Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya’s “Behind the Wall” and the censor

When I was comparing versions of Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya’s The Meeting (Свидание, 1879), I found that the 1912–13 Complete Collected Works in particular got rid of lots of passages of free indirect discourse, replaced pronouns with names, removed italics, softened emotional punctuation, and added paragraph breaks. It seemed like they were going for clarity, or their own idea of good taste, or perhaps consistency across different works in the collection, not fidelity to the author’s choices. Overall, though, the differences weren’t huge.

With “Behind the Wall” (За стеною, 1862), the 1912–13 editors also change paragraph structure, italics, and punctuation. There was little free indirect discourse to remove, since so much of the story is overheard direct speech. But the original 1862 journal publication stands out as different from all later ones I’ve consulted, and the reason is almost certainly cuts by the censor that soften the male lead’s remarks on marriage and religion. (This anticipates problems Khvoshchinskaya would have with the censor in 1878.) Here is a key passage with the words that were cut in 1862 but restored later crossed out, and words added in 1862 to try to preserve continuity in bold:

“And how do you understand duty?” he interrupted her. “I have done nothing to offend you, and you swear oaths of love, get down on your knees, shout ‘marry me!’ and just now you said I was a scoundrel? How should we live together after that…? Of course, that’s just how it should be for a married couple! All married people know that bliss: they have a good fight, and… What do you want, it’s a union! Blessed by God!” [The second half of a hyphenated word was allowed to stand at the end of this deleted passage, which let readers see that something was missing — EM]

He laughed out loud and pushed aside a chair as he paced the room.

“I asked you to leave my beliefs alone,” she said, once again with the familiar pronoun he had kept using all this time.

“I’m not attacking your convictions faith, calm down,” he objected coldly. “You have your ideas, I have mine: to each their own. There is just one thing I can’t make out: how do you make your peace with them?”

He stopped in front of her.

“These marriages of yours… when someone understands a man to be as you just made me out to be, that he doesn’t value anything, doesn’t respect anything, only needs women as lovers—you hear things like that all the time…! Marriages like those, how do people like you have the nerve to call God’s blessing upon them… if, that is, you believe in God? You all have God on your tongue every moment. Granted, if I, hopeless man that I am, try to explain it, I’ll say the wrong thing, say it my way, but how does it look to people with your beliefs? I have no ideals; you, with your ideals… you don’t find them disgusting, an abasement, a mockery, these transactions, these cohabitations, these vows of forever—which means until the first opportunity the first dashing young man rides by, until the first vile woman comes along selling her charms. All this is sanctified, all this is… how does your kind put it…? Lawful? Do you know, it’s simply a crime…? if it were unsanctified and unlawful, it wouldn’t be so revolting. That’s the thing—if people are animals, then let them live like animals. It would be more logical, at least…”

His voice gave out from an agitation that he no longer tried to hide.

“And that isn’t an insult either?” she asked abruptly, without emotion.

“What?”

“What you just said.” She again used the formal “you.” “That I am prepared… how did you put it? To throw myself at the first opportunity at the first dashing young man to ride by? I quite liked that expression.”

You can compare three of the Russian texts online: with cuts in 1862, pp. 438–39; without cuts in 1892, pp. 292–93; without cuts in 1912–13, pp. 26–27.

As you see, the cuts matter not just for reconstructing the author’s position—and the limits of what could be said in print—on an issue of the day, but for our understanding of the characters. In the uncensored (or less censored?) version, the woman says the man has said she is ready to throw herself at the first dashing young man, and the reader can decide whether the man meant “until the first dashing young man rides by” as a general statement or implicitly meant her. In the censored version, she is the first to mention the dashing young man, and she seems to be claiming he said more than he actually did.

I considered the possibility that the 1862 text was what Khvoshchinskaya first wrote, and the later texts were an attempt to make the man’s case stronger by adding something new. The 1866 preface to the story, which I’ve seen quoted by Arsen’ev but haven’t been able to read myself yet [update 11/20/23: here is the 1866 preface], apparently apologizes for not having free love unambiguously win the argument against institutional marriage, presumably in response to criticism from other liberal/progressive/pro-reform writers of the 1860s. But it’s obvious from the way the cuts were done that something was removed. I’ll be curious to see if the uncensored text first appeared in 1866 or 1880; I’m guessing 1866, since I think authors often managed to restore suppressed passages when an already approved piece went from a journal to a book.