A Double Life Page 2
The harsh criticism of her poetry in The Contemporary led Pavlova to write a long, rambling letter to Panaev, full of deprecation of both her sex and her art. However grand their tone, the following words show that Pavlova’s doubts and hesitations always took the form of questioning herself as a woman poet:
It is said that the chief content of a woman’s letter is in the postscript: I give you new proof of the truth of this pronouncement; only at the end of my letter do I decide to utter what is foremost in my heart, that your criticisms cut me to the quick. I do not repudiate my sex and have not conquered its weaknesses; whatever you may say, a woman-poet always remains more woman than poet and authorial egotism in her is weaker than female egotism…. I have never wished nor tried to make myself an author; this necessity that exists in me for better or for worse, this calling I keep in check as much as I can.12
Thus, Pavlova tries to defend her innocence; to wit, she is guilty only of the petty vanity of women, not the colossal vanity of a woman who wants to be a poet. She apologizes for her talent to the man who edited the most powerful journal of the time, but, as we have seen, in vain.
In exile, Pavlova came to view life as a challenge to survive. As she wrote to Olga Kireeva from Dresden on July 22, 1860, when alone and beset by financial difficulties, “I am occupied with the contemplation of an interesting experiment; I wish to see whether everything that befalls me will strengthen me; whether I will withstand it or not.”13 But even in exile, Pavlova, who was never closed to life, was able to form her last great literary friendship with a man who treated her not as a monster, but as an admired equal—Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, the poet, playwright, and humorist. They met in Dresden in 1860, and she translated his poetry and plays into German so that they could be acclaimed outside his native country. As his letters show, she also helped him with the Russian originals.14 He in turn secured a pension for her from the Russian government and corresponded warmly and solicitously with her until his death in 1875. Pavlova outlived him by eighteen years and died worse than reviled—she died utterly forgotten.
II
To be more than charitable, we might say that Pavlova’s life and art were so badly misread by her contemporaries because she was such a unique phenomenon in Russia. The eminent scholar B. Ya. Bukhshtab writes of how the first century of the new Russian poetry, from 1740–1840 approximately, brought forth not one notable woman author.15 Pavlova’s only contemporary female poet of note, the Countess Evdokiia Rostopchina, was as different from Pavlova as were the cities in which they lived, St. Petersburg and Moscow. Rostopchina’s poetry, aside from being stylistically less interesting than Pavlova’s, reads more like a chronicle of her vastly more successful life. This more intimate, domestic sort of poetry (“I am only a woman … ready to be proud of this,” Rostopchina wrote in her lyric “Temptation”) was and is generally considered peculiarly appropriate to women writers. Pavlova’s own verse—its feeling restrained, and lyric meditation or elegy being her preferred genre—was considered by her contemporaries, as it was by the modern Russian poet Vladislav Khodasevich, as “above all not feminine.”16 Pavlova’s lyrics, such as the cycle of poems inspired by her love for Boris Utin, can hardly be termed cold or abstract, but even when her poems reflect personal emotion, the feeling is both intensified and generalized, as is true in the case of most good poetry.
Neither Pavlova’s longer poems nor her prose works present a kind of confessional; still, her treatment of the theme of woman is central to many of them. Here as well, she was able to turn from the exact circumstances of her own life to the whole condition of the lives of others like her, the Russian women of her class. (Pavlova has no illusions about an aristocrat really being able to fathom the depths of misery of Russia’s poor, and she mocks Cecily, the heroine of A Double Life, for thinking that poverty can somehow be graceful.)
Until recently, Pavlova’s works were never discussed critically in terms of the primary theme that would link them to her life. Critics of both her and our times have pretended that her treatment of women is no more than a mere aspect of a criticism of aristocratic Russian society in general. But especially in a few of her longer poems and in her prose works, Pavlova concerned herself in a primary sense with women’s “fate”—with fate in quotation marks to stress the fact that if her women fail to be the agents of their destiny, it is not because their nature dooms them to suffering, but because the actions of men determine their fate. She described especially keenly the peculiar amorphousness of women’s lives, of what is expected and not expected of them, or, as she called it in her long narrative poem “Quadrille,” “the confusion (bestolkovost’) of woman’s role—/ A mixture of willfulness and constraint / Which is nearly always our lot.” The willfulness of a young girl who is seemingly free to accept or reject any man she wants and to construct her own dreams of life, as well as the constraint that the narrowness of her upbringing, the rules of acceptable conduct in society, and the ultimate necessity of marriage impose on her, form part of the duality of A Double Life.
In some of her other writings, Pavlova described the later stages of a woman’s life as well, although she had no definite comprehensive plans to be complete in this respect. In “Quadrille,” published in 1859 but begun as early as 1843, four women who are already married tell each other their stories, recalling how in different ways, their girlish illusions have been shattered. In her memoirs, which survive only in the fragment that was published in 1877, Pavlova, in the midst of a description of her own happy childhood, gives us a portrait of the death of a very old lady, a creature from a previous age. Again, we see the paradoxical quality of a woman’s existence—bound by convention, yet full of strange, heroic independence. The old lady has nursed a breast cancer without telling anyone about it: “This pampered lady to whom the smallest inconvenience was a burden, suffered a tormenting pain over the years, without permitting herself a single outcry.” She would lock herself in her bedroom and wash the blood and pus from her underwear so that even her maid would not see it. Pavlova’s father, who had a medical degree, was a close friend of this woman and suspected nothing. Pavlova expands the paradox:
Seeing a doctor every day, in whose art she fully believed, she had the strength of spirit not to betray herself even once, not to ask for help or the alleviation of the disease which was killing her! And all from modesty, in order not to have to bare her breast before a doctor—the breast of a sixty-year-old woman! One can call that folly, but it is impossible not to recognize a heroism of sorts in a woman who, awaiting an inescapably near and agonizing death, to the very end did not allow herself the merest slight to decorum, the most negligible digression from accustomed rules, did not once forget to embellish her clothes with the appropriate ribbon, to rouge her cheeks, and affix a mouche to her face.17
This strange behavior is the logical result of the upbringing to which young girls were subjected—and a true story stranger than any fiction. Russian realism had to pretend to have a semblance of believability; Russian reality did not.
While Pavlova felt a generalized sympathy with all the ages of woman, all “mute sisters of my soul,” as she called them in her dedicatory poem to A Double Life, she still felt closest to people of keen intelligence and to poets. Most of her heroines are not she. Like Cecily in A Double Life, their talents are unconscious, suppressed by circumstances of their lives as Pavlova never allowed hers to be. A long story of 1859 called “At the Tea-Table”18 begins with a sharp debate about the lack of equality of the sexes and whether women’s dependency and inferiority are inevitable. One character asserts that women are educated to be childlike and then politely scorned for having childish minds; another says that a woman’s nature is different from a man’s. Later, a story within the story is told, and its main character, the Countess Aline, says to a man who wants to marry her: “Don’t you know that to praise a woman’s intelligence means to reprove her? Aren’t people all convinced that there is no heart? Hasn’t it been de
cided that an intelligent woman is some kind of monster that has no feelings? Ask anyone; anyone will tell you this.” Pavlova’s own bitterness emerges at times, untransmuted by the more generalized passion of her art.
While Pavlova was nearly alone among Russian women writers of her time in the realization of her ambition to be a poet of importance, she was also part of the beginning of a new kind of literary activity in Russia—one concerning women and often involving women writers. In the second third of the nineteenth century, while women were beginning to write in the popular journals of the day, critics eagerly debated whether women should or should not write, and what was women’s special sphere of talent as writers. Related to this phenomenon was the fact that in the 1830s, male writers were developing the possibility of the society tale for social criticism and psychological intrigue. Still earlier, in France, Madame de Genlis had perfected this genre. In her story “La Femme Auteur,” she even confronts this problem of the woman writer: “Men would never accept a woman author as an equal; they would be more jealous of her than of a man.”19
In Russia, Vladimir Odoevsky refined this genre in the 1830s, and stories like his “Princess Mimi” (1834) and “Princess Zizi” (1839) have as their central figures independent, contradictory women who manipulate, if not their own destinies, then certainly those of others. If their lives produce evil results, then Odoevsky lets us know that their education is to blame: “They teach [a girl] dancing, drawing, and music so that she may get married…. This is the beginning and end of her life. It is her life.”
Lermontov sees the same social types, but much more from the man’s point of view. In “Princess Ligovskaya” (1836), which formed the basis for part of A Hero of Our Time, the main character is one who is hurt by society, and women, whether unyielding (“the class of women who have no heart”) or vulnerable, are damned either way. For women, says Lermontov, “tears are a weapon both for offense and for defense.”
A third author of society tales, V. A. Sollogub, wrote at least one piece that probably had some influence on A Double Life, a story called The Ball. It describes how men and women both hide their feelings behind masks. In a dream, their real emotions surface but only temporarily. The narrator is a man, but the woman he loves/hates has a long confessional monologue. Thus, for a decade before Pavlova wrote A Double Life, the prose writers of Russia were describing, with varying degrees of sympathy, women in society whose conflict with the world took place in the shrunken arenas of their townhouses, in their drawing rooms, behind their tea tables. In these small places where they fought the determining battles of their lives, their strength is tested and their character defined as surely and dramatically as if they, like the men, had gone to the rugged mountains or limitless horizons of the Caucasus to pacify the natives and fight duels with fellow officers.
The publication of A Double Life in 1848, when Pavlova was at the height of her fame as a poet and translator, was a literary event that drew the attention of all the important literary journals of Russia. One chapter of the novel had been published a year before, and the full work was eagerly anticipated. The fact that it was part prose and part poetry seemed to bother no one; the reviewers understood the purpose of this structure and praised the quality of the poetry highly. Even The Contemporary’s anonymous reviewer called Pavlova’s new work “original in form, in the highest degree remarkable in content.”20 In one of the peculiar tributes to which women poets are subject, he stated that the poetry was so sharp and energetic that “it is difficult to recognize in it the tender hand of woman.” Showing his social conscience, he praised Pavlova for dealing with important questions like the education of society women. He also made the crucial distinction that the heroine carries poetry in her soul without actually being a poet. But his enthusiasm went far beyond the text, causing him to utter something contradictory to the ideas of the novel that he had just been praising when he rhapsodized that young girls should certainly not try to lose their love of parties and cease to cultivate feminine charms:
On the contrary, we would even wish our girls and especially women more of that desire to please. Maybe this would save them from the terrible change which comes over them when they get married, when they no longer consider it necessary to dress nicely at home for their husbands, when they replace the corset with the peignoir, the slender figure with a full body.21
Here, the male imagination, indulging in literary and social criticism of a most fanciful kind, itself becomes ex post facto a kind of background for what Pavlova was dealing with in her novel.
A Double Life, a novel in ten chapters, is the story of a young girl named Cecily von Lindenborn, whom we see being trapped into a meaningless life and marriage by the people closest to her—her well-meaning mother; her best friend, Olga; and Olga’s mother, an experienced social manipulator. In the last chapter, Dmitry, Cecily’s suitor, marries her for money. Pavlova does an excellent job of describing this kind of man of little will, who is teased by his friends into a pledge of faithlessness to his marriage even before it takes place. As one of the bachelors says, “Who would want to get married if the blessed state of matrimony made it necessary to give up wine and good times?” Cecily, on the other hand, has only vague premonitions that something is going wrong. Her upbringing has so carefully cultivated an almost total ignorance that she
could never commit the slightest peccadillo … could never forget herself for a moment, raise her voice half a tone … enjoy a conversation with a man to the point where she might talk to him ten minutes longer than was proper or look to the right when she was supposed to look to the left.
Cecily, surrounded by wealth, friends, and family, is ultimately quite alone. Her mother, who accompanies Cecily almost constantly and communicates with her not at all, wants her married—to someone rich if possible, but married. Her closest friend, Olga, encourages Cecily’s marriage, so that she will be hors concours for a certain disdainful Prince Victor, who goes off to Paris in the last chapter anyway, and in so doing foils the carefully laid plans of Olga’s mother, Natalia Afanasevna Valitskaia. Clever as this prime mover of the intrigue underlying A Double Life may be, it is the men who always have the ultimate option of freedom.
Like most of the great Russian novels of its time, this one is set in the aristocratic world. Pavlova further logically restricts her heroine to the female quarters of this world—enclosed and protected in domestic interiors or carriages traveling from house to house or from house to church. In the rare moments when Cecily steps onto a balcony or rides on horseback, she experiences a short-lived sense of exhilaration and of control over fate: “She gave herself over to the joy of riding horseback, to the attractions of this living force, this half-free will that carried her off and that she was guiding.” This is Pavlova’s most potent sexual metaphor in the nondream sections of the novel—and probably the best that Cecily will be granted before or after her marriage.
Nevertheless, it is in the most secluded place, in her bedroom, that Cecily is the least constrained. Here, we see the revelations of her mind freed from its mental corset (to use Pavlova’s image). Every chapter has the same structure, with some variation—a day of society’s vanities and cruelties followed by a night of dreams. Each chapter begins in prose and ends in verse, with the verse expressing a kind of interior monologue to reflect the double life that Cecily leads. The sections linking them are often in rhythmical prose and describe a state of drowsing, between reality and dream. There are other links as well: She dreams about people she hears about in the drawing room by day and thinks in her waking hours of what she has seen in her dreams. Finally, dreams and waking have an inverse emotional correlation: the better that Cecily’s real life seems to become as her marriage approaches, the greater the anguish expressed in her poetic dreams.
Each separate chapter has its own careful structure as well. The ninth, for example, begins and ends with Cecily’s sad dreaming and contrasts in the middle the prewedding parties of bride and groom; the
tenth begins in the brilliant but artificial illumination of Cecily’s mother’s house and ends with the church lights being extinguished after the wedding and a view of the dark, empty street. And there is often a nice alternation of style from one chapter to the next: Chapter 6 contains long, descriptive or ironically didactic paragraphs; Chapter 7 deals with the machinations of Muscovite matrons predominantly in dialogue (as each says the opposite of what she thinks, and the others know it but must pretend to take her words at face value).
Within the well-planned framework of the novel are the equally important small touches—symbolic, ironic, humorous. Pavlova excels in the topography of social relations: who sits near whom and who walks with whom determine whole years of a character’s life. The breaking of a blossom or closing of the latch on a jeweled bracelet symbolizes a future life broken and encircled. The most pathetic female character of all is named Nadezhda: she still has (as her name is translated) “hope” that she too will be married someday.
Pavlova, as unabashedly as any of the nineteenth-century male writers that were her contemporaries, makes clear in her fiction her own preferences and values in life. Thus, its attitude toward poetry is the measure of the society of the novel. When a poet suffers and is ridiculed, society is condemned. Even Cecily dares set her creative mind free only in dreams; in her waking life, she knew “that there were even women poets, but this was always presented to her as the most pitiable, abnormal thing, as a disastrous and dangerous illness.” The behavior of the two sexes is unequally compared by Pavlova. She describes men posing as carefully as women in society (they are equal in vanity); but her men have a particular crudeness that her women are free of, and some of her women have certain attractive virtues that her men at best only seem to have—“that violent female daring which is so far from manly valor.”