I came to love blogs in the 2000s, reading economists and political scientists who weren’t afraid to hit the same main points again and again, to link to their opponents as well as their allies, and to admit their ignorance about important things in their own field. The one place where I’ve been able to do what they did is in letting my own ignorance show, like when I wrote in 2013 that Nadezhda Durova “used male pseudonyms as a soldier, but AFAIK not as a writer.”
I still haven’t read Durova, but now I’ve read an article about that author and can instead say that I haven’t read Aleksandr Aleksandrov. For Aleksandrov, as Ruth Averbach writes, did not briefly pose as a man to fight in a war, but “spent approximately sixty of his eighty-three years living and speaking exclusively as a man” (988). His literary career happened because of “a chance encounter between his younger brother, Vasilii Durov, and Aleksandr Pushkin in 1829” (982). He wanted his memoirs to appear “under his male name, Aleksandrov,” but Pushkin insisted on The Notes of N. A. Durova, Published by A. Pushkin (984). Pushkin also wrote an introduction that “went even further in sealing the author’s reputation as a woman,” with lines like “Cornet Aleksandrov was really the maiden Nadezhda Durova” and “now, N. A. Durova herself reveals her secret” (984). That was in the July 1836 issue of The Contemporary, and when the memoir was published as a book, a different editor used the title The Cavalry Maiden: An Incident in Russia (Кавалерист-девица: Происшествие в России, 1836), against the author’s wishes. In 1839 a new edition had the new title Notes of Aleksandrov (989).
In Russian, gender shows up not only in personal pronouns, but also in verb endings: when people speak about themselves in the past tense, you can hear what gender they’re presenting themselves as. In the text of The Cavalry Maiden as it has come down to us, Aleksandrov uses masculine forms in direct speech, but the narrator uses feminine first-person forms when addressing the reader. Averbach suspects that the feminine grammatical forms came from editors, just as the titles Notes of N. A. Durova and The Cavalry Maiden did (985). Evidence: “Aleksandrov is thoroughly documented as using his male name and masculine verb forms, frequently insisting that others use his preferred pronouns in spoken language, even asking his son to address him as roditel’ (parent, father) instead of ‘mother,’ and surviving documents and letters attest that he did so in written language as well” (981). When Pushkin wrote to Aleksandrov, he consistently either used masculine forms or found ways to avoid the choice (985). I gather any manuscript of Aleksandrov’s memoirs with masculine forms for both narration and reported speech has been lost, which is a pity—it really does make a difference whose pen we attribute those feminine verb endings to—but Averbach makes a persuasive case that it may well have existed.
From Pushkin to Averbach, I have the impression that people are quite interested in Aleksandrov’s unconventional gender identity and only secondarily in what Aleksandrov wrote on all other topics. As you might expect, different people at different times have interpreted his gender differently. In the 1830s Aleksandrov’s brother refers to his “military service and masculine presentation as a ‘prank’ or ‘antics’ (shalost’)¨ (982). (Here it’s worth remembering Joe Peschio on how important pranks were for Pushkin’s generation, and how versatile the concept was.) In the twentieth century, feminist critics see Aleksandrov (or rather, from this point of view, Durova) “as a woman ‘pretending’ to be male,” and “even recent attempts to approach the author from a feminist and queer studies–informed perspective by Ann Marsh-Flores [2003] and Ona Renner-Fahey [2009] rely on the language of masquerade, positing that Aleksandrov was ‘really’ a cis woman posing as a man” (978). Averbach herself sees Aleksandrov this way:
While I am sensitive to the optics of “removing” a female writer from the canon and claiming him for men, I believe that Aleksandrov and his work requires a new critical approach, a trans reading that reconciles his initial position as a female and his conscious decision to become male. After all, in describing his transition, Aleksandrov wrote he wanted not only to “part company forever from the sex whose sad lot and eternal dependence had begun to terrify me,” a position easily legible to second and third-wave feminists, but also “become a warrior and son to my father,” a sentiment less legible from these perspectives and requiring a trans reading that respects the author’s masculinity. (977)
If you’re reading my poor summary and thinking that Averbach is crudely projecting twenty-first-century concepts back in time, know that she has anticipated this objection and has quite a thoughtful approach to it, even as she doesn’t shy away from talking about misgendering and deadnaming and TERF ideology (concepts which help us understand episodes like Aleksandrov’s reaction to Pushkin trying to kiss his hand at their first meeting, 983). Averbach spends half the article analyzing contemporary responses to Aleksandrov’s memoirs and fiction by two critics I don’t often see grouped together, Faddei Bulgarin (pp. 985–90) and Vissarion Belinskii (pp. 990–93). If you read their pieces about Aleksandrov in chronological order, somewhere in the middle each critic shifts to using masculine forms to talk about him (989, 992). In other ways the critics are each as you expect them to be: Bulgarin is interested in Aleksandrov’s memoir accounts of his meetings with powerful people (987), while Belinskii reads Aleksandrov’s story “Pavilion” (Павильон, 1839) as a contrast of “the desire to control and define the other, termed here as ‘passion,’ with ‘love,’ which assumes the free, equal, and consensual participation of all parties” (992).
Bulgarin also compares Aleksandrov to an earlier public figure who did not conform to contemporary notions of gender, the Chevalier d’Éon (pp. 987–88). In an odd coincidence, my non-Russian reading this year included a 46-year-old mystery novel (title at this link to avoid spoilers) that hinges on a detective figuring out that “eonism” has to do with the Chevalier d’Éon and the kind of life that Averbach says Aleksandrov led, trans avant la lettre. But as Averbach says, the two historical figures were different: “Éon’s gender expression varied over time, often adapting dress and language situationally” (988).
See Ruth Averbach, “The (Un)making of a Man: Aleksandr Aleksandrov/Nadezhda Durova,” Slavic Review 81.4 (2022): 976–93. Thanks to Margarita Vaysman (who has written on Aleksandrov too) for telling me about this article! The title of this post is from the same paragraph of The Cavalry Maiden as “become a warrior and son to my father.”
Words new to me: репетир
From stanza 31 of Afanasii Fet’s narrative poem The Student (Студент, 1884):
Без опыта, без денег и без сил,
У чьей груди я мог искать спасенья?
Серебряный я кубок свой схватил,
Что подарила мать мне в день рожденья,
И пенковую трубку, что хранил
В чехле, как редкость, полную значенья,
Был и бинокль туда же приобщен
И с репетиром золотой Нортон.
With no experience, money, or strength, at whose breast could I seek salvation? I grabbed the silver cup that my mother had given me for my birthday and the meerschaum pipe that I kept in a case as if it were a rarity filled with significance; a pair of binoculars was added to the lot, and a gold Norton with a repetir.
The more common repetitor ‘tutor’ doesn’t make any sense, so repetir must be something new, connected to whatever was sold under the brand name Norton. In a place like this you just know there will be a footnote, and Boris Bukhstab indeed provided one: “s repetirom zolotoi Norton—a gold pocket watch made by a company called Norton, which would strike the hour when a special spring was pressed” (701). A Russian website about fancy watches explains that a repetir can also be called a retransliator, and watches with one are different from clocks that strike the hour because they make noise only when you ask them to by pressing a button, which is convenient if you’re trying to sleep in the same room as one. The English word for this mechanism is “repeater.”
Before this I don’t think I’d read any of Fet’s long poemy as opposed to his short stikhotvoreniia. Bukhshtab’s notes also explain that the poem is autobiographical, about the time the young Fet was living with Apollon Grigor’ev, and indeed the events in this 1884 poem were described decades earlier in two stories by Grigor’ev, “Ophelia¨ (Офелия, 1846) and “The Man of the Future” (Человек будущего, 1845).
Much of The Student is written in a “sensible old man looks back longingly at the follies of his youth” vein, but even the young Fet turns out to be cautious. He lives with his Moscow friend (unnamed in the poem, but assumed to be Grigor’ev) and the friend’s parents, and the poet (who I’ll just call Fet) is not drawn to women, though Grigor’ev is constantly falling in love and skipping through fields “the moment the women weren’t absolutely hideous” (stanzas 1–4). Among the visitors to Grigor’ev’s parents’ house is Liza, Grigor’ev’s mother’s goddaughter, who becomes engaged to an officer who is neither tall nor handsome, nor of high rank, but owns property. Fet and Grigor’ev serve as the shafera who hold the crowns over the bride’s and groom’s heads at the wedding; Fet thinks the bride looks scared or sad (5–13). At the wedding reception, the bride asks Fet to dance and uses the mazurka to say she has ruined her life by going along with her mother’s plans for her, since she has long loved another man—Fet (14–19). Fet begins a clandestine affair with the married Liza, with Grigor’ev’s knowledge, including ill-advised letters where the lovers make plans to meet by slipping away dressed as peasants (20–26). Liza’s husband discovers the letters and is enraged, but Liza manages to send her maid with one more letter containing a dramatic proposal: Fet should kill Liza’s husband in a duel, after which Liza will follow Fet to his country estate and become his wife. Also, they should meet at a monastery at eight o’clock the day after tomorrow (27–30).
So far we have a recognizable love story, though I think the declaration of love coming from the woman immediately after the wedding is unusual. The last ten stanzas are strange, though. Fet tells us which valuable items he gathers, apparently preparing to flee with Liza (31, quoted above), then addresses the dead Grigor’ev, nostalgic for their time drinking tea and reading a Roman poet (32). He brings his sack of valuables to his teacher, who tells him he should save himself (and Liza) by not going along with her plan; the teacher offers to have Fet restricted to the barracks for a month to keep him out of trouble (33–34). Fet does, however, show up for the meeting at the monastery, and Liza manages to come too (35–37). But they do not flee together, and Fet does not fight a duel. The old poet reflects on the intense suffering of youth versus the bitter routine of age (38). The end of the young poet’s story: Fet and Grigor’ev learn that Liza and her husband have gone to the country (39). Fet also leaves Moscow, learns that Liza’s husband has died, and tries to get in touch with her, but she doesn’t want to meet him. Rumor has it that she has found a general, but maybe that was a lie (40).
I’m going to have to read the Grigor’ev stories someday (Bukhshtab hints that they cast an interesting light on the psychology of the character modeled on Fet, “Voldemar”). I find it strange that the old poet narrating The Student, for all his ironic attitude toward his young and old selves, seems to take seriously the contrast between reckless youth and cautious old age, even as the young man is already astonishingly prudent from the moment his letters are discovered.
Green noise
Nekrasov’s poem “The Green Noise” (Зеленый шум, 1862–63) takes us inside the perspective of a peasant man who decides to kill his wife. She voluntarily tells him—he wishes she hadn’t—about something that happened to her while he was in St. Petersburg. It’s hard for the reader to tell if she was raped or had an affair, since we hear this through the “I” of a husband concerned about something other than consent. Listening to winter’s cruel voice, the man is obsessed with his own feelings and the fear he will lose the community’s respect if he does nothing. With the coming of spring (the Green Noise), his mind turns to love, patience (in this context peasant terpenie becomes as positive in a Nekrasov poem as in a Tiutchev one), and forgiveness, and he drops the knife he was going to murder his wife with.
I’ve always found the poem striking. Who is it for? Is a hypothetical male peasant reader (listener?) supposed to be rhetorically persuaded not to enforce patriarchal norms through violence? Are educated urban readers supposed to learn a nuanced truth about peasant men, so they don’t idealize or demonize them? Are educated men supposed to adopt new ideas about gender relations through the mechanism of “realizing” that their social group is more “advanced” than this peasant? Or is the poem a portrait of destructive obsession (and an exit from it) that’s relevant for any social group?
This is the poem where Nekrasov worked out the meter he would use for another peasant-voiced work, Who Can Be Happy in Russia? (Кому на Руси жить хорошо, about 1863-1877)—several 8-syllable lines of iambic trimeter with dactylic rhyme, punctuated by a 6-syllable line with masculine rhyme every so often—and J. Alexander Ogden’s idea of ventriloquism in Who Can Be Happy is relevant for “The Green Noise” too.
One thing about the poem that’s been known since a 1935 article by Soviet scholar I. S. Abramov, but that I only came to appreciate this year, is that Nekrasov took the central “green noise” image and most of the first post-refrain stanza from an 1856 article in a Slavophile journal. The nature language that Nekrasov has spoken by a seemingly Russian married man comes from a song supposedly sung by unmarried Ukrainian women and commentary about that song by Mikhail Maksimovich (1804–1873), the same scholar who vouched for Gogol’s proficiency in Ukrainian. Maksimovich’s article appeared in the very first issue of Russian Colloquy, whose entire 20-issue run is available on the internet. I’ve added it on the right sidebar, but the credit goes to Wikipedia editor Haendelfan for posting links to multiple digitized versions in late 2021.
The early and late Putin years in detective shows
With another new year, Putin (24-year reign, if you include the tandem of 2008–2012) is catching up to the nineteenth-century rulers Alexander I (also 24 years), Alexander II (26 years), and Nicholas I (30 years). And just as getting to know the nineteenth century means learning about not just watershed dates, but gradations within one reign—like the comparatively open period under conservative Nicholas I in the mid-1840s, long after the Decembrists but before the events of 1848—people are already starting to divide the Putin years into periods.
One way to get a feel for what’s changed is from a novel written in the early Putin years, One Shadow for Two (Одна тень на двоих, 2003) by Tat’iana Ustinova (b. 1968), which was adapted for television in both 2005 and 2023. Spoilers ahead, links to videos at the end.
In both adaptations, the central character is Danilov, a successful architect from a well-to-do, cultured family. His strict and intolerant mother had been training him to be a pianist, but he rebelled, turning his back on music and marrying a woman his mother thought beneath him. His father, a famous writer who later emigrated, was not as forceful a personality. Danilov’s violinist friend Tarasov, from a much poorer family, was musically talented and quasi-adopted by Danilov’s parents.
The woman Danilov married, Nonna, was found murdered a few years before the main story begins. Danilov was suspected, but the crime remained unsolved. The dead woman’s brother Veniamin held Danilov responsible and frequently demanded money from him.
Danilov’s longtime friend Marta is devoted to him, but Danilov is in a relationship with a different woman, Lida. However, a few months earlier, Danilov and Marta had to share a hotel room on a trip and had sex one time. Marta is pregnant but has not told Danilov the baby is his.
After side plots and more murders, it becomes clear that Tarasov killed Danilov’s first wife and everyone else. Tarasov’s whole life was envy of and resentment toward Danilov, who was freely given the opportunities Tarasov had to fight for, but Danilov didn’t even want them. Tarasov pays more attention to Danilov’s mother than Danilov himself does, but can never become her actual son. In a final confrontation on a rooftop, Tarasov falls to his death while trying to kill Danilov. Danilov realizes that Marta is the woman he should be with.
Plausible morals of the story: educated Russians in Russia are good, but they are endangered by the jealousy of the poor and the treachery of émigrés. Men like Danilov should be ambitious in their careers and (especially in 2023) marry women who are family-oriented, while women like Marta are free to choose ambitious men over someone stable but boring.
The 2023 adaptation is less than half as long as the 2005 one, so it’s no surprise that plotlines and characters are minimized or cut, but of course the choices of what to leave out aren’t random. Here are some changes I noticed.
Dr. Znamenskaia and Danilov’s father: In 2005, we learn that Danilov’s father (a Soviet shestidesiatnik writer who emigrated to New York) married Danilov’s mother (a Western-oriented harpy and snob) instead of Znamenskaia, a distinguished doctor who has just received a medal from the president; she, unlike Danilov’s parents, stayed in Russia. She drinks vodka and wants it served in the proper unpretentious way. She tells a policeman who questions her day-drinking that two shots of vodka, twice a day, is healthy, then drinks more in front of him (13:48). She makes home-cooked meals for Danilov’s father, showing him what he’s missing with his refined wife who would never eat plain honest food or waste time cooking it. The father spends a lot of time trying to reconcile with his son and repeatedly declares that St. Petersburg is his home, and he (despite his wife’s wishes) won’t leave again. In 2023, Danilov’s father is dead before the main events happen, and there is no hint of a past connection between him and Znamenskaia.
Marta: The 2005 Marta cooks for Danilov and hides her true feelings for him, but she acts at home in his apartment, speaks to him as an equal, and isn’t afraid to interrupt him when he’s working. She has another romantic option, a naval officer on a long voyage (which other characters amusingly take as a “girlfriend in Canada” cliché, but who turns out to be real). He’s masculine and gallant and seems to others like a good catch, but she doesn’t love him. We first see the 2023 Marta bringing a fish pie she has painstakingly made from scratch to a distracted and unappreciative Danilov; she is self-effacingly ready to vanish at any moment if necessary. The man who loves her unrequitedly is no longer an older naval officer, but a sincere country neighbor named Petia who invites her on dates to the local DK and collects mushrooms for her (2:35:25).
Lida: The 2005 version of Danilov’s lover is unabashedly materialistic and glamorous, living the stereotype of the post-Soviet woman who was told her top priority should be to land a rich man. The 2023 version is a journalist (a type that has grown markedly more negative on Russian television) with a professional manner and more educated habits of speech.
Veniamin: Danilov’s ex-brother-in-law is an exaggerated tragicomic alcoholic in 2005 with an alcoholic girlfriend. The 2023 version is still supposed to drink—we see him take a swig from a hip flask while he’s working—but it’s toned down quite a bit, as is his poverty. The girlfriend character doesn’t appear.
Detective Patrikeev: In 2005 the police investigator was a wily man in a hat who half-hid his intelligence and seemed like a descendant of honest Soviet policemen or even Dostoevskii’s Porfirii Petrovich. In 2023 his role is minimal, and something like law enforcement is carried out by the private security force of Danilov’s rich client Kuptsov.
Differences besides the characters: In 2023 Tarasov torments Danilov with voice mail messages that seem to come from his dead wife, one of several plot points that rely on cell phones and recent technology. In 2005 we often see two characters in bed with each other where in 2023 we learn they slept with each other through dialogue. Danilov smokes on camera in 2005.
2005
2023
Khvoshchinskaya Sisters Digital Collection
My fellow Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya fans—and, of course, fans of her sisters—will love the new site put together by a team of Khvoshchinskaya scholars as well as librarians and researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It’s not just links, but actual downloadable .pdfs of the sisters’ works and works about them. And it’s not just the most famous pieces, but also things like a story Khvoshchinskaya translated from Norwegian for a newspaper originally by an author whose Wikipedia page currently exists only in Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish. Last summer I spent hours trying to track down details about Khvoshchinskaya’s many translations, and I could find where a lot of the Italian and French ones came from, but her translations of Lars Dilling stumped me.
I’m going to keep up, in the senses of “leave online” and “occasionally maintain,” the bibliographies of Khvoshchinskaya’s works and secondary literature about them, but you’ll want to go to the Khvoshchinskaya Sisters Digital Collection first. You can also find the 1876 portrait of Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya that Pavel Tretiakov commissioned from Ivan Kramskoi over there (and copied in this post).
Girls Are Smarter Than Old Men
My podcasts post did what I hoped, and now I have more good things to listen to than time to listen. Thanks to all who weighed in with suggestions! I wanted to highlight one podcast: Девчонки умнее стариков (Girls Are Smarter Than Old Men, after the title of an 1885 Tolstoi story also called “Little Girls Wiser Than Men”), recommended by jkdenne and surely of interest to readers of blogs like this one. Hosts Natasha Lomykina and Masha Lebedeva take pairs of books that did or didn’t make the shortlist for the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award and second-guess the choices of the all-male selection committee.
I’m the exact kind of person who needed to hear the first episode, where they tear down a novel about a middle-aged man reflecting on his failures and disappointments. This, they argue, is a specific and idiosyncratic topic that could only interest a narrow set, but those people—men of a certain age—happen to be the ones deciding which books make the cut. They think the committee should care more about books with themes that matter to regular people, like post-partum depression and mother-daughter relationships.
But the podcast isn’t just provocative restatements of this thesis. It’s two people who obviously love reading saying interesting things about recent books written in many different languages (at least in the first several episodes, when the prize at stake is the one for foreign literature in Russian translation). I’ve already bought one book on their recommendation.
Long after they’d won me over as a listener, they did a translation comparison out loud. Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s novel El ruido de las cosas al caer (The Sound of Things Falling, 2011) was published in Russian twice in 2022 by the same publishing house—they had hired Spanish-to-Russian translator Maria Malinskaya to do it when television presenter Mikhail Kozhukhov, bored during COVID, came to them with a translation he’d done himself. Lomykina and Lebedeva discuss whether it’s true or even necessarily good that Kozhukhov’s translation was called “more dynamic,” analyze how a single passage was handled by each translator, and discuss their different renditions of the title. Should it be The Sound or The Noise of Things Falling? See episode six, starting around 13:00.
“Yesterday afternoon, a little after five”
If you like Russian poetry from after Lermontov and before Blok, you’ve probably read this by Nekrasov:
Вчерашний день, часу в шестом,
Зашел я на Сенную;
Там били женщину кнутом,
Крестьянку молодую.
Ни звука из ее груди,
Лишь бич свистал, играя…
И Музе я сказал:
“Гляди! Сестра твоя родная!”
prose paraphrase:
Yesterday afternoon, a little after five, I happened upon Haymarket Square; a woman was being beaten with a knout there, a young peasant woman. Not a sound from her breast, only the whistling of the whip as it played… And I said to my Muse: “Look! Your sister!”
Nekrasov wrote this poem in an album in 1873, claiming it was from 1848. He never published it, and it would not appear in his collected works until 1920. It’s a widely known and straightforward-seeming short poem, but not as simple as people think, according to Pavel Uspenskii and Andrei Fedotov. They focus on three possible readings: the “civic” reading, where the peasant woman is whipped by representatives of the state (174–78); the “ordinary situation” reading, where the whipping is a private act of violence (179–84); and the “album” reading, where the whole situation represents the impossibility of any poetry by someone like Nekrasov being fit for a lady’s album (185–86). The ambiguity of the last two lines, quite appealing to readers used to modernist poetry, probably seemed like a defect even to the author at the time, and that may be an additional reason why Nekrasov left the poem unpublished (184–85).
Reading 1
The “civic” reading was popular in Soviet literary criticism, and Uspenskii and Fedotov take as their starting point an article by E. Dushechkina first published in 1983. For Dushechkina the poem is about state violence. The pseudo-passive in line 3 (the verb bili without a subject) implies this; why else would the poet not specify who is holding the knout (175)? The woman’s silence in line 5 reflects the fact, noted by contemporaries, that being flogged with a knout was so painful that victims were unable to cry out (174). But the scene is more significant than a single person’s pain. Because of the way the words for knout and whip are used in other Nekrasov poems, it becomes a generalized “symbol of the suffering and humiliation of the defenseless and oppressed people” (qtd. p. 175). The link between the woman and the Muse in lines 7–8 shifts our attention to another state sin: the red marks presumably on the woman’s back are like the marks left by a censor’s red pencil (184).
For Uspenskii and Fedotov, this line of thinking is doubly Soviet: besides the ideological Soviet need to see Nekrasov as a realist who based his poems on actual events, there is the experience of living in the Soviet Union, which gave people the habit of identifying a dangerous but unspecified agent with the government (174–75). But this poem probably wasn’t based on a government-imposed punishment Nekrasov witnessed. At the time when he claimed the poem was written, such public floggings were rare, especially of women, and when they did happen, they happened in the morning, in another part of St. Petersburg, with a different kind of whip (174). It’s linguistically and situationally plausible that the unspecified agent of bili is someone else (175). Take away Dushechkina’s Soviet worldview, and there is no reason to assume the woman’s silence is literal, but the knout symbolic (175).
It’s not wrong to read the poem as depicting an action by the government, according to Uspenskii and Fedotov, but if you read it that way, you should read it primarily as a product of the poet’s imagination, not a pithy description of a real event (175–76). And this act of imagination has an unstated erotic aspect, since publicly whipping a woman presupposed stripping her to the waist. In several pieces of visual art from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European artists depict this kind of violence against women in a sexualized way, unlike depictions of men being whipped, which were compassionate rather than erotic (176–78). Nekrasov may or may not have known these exact images or contemporary pornographic images of women being beaten, but he might have refrained from publishing the poem because you could read it with the poet as a voyeur who was turned on by the cruelty he saw (178).
Reading 2
Since we don’t need to assume the government was responsible for the woman being beaten, we can see it as an “ordinary situation” that happened in parts of St. Petersburg like Sennaia (Haymarket) Square. In the Soviet telling, this was one of the most “democratic” parts of the city, but to Uspenskii and Fedotov this is just a euphemistic way of saying it was considered a slum full of prostitutes and criminals where violent acts were common (179). Passages from Vsevolod Krestovskii’s The Slums of Petersburg (Петербургские трущобы, 1864–66) and Dostoevskii’s Notes from Underground (Записки из подполья, 1864), when read in context, show that Sennaia Square was thought of as a red-light district (179–80).
“Fallen women” in places like Sennaia were on the receiving end of violence from their neighbors. The woman in the poem could have been whipped not by agents of the state, but by “drunken clients or, perhaps, cabmen, in whose hands it is easy to picture a knout that is not symbolic, but real as can be” (182). And if we now imagine the knout as real, we can imagine the woman’s silence as metaphorical: it could represent the voicelessness of a doubly marginalized outcast who is “not only a representative of the silent peasant social estate, but is also most likely a woman of the night” (182).
Other poems by Nekrasov show women and animals on the receiving end of cruelty from peasant and merchant men, so it isn’t as if he saw the tsarist government as the source of all violence (180–81). If the Haymarket setting leads us to imagine the woman being beaten is a sex worker, then what do we make of the poet’s presence there? In one sense, he “gets exactly what he came for”: having come to the square presumably in search of sexual pleasure, he finds voyeuristic pleasure in watching the beating (183).
Reading 3
The third reading that coexists with the “civic” reading and the “ordinary situation” reading is the “album” reading. Dushechkina had also read Nekrasov’s poem in the context of the album it was written in, seeing a poetic dialogue with an earlier contribution by Turgenev (185). Uspenskii and Fedotov instead focus on the remarks Nekrasov wrote before and after the text of the poem. Nekrasov introduced the poem this way: “Having nothing new, I rummaged through my old papers for a long time and found a scrap of paper covered in penciled words. I could not make any of it out (the scrap, as far as I can remember, is from 1848) apart from the following eight lines.” After the text of the poem, he added, “forgive me if these lines do not entirely suit your elegant album. I failed to find or invent anything else” (186).
Uspenskii and Fedotov agree with an earlier argument by M. D. El’zon that the poem was written in 1873, not 1848. Why? Saying it was a draft and from long ago let Nekrasov distance himself from the shocking qualities of a poem about violence with erotic implications (186). Choosing 1848 in particular, a year associated with politics and censorship, let him guide the reader’s thoughts away from the erotic (186). But what else do these words framing the text do?
One possibility is that they let us read lines 7–8, where the woman and the Muse are both silent (the poet asks the Muse to look, not to speak) as a bit of the kind of high-society game poets had played in albums decades before:
In the atmosphere of the album, Nekrasov’s masterpiece unexpectedly takes on a high-society playfulness—the eight-line poem turns out to be a work whose pointe is that the poet cannot compose a poetic utterance suitable for the album, so he writes a poem about the impossibility of writing any poem at all. (186)
See Pavel Uspenskii and Andrei Fedotov, “‘Vcherashnii den’, chasu v shestom…’ N. Nekrasova: Al’bomnoe stikhotvorenie o gosudarstvennom nasilii, kvartale krasnykh fonarei i poeticheskoi nemote?” Novyi mir 8 (2022): 173–87. I’m becoming a huge fan of Uspenskii’s and his co-authors’ work: see earlier posts on their research on Panaeva (also Uspenskii and Fedotov) and Pasternak (Tat’iana Krasil’nikova and Uspenskii).
Behind the Wall (preface to the 1866 edition)
The preface below is from page 201 of V. Krestovskii [N. D. Khvoshchinskaia], Romany i povesti, vol. 8 (St. Petersburg, 1866). The 1866 text restores passages cut by the censor in the 1862 journal publication. The title and year of the story (“Behind the Wall. 1862.”) were printed on separate lines above the preface. Page 202 is blank, and the story proper begins on page 203, where the title but not the year is repeated. The next story appears under its title only, without the year or a preface. This preface to “Behind the Wall” was absent when the story was republished in 1880, 1892, and 1912–13. You can find a serialized translation of “Behind the Wall” (За стеною) starting here.
[Preface to the 1866 edition]
Three years ago, when these scenes appeared, they were taken to be what they in fact are: a quick sketch of something vital, a simple incident transcribed without any pretense of deciding who in it is right or wrong; the small frame into which the story was fitted did not leave enough space for even a slightly more detailed development of the plot and characters. The goal of the story was only to touch upon a question then beginning to interest society, how people feel constrained and suffer when no one is preventing them from satisfying their desires and no one is forcing them to suffer.—In three years, society has gone far in analyzing this question, and now when people come upon it in some literary work, they rightly no longer settle for implications, but demand a definite and clearly expressed opinion. If the reader of today should demand the same of these scenes, if they should leave so much unsaid that they cause a misunderstanding or arouse his indignation, then let the figure of the year when they were written serve as explanation or excuse. This is one side of our recent past told dispassionately… All of us are to blame for the composition and character of our common life, and perhaps traits can be found in a love from the time of serfdom that for many are familiar, not alien. The artless truth about old sorrows, transcribed without analysis and for that very reason more alive, may prove not without use as a guide in the new life beginning…
December, 1865.V. K.
[Предисловие из издания 1866 г.]
Три года назад, когда появились эти сцены, они были приняты за то, что они есть в самом деле: за беглый очерк насущного, за простой случай, записанный без претензии решать, кто в нем прав или виноват; маленькая рамка, в которую сложился рассказ, не давала места даже несколько более подробному развитию действия и характеров. Целью рассказа было — только коснуться вопроса, тогда начинавшего занимать общество, что люди стесняются и страдают, когда ничто не мешает им удовлетворять своим стремлениям и никто не вынуждает их страдать. — В три года, общество далеко пошло в разборе этого вопроса, и, встречаясь с ним теперь в каком-нибудь литературном произведении, справедливо требует уже на намеков, а мнения определенного и ясно выраженного. Если нынешний читатель потребует того же от этих сцен, если они своей неполнотой и недосказанностью возбудят в нем недоразумение или недовольство — пусть послужит для него объяснением или оправданием цифра года, когда они написаны. Это — рассказанная беспристрастно одна из сторон нашего недавнего прошлого… В складе и характере нашей общей жизни виноваты мы все, а в любви крепостных времен, может быть, найдутся черты знакомые и нечуждые многим. Безыскуственная, записанная без разбора, а потому именно, более живая правда о старых печалях, может быть небесполезна, как указание в новой, начинающейся жизни…
Декабрь, 1865.В. К.
A who’s who of pseudonyms
This must have been a good month to shop for books:
(This is the end of a 15-page catalogue advertising what a chain of bookstores was selling at their St. Petersburg, Kazan, and Warsaw locations. I think it appeared in multiple issues of The Herald of Europe; the image is from March 1868.)
Now on sale, War and Peace, Oblomov, Dombey and Son, No Way Out, Who Is to Blame?, La Dame de Monsoreau, The Family Chronicle, what I’m pretty sure is Villette, three separate collections by Russia’s leading prose satirist, tales of adventure about America…
Lots of authors went by their own names, as usual: Dickens, Tolstoy, Dumas, Goncharov, Aksakov, Avdeev.
Many are pseudonyms with no indication they are pseudonyms: Shchedrin (Saltykov), Stebnitsky (Leskov), Kokhanovskaya (Sokhanskaya), Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë), G. Aimard (Olivier Gloux). No author at all is listed for what I assume is Herzen’s Who Is to Blame?
And one author has her pseudonym revealed: “Novels and Novellas, by V. Krestovsky (N. D. Khvoshchinskaya), 8 volumes. St. Petersburg. 1866. Price 8 rubles.” Apparently the “V. Krestovsky (pseudonym)” workaround—not yet needed to distinguish her from young Vsevolod Krestovsky through most of the 1850s, and established in the 1870s and 1880s—had not caught on. It looks like the dividing line in the main journal she published in was between 1868’s Two Memorable Days, when she was still “V. Krestovsky, the author of the novel In Hope of Something Better et al.,” and 1869’s First Struggle.
In so many places—unlike this ad—journals bent over backward to avoid saying this Krestovsky’s real name was Khvoshchinskaya. Seeing both names in the ad made me wonder if the actual 1866 books said “V. Krestovsky (N. D. Khvoshchinskaya)” on the title page, but it looks like they didn’t:
It’s not impossible that “Khvoshchinskaya” appeared on some other page that wasn’t included in the .pdf I got from interlibrary loan. Still, that probably ruins the story I was starting to come up with, where the 1866 edition of Khvoshchinskaya’s collected novels and novellas is hard to find today because it revealed her real name, and since she wanted her fiction tied only to “V. Krestovsky,” she somehow bought up the whole print run or otherwise made the books disappear.
Podcasts
Here’s what I’ve been listening to:
- The Slavic Literature Pod
I was excited to discover this one, which used to be called Tipsy Tolstoy. Matt Gerasimovich and Cameron Lallana talk mostly about Russian literature and film. Sometimes they read a long book over many episodes, but the episodes I’ve started with get through one short work in one go: Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata (1889; with guest Tatyana Gershkovich) and “Alyosha the Pot” (written 1905), Khvoshchinskaya’s “On the Way” (1854), Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan (2014). - The Eurasian Knot
As a Sean’s Russia Blog fan from way back, I miss the old name The SRB Podcast, but Sean Guillory’s show remains excellent. The guests are wonderful, and the topics cover a lot of ground in the social sciences and humanities. And the name change makes sense, since it is actually, not just aspirationally, about more than Russia. - In Moscow’s Shadows
This is my favorite English-language source about events in Russia right now. Mark Galeotti is remarkably good at the one-person-podcast format, and from where I stand he seems both well-informed and admirably reluctant to go further than the evidence will take him. He was also great in June at a Pushkin House event with Ekaterina Schulmann (video).
I’m sharing these partly because I think they’re good, and you’d probably like them if you read this blog, but also as an excuse to ask all of you if you know of good podcasts about Russian or Slavic literature, culture, history, current events, etc. Please post a link in the comments if there is a podcast in any language that you’re enjoying!
I’d also love any recommendations you have for podcasts in Russian on any subject, as some that I used to listen to have ended. I sometimes listen to Живой гвоздь (the successor to Echo of Moscow) in podcast form, as well as Что случилось? from Meduza. My favorite in the last year or two has been the movie podcast Крупным планом from Kinopoisk, which hits that balance between friendly podcast banter and new information/novel opinions.
XIX век