A Double Life

by Barbara Heldt

  A DOUBLE LIFE

  RUSSIAN LIBRARY

  The Russian Library at Columbia University Press publishes an expansive selection of Russian literature in English translation, concentrating on works previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations. Works of premodern, modern, and contemporary literature are featured, including recent writing. The series seeks to demonstrate the breadth, surprising variety, and global importance of the Russian literary tradition and includes not only novels but also short stories, plays, poetry, memoirs, creative nonfiction, and works of mixed or fluid genre.

  Editorial Board:

  Vsevolod Bagno

  Dmitry Bak

  Rosamund Bartlett

  Caryl Emerson

  Peter B. Kaufman

  Mark Lipovetsky

  Oliver Ready

  Stephanie Sandler

  For a complete list of books in the series, see Series List.

  Published with the support of Read Russia, Inc., and the Institute of Literary Translation, Russia

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Introduction and translation copyright © 2019 Barbara Heldt

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-54911-0

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Pavlova, Karolina, 1807–1893, author. | Heldt, Barbara, 1940– translator, writer of introduction.

  Title: A double life / Karolina Pavlova; translated and with an introduction by Barbara Heldt.

  Other titles: Dvoĭnai︠a︡ zhiznʹ. English (Heldt)

  Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. | Series: Russian library

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018054278 (print) | LCCN 2018058345 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231549110 (electronic) | ISBN 9780231190787 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231190794 (pbk.)

  Classification: LCC PG3337.P35 (ebook) | LCC PG3337.P35 D8613 2019 (print) | DDC 893.71/3—dc 3

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018054278

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

  Cover design: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich

  Book design: Lisa Hamm

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Barbara Heldt

  A DOUBLE LIFE

  Afterword by Daniel Green

  INTRODUCTION

  Karolina Pavlova: The Woman Poet and the Double Life

  BARBARA HELDT

  In the nineteenth century, when its literature equaled that written at any place at any time in history, Russia had no “great” woman writer—no Sappho, no Ono, no Komachi or Murasaki Shikibu, no Madame de Staël or George Sand, no Jane Austen or George Eliot—or so we might say when surveying the best-known works of the age. But we now know this truth to be less than true.

  Karolina Pavlova, born Karolina Karlovna Jaenisch in Yaroslavl in 1807, died in Dresden in 1893 after having lived outside Russia for four decades. She had abandoned her native country not because of tsarist oppression but because of hostile criticism of her poetry and her personal life. She died without friends, without family, without money, without renown (not a single Russian newspaper gave her an obituary)1 but with an unyielding dedication to what she called her “holy craft,” which had produced a body of fine literary, largely poetic, works.

  In 1848, when she had completed her only novel, A Double Life, Pavlova was not only devoted to art but also enjoyed other, more transient pleasures like love, friendship, and respect, which she was to lose later on. To judge from the irony that pervades her otherwise romantic description in this book of a young girl who has everything, Karolina Pavlova even at that time had come to expect little from the world beyond what her own talents and personality could bring to it. The theme of conflict between poet and society had informed the works of the great lyric poets who were her predecessors, Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov.

  Pavlova returned to this theme again and again, translating her emotions into verse of abstract classical precision, which her detractors called cold, heartless, and remote from the so-called real problems of life. Even when there was admiration for her poetry, it was mixed with ridicule of her personally. Thus, a letter of her fellow poet N.M. Iazykov in 18322 contains hints that this extraordinary phenomenon, a woman poet, was somehow ridiculous when reciting her poetry, as was then the custom. In this way was engendered a more subtle conflict than that of poet versus society—that of woman poet versus society and ultimately, of woman versus poet within Pavlova herself.

  As much as any woman of her time could in Russia, Pavlova lived in a man’s world. Her father, Karl Jaenisch, was a professor of physics and chemistry at the School of Medicine and Surgery in Moscow; many university professors in Russia were, like him, of German origin. Jaenisch adored his daughter and saw to it that she received a superb education at home—the only place in Russia where a woman could get a higher education (Moscow University was not officially open to women until 1876, although various so-called women’s courses existed beginning in the early 1870s). Her first romantic love was the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, who tutored her in Polish (she already knew Russian, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, and Dutch, as well as Russian) and was stunned by her literary talent. In the late 1820s, Karolina Jaenisch was already attending the important literary gatherings in Moscow, translating poetry, and writing her own works in German and French. In 1833, her first book appeared—a translation of Russian poets into German called Das Nordlicht.

  In December 1836, she married Nikolai Pavlov, a minor figure in the world of letters whose talent soon ran dry. Pavlov’s friend B.N. Chicherin wrote in his memoirs that Pavlov confessed to having married Karolina for her money—“a social misdemeanor,” Chicherin says, “that is quite usual and looked upon with indulgence.”3

  On Thursdays in their Moscow house from 1839 to 1844, the leading figures of the day attended the Pavlovs’ literary salon.4 Poets would read aloud from their latest works, and the exponents of the two social philosophies of the age, the Slavophiles and the Westernizers, would gather for sharp debate until their mutual hostility grew too great for social gatherings to countenance. The Pavlovs had a son named Ippolit, who recalled how his mother would often retire from her large and noisy household and compose her verses by speaking them aloud, walking back and forth in her room, repeating, rearranging, and modifying words and phrases.5

  An alien figure both because she was perceived as being “German” and because she was a woman-poet, Pavlova lived above all for her art. The recurrent theme in her relationships with all her famous contemporaries is her need, through their friendship, to confirm her view of herself as a poet. In poetry dedicated to them, she constantly reiterates what she wrote to Yevgeny Baratynsky in 1842: “You have called me poet, / Liking my careless verse; / And I, warmed by your light, / Believed, then, in myself.”

  But circumstances of her life conspired to undermine this belief. If Pavlov married Karolina for her money, he soon began to gamble it away, sometimes at the rate of 10,000 to 15,000 rubles in an evening. Friends noticed that as her literary fame increased and his declined, he grew jealous: “Soon her poetry will be read more than his short stories. It seems he fears this.”6 Pavlov set up a separate household with a younger cousin of his wife, whom Karolina had taken in and helped support.

  The loneliness of Pavlova’s position was greatly intensified by the fact that, despite the long list of famous men among her acquaintances, most of her male contemporaries disliked her intensely and interpreted her shaky pride as haughtiness, and her love of poetry as the
atrical posing. As a Soviet scholar has written: “The ironic references to Karolina Jaenisch are as frequent as the well-wishing ones, if not more frequent, and the latter in their tone … invariably include a shade of irony and mockery. The number of epigrams aimed at Jaenisch appear not less in number than the number of album verses full of praise and ecstasy.”7 To many, Pavlova’s claim to live only for her art seemed a monstrous thing in a woman—or at best something to be indulgently patronized.

  From I. I. Panaev, the powerful editor and minor writer and publicist, comes the most consistently unfavorable picture of her. He claims to have felt “timidity” in her presence:

  Before me was a tall, extremely thin lady, stern and majestic in appearance … In her pose, in her glance was something affected, rhetorical. She stopped between two marble columns, with dignity she inclined her head slightly at my bow and then extended her hand to me with the majesty of a theatrical empress…. Within five minutes I learned from Mrs. Pavlov that she had received much attention from Alexander [von] Humboldt and Goethe—and the latter had written some lines to her in her album … then the album with these precious pages was brought forth…. Within a quarter of an hour Karolina Karlovna was declaiming to me some verses translated by her from German and English.8

  By drawing attention to her work, promoting it to an influential man of letters, Pavlova may have thought that she was acting in the normal professional manner, but this way of being a poet was perceived as grotesque in a female. Panaev also relates that Pavlova treated her husband rudely (as well she might have, considering that by then, Nikolai was gambling away her entire estate). Panaev, too, seems to be responsible for the glib slanders against Pavlova’s verse, which followed naturally from his dislike of her personally. Once, when Timofey Granovsky began to praise her poetry, Panaev set him straight by reading a parody of Pavlova, and from then on, or so he claims, Granovsky had nothing further to do with her.

  Panaev’s poem, like all his “parodies,” is actually a satire directing itself at Pavlova’s person, rather than an attempt to imitate parodically the qualities of her verse. Another and more genuine parody of Pavlova, called “My Disillusionment,” by another critic on the left, the poet Nikolay Nekrasov, bemoans the possibility that women might want to give up jelly-boiling and pickle-making for philosophy and literature. One can only regret that Nekrasov, who often expressed in his poetry a voyeuristic sympathy for “fallen women” (as prostitutes of the time were romantically called), was incapable of extending the same sympathy to women of his own class.

  D. V. Grigorovich, in his memoirs, repeats a common criticism of Pavlova’s poetry which, because it was untrue, seemed to stem from both ideological and personal dislike. He says that when they were introduced, “not half an hour had gone by after the customary courtesies but she was already reading to me and the two or three other people sitting there her verses, which are distinguished more by the beautiful sounds of the words than the poetic content.”9 This criticism of her verse—that it subordinated sense to sound—reflects a common charge made by poets and critics of utilitarian persuasion against those of either the Slavophile or the “art for art’s sake” philosophy. Panaev and the crusading journal The Contemporary were Pavlova’s opponents in an intellectually polarized Russia, and she in turn condemned the utilitarians as “cold minds” (in her “Poslanie I. S. Aksakovu” of 1846).

  Even Pavlova’s literary friends wrote, if not articles and memoirs, then private letters condemning her as a woman. The Slavophiles appreciated Pavlova as a poet not only for the nationalist content of some of her verses but also for making Russian poetry known abroad through her translations. Yet when Pavlova finally took matters in hand and initiated proceedings that led to her husband’s arrest after he mortgaged her property in secret, even her closest friends turned against her. She could not have foreseen that Pavlov’s reputation as a liberal would bring about a search of his library, which contained some banned books; as a result of this discovery, he was jailed and sentenced to a ten-month exile in Perm. He was later pardoned by the authorities and returned to live with his wife’s cousin, but their friends never forgave Pavlova.

  During the early months of 1853, Pavlova wrote nothing. She left for Petersburg, where her father died in a cholera epidemic. Trying to avoid contagion, she left without attending his burial, and a new scandal arose because of her treatment of the dead man. In May 1853, she settled in Dorpat with her son and mother. In the midst of her distress, she met a law student named Boris Utin, twenty-five years younger than she, who became the profoundest love of her life. Her long poetic silence was broken in January 1854 with a poem that celebrated their meeting and the rare relationship of equals that Pavlova needed to have with men. It contains a double tension. The first is that of two people communicating while at the same time participating in society games (Pavlova does not indulge in a Byronic rejection of society; she describes the even-more-difficult triumph of feeling within its context). The second is that between two people themselves as they experience, fight, and resolve a complete sexual and spiritual attraction. Initially as enemies, and finally as brothers, they are always equals:

  Strange, the way we met. In a drawing-room circle

  With its empty conversation,

  Almost furtively, not knowing one another,

  We guessed at our kinship.

  And we realized our souls’ likeness

  Not by passionate words tumbling at random from our lips,

  But by mind answering mind,

  And the gleam of hidden thoughts.

  Diligently absorbed by modish nonsense,

  Uttering witty remarks,

  We suddenly looked at each other

  With a curious, attentive glance,

  And each of us, successfully fooling them all

  With our chatter and joking,

  Heard in the other the arrogant, terrible

  Laughter of the Spartan boy.

  And, meeting, we did not try to find

  In the other’s soul an echo of our own.

  All evening the two of us spoke stiffly,

  Locking up our sadness.

  Not knowing whether we would meet again,

  Meeting unexpectedly that evening,

  With strange truthfulness, cruelly, sternly,

  We waged war until morning.

  Abusing every habitual notion,

  Like foe with merciless foe,

  Silently and firmly, like brothers,

  Later we shook hands.

  In February 1854, Pavlova’s son, Ippolit, went back to Russia to live with his father and attend university the following year. Pavlova settled in Dresden in 1858 and remained there for the rest of her life—in exile from the language in which she wrote, from the poetic tradition that she had admirably continued, and from the country and the city she loved, scorned by the prominent people she had known best, who at their best were her literary peers.

  Pavlova continued writing. She reminds one of George Sand, who worked eight hours a day regardless of the emotional turmoil in her life. One of Pavlova’s former literary friends, Ivan Aksakov, visited her in 1860 in Dresden, where she was living on a strict budget. Aksakov chose to give a negative interpretation to what might have been a refusal to let her grim life drag her under:

  She, of course, was extremely happy to see me, but within ten minutes, even less, was already reading her verse to me…. She is completely bold, merry, happy, self-satisfied to a high degree, and occupied only with herself. This is such a curious psychological subject, it should be studied. It would seem that the catastrophe which has befallen her, a true misfortune experienced by her, the separation from her son, loss of her place in society, name and wealth, her poverty, the necessity of living by her labors—all this, it would seem, would strongly shake a person, leave profound traces on him … nothing of the sort, she is the same as always, has not changed at all except that she has grown older and everything that has happened to her has only s
erved as material for her verses…. It’s astonishing! In this woman filled with talent, everything is rubbish—there is nothing serious, profound, true, and sincere—at bottom there is an awful heartlessness, a dullness, a lack of development. Her sincerity of soul exists only in the form of art, all of it has gone into poetry, into verse, instead of feeling there is a sort of external exaltation. You feel that, of course, she herself does not realize that she loves no one, that for her nothing is cherished, dear, holy.10

  Aksakov adds that she is “poisoned by Art.” Strength of character thus becomes weakness or disease.

  The riddle of Pavlova’s nature that Aksakov puts forward seems to be easily solvable. Her quickness to declaim her verses, her strident living for her craft alone that is so emphatically noticed by all the sources quoted, can be seen as another kind of attempt to prove to herself that despite her womanhood, she was indeed a serious poet, not a mere salon hostess—a poetry-writing woman, as most of her more gifted female predecessors in Russia had been.

  At times, the effort of being both poet and woman led to a split between Pavlova’s poetic philosophy and her philosophy of life—a double life of the spirit. In the same letter, Aksakov writes of Pavlova: “She will tell you that she no longer believes in human friendship—and it’s all nonsense, and within five minutes in her poetry, excellent poetry, she boasts that she has preserved her faith in friendship and in people.”

  These accusations, voiced or rumored, of contradictory, almost hypocritical emotions or “dryness of heart,” as Chicherin put it, had an effect on Pavlova that is best seen in her actual work. Pavlova’s own writings give a very different picture from that of a woman sure of her art and cold to life.

  Her friends did try to reassure Pavlova that, within the conventions of her time, she was free to write. We have a report from Ivan Aksakov’s sister, quoted in one of his 1860 letters, that “Karolina Karlovna is upset and says that poetry is not a serious occupation and she is looking for a serious occupation.” Aksakov’s sister tells him to reassure Pavlova that “the chief business of her life is the education of her son and her maternal calling,” and because these are assured, “she can without pangs of conscience devote herself to occupations not serious.”11 One can imagine how consoling this advice from a typical, well-meaning woman of her circle must have been to Pavlova.