasts with the clichés of high society and faux intellectuals. Clichéd words from the war of ideas in Russian journals include education, ideas, struggle, development, enlightenment, self-perfection, progress, self-development, and analysis. City Folk and Country Folk was not reviewed, but in her letters to the writer Olga Novikova, Sofia’s older sister Nadezhda commented
on her development as a writer: “We are accomplishing all the same great deeds. Sonia is producing, wait. In March, in Notes of the Fatherland, her novel, read it; I do not boast of this to you, for I am impartial—but do not boast simply because I know what the author is capable of.”43 Later that same year, Nadezhda simply wrote, “Charming,” about Sofia’s novel Domestic Idylls from a Recent Time, about the tragic consequences of a noblewoman’s love for a man from the petty bourgeoisie.44 In 1864, Nadezhda wrote, “Sofia is doing something quite splendid, serious; a creation, indeed. You cannot expect it at all soon, but know that you are waiting for something you have long not read.”45 It is not clear to which work Nadezhda, one of Russia’s great nineteenth-century novelists and critics, was referring, but there is no doubt that City Folk and Country Folk is a work of true quality and craft. It is splendid and serious, and offers a unique portrait of a crucial moment in Russian history and literature.
NOTES 1. Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal, and Mary Zirin, eds., Dictionary of Russian Women Writers (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 286–91. 2. On Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, in English, see: N. D. Khvoshchinskaya, The Boarding-School Girl, trans. Karen Rosneck (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000); Karen Rosneck, “Nadezhda Dmitrievna Khvoshchinskaia (V. Krestovsky),” Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale, 2001); Jehanne M. Gheith, Finding the Middle Ground: Krestovskii, Tur, and the Power of Ambivalence in Nineteenth-Century Russian Women’s Prose (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004); Diana Greene, Inventing Romantic Poetry: Russian Women Poets of the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Karen Rosneck, Understanding Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia’s Short Story Collection “An Album: Groups and Portraits”: The Literary Innovations of a Nineteenth-Century Russian Writer (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2010). 3. Although sources give later years for their births (1824 instead of 1822 for Nadezhda, 1828 instead of 1824 for Sofia, and 1832 instead of 1828 for Praskovia), birth registries indicate that the sisters lied about their ages. P. D. Khvoshchinskaia, “Biografiia,” in
Introduction
\ xxvii
xxviii \
Introduction
4.
5.
6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
11. 12. 13. 14.
15. 16. 17. 18. 19.
Sobranie sochinenii V. Krestovskogo (psevdonim), vol. 1, 5 vols. (St. Petersburg: Izd. A.S. Suvorina, 1892), I–XVIII; Aleksandr Potapov, Neizrechennyi svet (Ryazan’: Novoe vremia, 1996), 52. Letter to Olga Novikova, 8 June 1862, N. D. Khvoshchinskaia, “Ia zhivu ot pochty do pochty”: Iz perepiski Nadezhda Dmitrievny Khvoshchinskoi, ed. Arja Rosenholm and Hilde Hoogenboom, FrauenLiteraturGeschichte 14 (Fichtenwalde: F. K. Göpfert, 2001), 124. On their relationship, see Gheith, Finding the Middle Ground, 63–68; K. K. Arsen’ev, “Sovremennyi russkii roman v ego glavnykh predstaviteliakh: Krestovskii (psevdonim),” Vestnik Evropy 1, no. 1 (1885): 331; Karen Rosneck, “Translator’s Introduction,” in The Boarding-School Girl (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), xiv–xv. V. R. Zotov, “Nekrolog,” Illiustrirovannaia gazeta, August 19, 1865; Greene, Inventing Romantic Poetry. Letter to Novikova, 30 September 1865, Khvoshchinskaia, Ia zhivu ot pochty do pochty, 160. Deborah A. Martinsen, ed., Literary Journals in Imperial Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). S. D. Khvoshchinskaia, “Kladbishche” 1843, f. 541, op. 1, d. 43, Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI). Letters to Alexandra Vasil’evna Pletneva, 27 November 1843, 30 June 1845, Khvoshchinskaia, Ia zhivu ot pochty do pochty, 239; S.D. Khvoshchinskaia, “Pis’ma k Pletnevoi, A.V.” l. 14, f. 234, op. 4, no. 191, Pushkin House (PD). Potapov, Neizrechennyi svet, 59. A. Karrik, “Iz vospominanii o N.D. Khvoshchinskoi-Zaionchkovskoi (V. Krestovskiipsevdonim),” Zhenskoe delo, no. 9, 11, 12 (1899): 5, 37–38. Rosalind P. Gray, Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 37–38. Letter to Novikova, 10 August 1859, N. D. Khvoshchinskaia, “Pis’ma KhvoshchinskoiZaionchkovskoi k Novikovoi, O. A., (1858-1863)” l. 66, f. 345, op. 1, d. 850, Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI); S. D. Khvoshchinskaia, “Pis’ma Khvoshchinskoi, S. D. k Kraevskomu, A. A., (1855-1864)” ll. 10, 15, 23, 25, f. 391, n. 804, National Library of Russia (RNB). Letters are dated after her return from Europe: 22 August 1861, 5 October 1862, 6 November 1863, 2 April 1864. Letter to Novikova, 30 August 1860, Khvoshchinskaia, “Pis’ma,” l. 66v. Letter to Kraevsky, 22 August 1861, Khvoshchinskaia, Ia zhivu ot pochty do pochty, 61. Letter to Novikova, 29 November 1861, Khvoshchinskaia, “Pis’ma,” l. 124. A. I. Reitblat, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu i drugie raboty po istoricheskoi sotsiologii russkoi literatury (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009), 254. T. G. Nikiforova, “Pis’ma A.G. Dostoevskoi k S.A. Tolstoi,” in Mir filologii (Moscow: Nasledie, 2000), 290–306.
20. Gheith, Finding the Middle Ground, 74–76. 21. Barbara Alpern Engel, Mothers & Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 127. 22. With the exception of Kahn et al., the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and Mirsky and Terras, who include the same dozen names, Russian literary histories in English ignore women’s prose. Dmitry S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900, ed. Francis Whitfield (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999); Victor Terras, ed., Handbook of Russian Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Caryl Emerson, Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Andrew Baruch Wachtel and Ilya Vinitsky, Russian Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 2009); Andrew Kahn et al., History of Russian Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 23. Prince N. N. Golitsyn, Bibliograficheskii slovar’ russkikh pisatel’nits, Repr. (Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der DDR, 1974). 24. Robin Alston, A Checklist of Women Writers, 1801-1900: Fiction, Verse, Drama (London: British Library, 1990). 25. P. A. Nikolaev, ed., Russkie pisateli 1800–1917: Biograficheskii slovar’, 5 vols. (Moscow: Bol’shaia Rossiiskaia Entsiklopediia, 1989). 26. Maurice Friedberg, Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 186; V.A. Soloukhin, Pri svete dnia (Moscow: no publisher, 1992), 94–97. 27. Greene, Inventing Romantic Poetry. 28. The 1857 census showed 22 million serfs held by 100,000 nobles, 23 million state serfs, and 3.3 million appanage (udelnye) serfs, totaling 49.3 million serfs in a population of 68.7 million. M. G. Mulhall, The Dictionary of Statistics, 4th ed. (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1899), 541. 29. David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 17, 20. 30. Nikolaev, Russkie pisateli; Irina Reyfman, How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Ranks (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016). 31. Gregory L. Freeze, “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History,” American Historical Review 91, no. 1 (1986): 11–36. 32. Seymour Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985). 33. Michelle Lamarche Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700-1861 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 34. David Moon, Abolition of Serfdom in Russia: 1762-1907 (New York: Longman, 2002), 17. 35. S. D. Khvoshchinskaia, “Sel’tso Lyskovo,” Otechestvennye zapiski, no. 5 (1859): 1–74. 36. Moon, Abolition of Serfdom, 105–9.
Introduction
\ xxix
xxx \
Introduction 37. S. D. Khvoshchinskaia, “Aleksandr Nikolaevich Radishchev,” Illiustratsiia 7, no. 159 (March 2, 1861): 129–30. 38. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1986), 17. 39. Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Woman and Russian Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 40. Karrik, “Iz vospominanii.” 41. Rosneck, “Translator’s Introduction,” xx. 42. Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 38–49. 43. Letter to Novikova, 13 April 1863, Khvoshchinskaia, “Pis’ma,” l. 192. 44. Letter to Novikova, 6 September 1863, Khvoshchinskaia, Ia zhivu ot pochty do pochty, 128. 45. Letter to Novikova, 3 January 1864, Ibid., 136.
Praise for C I T Y F O L K A N D C O U N T R Y F O L K “Talk about buried treasure! The heroines of this sly, engrossing novel crackle with a verve so fresh that 1860s Russia feels close enough to touch. A brilliant reminder (as if any were needed) that women have been fighting, and triumphing over, their conditions forever. Reviving this forgotten book is a masterstroke.”—K AT E B O LI C K , author of the New York Times best-seller Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own “A single man of property comes to a country village—unsettling young and older ladies. The village is in Russia, soon after the emancipation of the serfs; Ovcharov is a hypochondriac intellectual. ‘A comical people,’ he reflects at one point, and the women and the reader must agree. Admirers of Jane Austen will delight in this charming satire.” —RACHEL B ROW NS TE I N, author of Why Jane Austen? Russian Library Columbia University Press New York cup.columbia.edu Printed in the U.S.A.
ISBN: 978-0-231-18302-4