Pavlova possesses a romanticism that is characteristic of her time but mixed with an ironic sense of reality. We are told repeatedly that Cecily’s love for Dmitry is good even if Dmitry himself is not. Cecily’s mysterious sickliness both enhances her worldly beauty and brings her closer to the other world of which she dreams. Cecily is vulnerable like two of the novel’s minor characters—the poet who encounters boredom when he recites and the dead wife who is reproached for having loved her husband too well. Nature and seasonal change play an important role, even in this society tale. The sounds of nature outside Cecily’s room mark a transition from waking to dreams. Nature acts as an ironic accomplice to society when, in the gardens of a summerhouse, “even nature made itself unnatural.” The starry expanse of sky often provides a contrast to the petty world below. The novel begins in the spring, when Cecily dreams of love, and ends in the autumn, when she is married. The coming winter is strongly implied.
The strength of this novel, as of Pavlova’s view of life, is that both merge these romantic concepts into an ultimately clear realism. The countless ironic touches in A Double Life—from purely lexical ones, such as the use of the word satisfied, to larger metaphors, like the one comparing marriage to a mother pushing her daughter out of the window onto the pavement below—prevent the reader from becoming too lost in the enjoyment of the details of how rich aristocrats live. Similarly, as much as we could wish a happier ending for Cecily, Pavlova leaves her, and us, with the one weapon against life that does not destroy life: consciousness. The double awareness that this is the way things are and ought not to be, and the high quality of Pavlova’s narrative and poetic style, are themselves a vivid protest against the destiny of women.
And the first sentence of chapter 1 (“ ‘But are they rich?’”) is the best opening line of any Russian novel. In Russian, it takes only two words: “A bogaty?”
NOTES
1.These and many other biographical facts have been discovered or confirmed by Munir Sendich. See his unpublished dissertation, The Life and Works of Karolina Pavlova (New York University, 1968), and his publications of Pavlova’s correspondence: “Twelve Unpublished Letters to Alexey Tolstoi,’’ Russian Literature Triquarterly, no. 9 (Spring 1974), 541–58, and “Boris Utin in Pavlova’s Poems and Correspondence: Pavlova’s Unpublished Letters to Utin,” Russian Language Journal 28, no. 100 (1974): 63–88. The other early Pavlova scholar writing in English cannot resist moralizing, rather obtusely, that it was Pavlova’s “serious shortcoming … to allow the unhappy trends of her own personal life to intrude into her work.” See Anthony D. Briggs, “Twofold Life: A Mirror of Karolina Pavlova’s Shortcomings and Achievement,” Slavonic and East European Review 49, no. 114 (January 1971): 1–17. Slavic studies have come a bit further since these words were written, but they stand as a monument to past practice.
For the most complete biography of Pavlova, the reader is referred to Diana Greene’s entry on her in the Dictionary of Russian Woman Writers, ed. Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal, and Mary Zirin (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994), 492–93. Greene’s entry predates the excellent discussion of Pavlova and her cultural context in Catriona Kelly, A History of Women’s Writing; 1820–1992 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 93–107. See also Greene’s “Gender and Genre in Pavlova’s A Double Life,” Slavic Review 54, no. 3 (1995): 563–77. Pavlova has yet to have a full-length study devoted to her; the present translation is still the only publication of Dvoinaia zhizn’ (A Double Life) as a separate book in any language.
A symposium on Karolina Pavlova was held at Wesleyan University in April 1995, resulting in the fullest scholarly publication about her to date: Essays on Karolina Pavlova, ed. Susanne Fusso and Alexander Lehrman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001). Susanne Fusso’s contribution to this work, “Pavlova’s Quadrille: The Feminine Variant of (the End of) Romanticism,” explores new ways in which Pavlova’s femaleness became a literary fact within her poetic works.
2.N. M. Iazykov, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1934), 791–92.
3.B. N. Chicherin, Vospominaniia. Moskva sorokovykh godov (Moscow, 1929), 3–4.
4.A partial list of such artists would include Alexander Turgenev, Pyotr Chaadaev, Alexander Herzen, Alexei Khomiakov, Konstantin and Ivan Aksakov, Vitalii Granovskii, Mikhail Pogodin, Stepan Shevyrev, Afanasy Fet, and Yakov Petrovich Polonskii, and foreign visitors such as Franz Liszt and Alexander von Humboldt. See Munir Sendich, “Moscow Literary Salons: Thursdays at Karolina Pavlova’s,” Die Welt der Slaven 17, no. 2 (1973): 341–57.
5.I. N. Pavlov, “Iz moikh vospominanii,” Russkoe obozrenie, no. 4 (1896): 889.
6.A. S. Khomiakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1904), 7:102. This is in a letter from Khomiakov’s wife, Ekaterina, to Iazykov, who was her brother.
7.N. Kovarskii, “Introduction to Karolina Pavlova,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad, 1939), vi–vii.
8.I. I. Panaev, Literaturnye vospominaniia (Leningrad, 1928), 288–89.
9.D. V. Grigorovich, Literaturnye vospominaniia (Leningrad, 1928), 193.
10.A letter of January 23, 1860, published in I. S. Aksakov v ego pis’makh (Moscow, 1892), 3:353.
11.Quoted in Boris Rapgof, K. Pavlova, Materialy dlia izucheniia zhizni i tvorchestva (P., 1916), 18–19.
12.Letter of October 12, 1854, quoted in Karolina Pavlova, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. V. Briusov (Moscow, 1915), 2:330–32.
13.Rapgof, 73. One critic, in a recent biography of her husband, claims that Pavlova led a life of luxury abroad (V. P. Vil’chinskii, N. F. Pavlov, Leningrad, 1970, 101). Quite the opposite is true, however. Nearly all of her unpublished letters of the time admit to financial as well as moral distress. See, for example, two letters in the Manuscript Division of the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library, Fond 852, N. 784; and Fond 66, N. 1, 46–47. The latter reads: “Je suis hors d’état d’agir, incapable même de vouloir, et horriblement seule.”
14.A. K. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 4:329, 347, and passim.
15.See B. Ya. Bukhshtab, ed., Poety 1840‒1850-kh godov (Moscow-Leningrad, 1962), 35.
16.V. Khodasevich, “Odna iz zabytykh,” Novaia zhizn’, (1916), 3:198.
17.Pavlova, Sobranie sochinenii, 303.
18.Ibid., 383. This story now can be read in English in An Anthology of Russian Women’s Writing 1777–1992, edited by Catriona Kelly (Oxford, 1994), 30–70. For an excellent analysis, see Diana Greene, “Karolina Pavlova’s ‘At the Tea Table’ and the Politics of Class and Gender,” Russian Review (April, 1994), 271–84, and her Reinventing Romantic Poetry: Russian Women Poets of the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).
19.Madame de Genlis, Nouveaux contes moraux et nouvelles historiques (Paris, 1804), 3:61–62.
20.Anonymous, “Dvoinaia zhizn’. Ocherk K. Pavlovoi,” Sovremennik, vol. 7, no. 3 (1848), 47.
21.“Dvoinai zhizn’”, 52–53.
DEDICATION
To you the offering of this thought,
The greeting of my poetry,
To you this work of solitude,
O slaves of din and vanity.
In silence did my sad sigh name
You Cecilys unmet by me,
All of you Psyches without wings,
Mute sisters of my soul!
God grant you, unknown family,
One sacred dream mid sinful lies,
In the prison of this narrow life
Just one brief burst of that other life.
September 1846
Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence.
Byron
“But are they rich?”
“I think so; the estate is sizable. They live well enough. Besides the usual Saturdays, they give several balls during the winter; he himself doesn’t enter into things; his wife handles everything; c’est une femme de tête.”
“What’s the daughter
like?”
“Nothing special! Good-looking enough and not stupid, they say, but who is stupid nowadays? Anyway, I’ve never discussed anything with her except the weather and dances, but she must have a touch of her father’s German blood. I can’t stand all these Germans and half-Germans.”
“A good match?”
“No! There’s a younger brother.”
“What do people do there on Saturdays?”
“Well, they mostly talk. Not too many people there. You’ll see.”
“Oh, I’m so fed up with conversations! You can’t escape from them.”
The carriage stopped at the entrance of a large house on Tverskoi Boulevard.
“Here we are,” said one of the two young men who were sitting in it, and both got out and ran up the wrought-iron staircase. In the vestibule, they made sure with a glance that their German-tailored clothing was fitted just right; they entered, bowed to their hostess, and looked around.
In the elegant drawing room were about thirty people. Some were talking among themselves in low tones, some were listening, others passing through; but it seemed as if all of them were weighed down by a sense of duty, evidently quite onerous, and it seemed that they all found amusing themselves a bit boring. There were no loud voices or arguments, nor any cigars either. This was a drawing room completely comme il faut; even the ladies did not smoke.
Not far from the door sat the hostess on one of those nondescript pieces of furniture that fills our rooms these days. In another corner stood a tea table. Nearby, some exceedingly nice young girls were whispering among themselves. A bit farther away, next to a large bronze clock on which it had just struck half past ten, a very noteworthy and graceful woman, submerged (so to speak) in a huge velvet armchair, was conversing with three young men sitting near her. They were talking about someone.
“He died this morning,” one of them said.
“Nothing to mourn about,” answered his lovely neighbor, looking at him in the most charming way.
“Well,” said one youth, smiling, “he was not so young anymore but very handsome; he was wicked but clever.”
“He was simply unbearable,” said the lady, “and I never liked his looks; there was something angry about them.”
“Who has died?” softly asked a shapely, pale, dark-haired girl of eighteen, going up to the tea table and bowing to one of the ladies near it. “Who has died, Olga?”
“I don’t know,” Olga replied.
The dark-haired girl sat down at the table and started to pour tea.
The graceful lady in the velvet armchair continued her clever conversation with the three young men. Judging by that conversation, it was limp and banal enough, but to judge by the expressions, the smiles and glances of the people talking, it was extremely lively and sophisticated.
“Who is that, Cécile?” Olga whispered to the young girl pouring tea.
Cecily looked up.
“The man who came in with Ilichev? I forget his name. It’s the first time he’s ever come to our house. It seems he’s a poet.”
Olga gave a haughty pout and turned her head toward the other side of the room. Two more men appeared. One of them led the other to the hostess, Vera Vladimirovna von Lindenborn, and introduced him. She greeted them most pleasantly.
“I am truly glad to be able to meet you at last. I hope that some time you will give us the pleasure of hearing you read your work.”
Vera Vladimirovna was not only a highly educated woman who entertained poets and artists, but also a woman of tact. She did not wish to put her visitor’s talent to use the very first time.
In the opposite corner of the drawing room, a distinguished man with graying hair barely perceptible in the candlelight, with a certain artificial carelessness in his dress and pretensions to profundity and perspicacity, went up to a young dandy leaning toward the window, whose eccentric hairstyle and spotless gloves were silhouetted very effectively against the heavy, cherry-colored curtain that fell to the parquet floors and set off his waistcoat, of the latest Parisian cut. He did not even contemplate having any other affectation.
“Look at the group near the tea table,” the distinguished man said to him. “Shall I tell you what is going on there? Sophia Strenetskaia is wondering where she can find a magnanimous bridegroom who will rescue the family from inevitable poverty and clear their debts to the Board of Guardians. Olga Valitskaia is out of sorts because Prince Victor has not come. Princess Alina is laughing so hard in vain; the victorious Uhlan won’t leave her cousin alone today, and the latter is using him to infuriate a certain other gentleman in the room. Amusing, isn’t it?”
“You’re a terrible man!” the young dandy respectfully answered, twirling his whiskers.
The terrible man smiled condescendingly.
In the mature ladies’ circle, the conversation was more innocent.
“Will you be moving to the Park soon?” Vera Vladimirovna was asked by a tall, important-looking lady sitting next to her, who until then had observed a strict silence.1
“In about two weeks, at the beginning of June,” she answered. “It seems the bad weather has passed. Will you be there too?”
“Yes, I love it. At least there you can spend the summer in good society, not like in the country, where you have to get along with God knows what kind of neighbors.”
“I agree completely,” said another well-dressed lady of forty, who wore roses in her hair and short sleeves as a kind of antidote against old age. “I am terribly glad to have escaped the district of Ryazan. My husband was absolutely set on taking me there for the summer, but thanks to my brother’s wedding, I’m lucky enough to end up in Petersburg instead of Ryazan. Even here in Moscow, I’m feeling a little stifled.”
“You’re an enemy of Moscow,” remarked Vera Vladimirovna.
“Why? I only share the opinion of Napoleon and think that, except for two or three salons such as this one, Moscow is a large village. And I admit I’m not devoted to villages.”
Meanwhile, the pouring of tea ceased, and Cecily and the young girls went out on the wide balcony. It was a magnificent May night, full of stars. The lindens growing green in front of the balcony rustled so softly, so harmoniously sadly, so mysteriously that it seemed as if they were growing not on the Tverskoi Boulevard, but in the free expanse of virgin nature. Cecily leaned on the iron railing and became lost in thought about heaven knows what.
Her friends were laughing among themselves. One, a lively blonde girl, with her back to the railing, looked through a lorgnette at the drawing room and made her remarks in a semiwhisper. She was obliged to make fun of people because she had the reputation of being very witty.
“I think,” she said, “that that blue dress will soon get a medal, it’s done such long service.”
The girls almost burst out laughing.
One of them asked, “Doesn’t my brother’s uniform become him?”
“Not at all,” said the blonde. “A man in a uniform should be swarthy and dark-haired, like Chatsky,2 for example. Don’t you agree, Cecily, that Chatsky is very handsome?”
“Not in my opinion,” Cecily answered. “His features are too sharp. I like a man to have a modest appearance, and even an almost feminine shyness.”
“Where is Dmitry Ivachinsky?” the blonde suddenly asked her.
“He’s visiting his father in the country,” said Cecily in a voice that showed she was blushing.
“When is he coming back?” the blonde continued with a meaningful smile.
“How should I know?” Cecily turned and went into the drawing room again.
Some mothers were already looking for their daughters, to take them home. Vera Vladimirovna came up to Cecily.
“Time to sleep, Cécile,” she said. “You know that doctor’s orders are for you to go to bed early, and it’s already almost midnight. Go on, my dear, people will understand.” She made the sign of the cross over her, and Cecily went out, walked past a long series of rooms lighted and dark, turn
ed into a barely lit corridor, and went into her own room.
There, everything was peaceful and silent. In the adjoining room, her old Englishwoman had already been in a deep sleep for two hours.
As is well known, a young lady of the highest circles cannot exist without an Englishwoman. In our society, we do not speak English, our ladies generally read English novels in French translations, and Shakespeare and Byron are completely off-limits, but if your six-year-old daughter speaks anything but English, she is badly educated. It often follows that the mother, not as well educated as her daughter, has trouble talking to her, but this inconvenience is of slight importance. A child needs an English nurse more than a mother.
Cecily called to the maid and began to undress slowly and pensively. She was thinking that most likely the summer would be pleasant, that the summerhouse would be fun, that soon Dmitry Ivachinsky would return and that they would take walks together and dance and go horseback riding. But at the same time, in the midst of these happy thoughts, a strange and inexplicable one kept breaking through—a heavy and persistent feeling, as if she were being made to guess a riddle, find a word, remember a name and was not able to … Finally, she lay down, the maid went out carrying the candle, and everything grew quiet. In the cozy, soundless room, the small lamp flickered in front of the icon of the Savior.
The clock on the small column between the windows struck half past twelve with one resounding stroke in the silence. Cecily’s gaze wandered lazily around the bedroom; the peaceful icon in its brilliant setting came and went before her eyes; then drowsiness closed them … but the question in her soul just would not fall asleep … how had it been? … who? … and where? …
A Double Life Page 3