A Double Life

by Barbara Heldt

  She lay for a long time before the icon, trying in vain to gain control of her thoughts, in bitter reverie, not praying—if grief and humility are not a prayer. Then, somewhat eased, she got up, went to her bed, and lay down for the last time on that peaceful, maidenly bed where for so many nights she had dreamed so sweetly, slept so quietly. Her pale brow sank onto the pillows. She lay for some time stretched out like a marble effigy on a tomb.

  The ornate clock in the small column between the windows struck one sonorous chime in the silence of night. Cecily slowly raised herself up and looked. She had remembered something and couldn’t recall it clearly, some word that she couldn’t find, some name that didn’t come to her…. And she felt and knew that everything going on now had definitely already happened to her once, that this moment was a repetition of something in her past and that she had already lived through it once before…. “My God!” she whispered almost aloud, “who has died? … What is this? …”

  She struggled with sleep.

  But her whole soul was gradually filled with a timid, sweetly sad expectation, a nebulous desire, like another, unfathomable love. Slowly, soft, bright tears slid from her dark, lowered eyelashes. She was falling asleep like a hurt, half-soothed child…. And now she remembered … there was hush all around…. Wasn’t it time? … She was alone … what was going to happen? …

  The stars shine menacingly above her,

  The night is infinite, the valley barely visible;

  She is alone … perhaps it is too late,

  Perhaps the time of encounter has passed.

  The midnight bird has taken wing …

  The earth is silent like the grave;

  From time to time the angry summer lightning

  Flashes in the dusky distance.

  And suddenly he stands beside her,

  Lowering his gloomy brow,

  Unmoving, with a hopeless look,

  In heavy, silent meditation.

  “You have come again! … and are we not in a dream? …

  Why was our path so separate? …

  Why are your lips so silent? …

  Why is terror descending on my heart? …”

  And he bent over, pale and grieving,

  And he offered words of sadness:

  “Let us say farewell today, my poor friend:

  Let life claim its rights!

  Go back to the realm of Earth,

  Go to your earthly triumph—

  I yield you over to the world,

  With an anxious prayer to the Creator.

  Sorrow has He given to all of us equally,

  To all a measure of sad days;

  Submit to His laws

  The murmur of your pride.

  Learn to live in outward agitation,

  Forgetting the Eden of youthful dreams,

  Share no more with anyone

  The secret of inconsolable meditation.

  Not in vain did your heart’s fantasies

  Strive so eagerly toward existence,

  Life will mercilessly fulfill

  Your passionate request.

  And the bright glow

  Of enchanted mist will dissipate;

  Too late, too soon,

  You will know the gift you have awaited.

  And fate will more than carry out

  Its sentence over you:

  But you will not lie down in cruel torment,

  You will not fall in battle.

  You will find amid the struggles

  Of years illusionless and hard,

  Many pure distractions,

  Many joyful victories.

  You will bear the insults of your friends,

  The evil lies of angry words—

  And you will raise the veil

  From the mysterious goddess Isis.

  You will understand earthly reality

  With a maturing soul:

  You will buy a dear blessing

  At a dear price.

  You will calm your heart’s hostility,

  You will not avert your eyes from misfortune,

  Neither moments of deception nor of hope

  Will trouble you.

  All that is today unconscious

  Alien to all, will flower in you—

  The burning agony of life

  Will turn into rich fruit.

  So, go as you’ve been sentenced,

  Strong in faith only,

  Not hoping for support,

  Defenseless and alone.

  Don’t disturb the heavens, transgressing,

  Silence your own dreams.

  And dare to ask of God

  Only your daily bread.”

  The next day, after seven in the evening, Vera Vladimirovna’s magnificently illuminated and decorated house glittered in the darkening twilight. People thronged Tverskoi Boulevard opposite the bright windows and, as usual, admired good-heartedly the arrogant luxury and unattainable happiness of the rich. In a luxurious private room, in front of a huge mirror lit with the bright light of candelabras, surrounded by her young friends, Cecily was putting on that beautiful, solemn dress that all those pretty little heads dreamed about, the specter of which so captivatingly and persistently arises in maidenly reveries; and even poor Nadezhda Ivanovna, bustling about the bride, still had not despaired of arraying herself in it.

  And the bride looked inexpressibly lovely in that wedding attire, with its wonderful veil falling transparently onto her young shoulders, with those white orange blossoms trembling brightly in the black of her curls, with those sparkling diamonds, with that pale face, with those thoughtful eyes.

  Cecily was feeling nervous, as is natural at such a moment, and was not able to understand her mysterious inner feelings. It seemed to her at times that she was in a dream, that in fact she was not being taken to the church to get married, and she asked herself: How did all this come about so soon? How is it that I am marrying Dmitry?

  Her apparel was complete. They handed her one more gorgeous bracelet, a gift from the groom. She stretched out her arm so they could put it on her and, looking with a distracted gaze at Olga while she fastened the lock, Cecily whispered deep in thought:

  So, go as you’ve been sentenced,

  Defenseless and alone….

  “What are you saying?” Olga asked, looking at her with surprise.

  “I don’t know,” Cecily answered. “It’s some song that has been going round in my head. I can’t remember where I heard it.”

  “What nonsense!” Olga said. “Go on, you’re ready. Put on your gloves. It’s time to go.”

  An hour later near the Arbat gates, at the wealthy parish church of the Apparition of St. Nicholas, smart carriages were lining up in a long row. The church was bright with candlelight. Aristocratic society was crowded together inside it and in the doorway a plebeian crowd gaped at the wedding, jostling intensely in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the handsome couple from afar.

  Cecily stood pale, with head quietly bowed beneath the heavy crown whose burden, perhaps symbolic, she seemed to feel on her young brow.1 Her limbs trembled slightly and her glance flew up anxiously two or three times along the iconostasis to the top of the cupola, where the rainy sky shone black through a high window.

  Among the spectators near the doors the usual chatter and comments, questions and answers proceeded in half-whispers.

  “What’s she looking so serious for? Don’t she want to get married?”

  “No, it’s for love.”

  “Look at those diamonds!”

  “So, then, he’s rich?”

  “They say he’s poor.”

  “He’s good-looking, though.”

  “Pardon me,” a friend standing with Ilichev in a corner of the church said, “How can she be called a beauty? She’s not at all pretty. She’s pale as a corpse.”

  “She’s sick with nerves,” Ilichev answered.

  “Hah!” the other continued, “these nervous wives are a punishment from God! Life with
her will be no joy for him.”

  “He’ll cure her,” Ilichev said cold-bloodedly.

  The solemn ceremony came to an end. Relatives, friends and acquaintances surrounded the young pair, congratulating them and accompanying them to the porch of the church. At the exit, Prince Victor went up to Madame Valitskaia with his stiff, barely noticeable bow.

  “I don’t suppose you have any errands to give me in Paris?” he said to her casually. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  “What?” the frightened Natalia Afanasevna asked. “You are going? I hope not for long.”

  “I don’t know,” the prince answered. “Probably for long.”

  Natalia Afanasevna found the strength almost to smile and utter a few words in which were included, not altogether clearly, the wish for a happy journey. The prince bowed slightly again and disappeared along with all her fine hopes.

  Why ever had she, poor woman, so diligently striven and so skillfully married off Cecily to Ivachinsky? All her expertise had been in vain; all her labors had come to nothing.

  She bit her lip and followed the others out.

  Vera Vladimirovna, standing on the porch of the church, wiped her eyes, full of tears of joy.

  The carriages were brought round, the clatter of wheels resounded, the clip-clop of the horses, the cry of the postilions, the shouts of the coachmen and lackeys—the whole loud hubbub of departure. The people dispersed. The lights in the church were extinguished.

  Soon afterward, the church stood dark and mute on the wide empty street. Above it, heavy, menacing clouds went slowly by and were carried away to no one knows where.

  Cherished thought has claimed what was its own,

  Found speech, crossed over to the outer world.

  Long had it lived mid worldly noise,

  Free and bright within me.

  And I was able in my soul to keep

  A portion silently for myself alone,

  And now I look upon my cause

  With an involuntary and strange sadness.

  And then it occurs to me again

  That it’s time for me to meet life differently,

  That dreams are lies, the word is useless,

  Sound and verse an empty game.

  This is, perhaps, the final song:

  Dreams fly away faster than the years!

  Shall I too recognize the vain power of the world?

  Shall I too forget the service of beauty?

  Now you have warmed my soul’s depths for the first time

  Will you bid me farewell, poetry?

  Will I abandon you, youthful beliefs?

  Will I find meaningless peace?

  Having known the joys and sorrows of the Earth,

  Having lived through the anxious years,

  Will I say, as many have said:

  All is empty fantasy! All is sad vanity!

  My spirit weakens and the goal is far off.

  The crazy hope of yesterday

  Is scarce remembered and the voice of self-reproach

  Rings louder and more threatening in my heart.

  I am oppressed with impotent searching,

  I am full of burdensome questions.

  Consciousness alone lives in my soul,

  The only strength, and may it never die!

  Then let the future threaten loss,

  And the heart’s dreams grow thinner every day;

  Let me pay a woeful price

  For the bright gifts of my youth;

  Though I throw treasure after treasure

  Into the stormy depths of the sea of life:

  Blessed the one who, arguing with the storm,

  Can salvage something precious.

  Written between 1844 and 1847

  1.In the Orthodox wedding ceremony, heavy crowns are held over (rather than placed on) the heads of the bride and groom for part of the service.

  AFTERWORD

  Karolina Pavlova: Translator and Writer

  DANIEL GREEN

  The creative work of translators is often overlooked, yet a skillful translation can set different cultures and times in conversation with each other. Barbara Heldt’s 1978 English rendering of Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life, presented here in its fourth edition, offers a striking example of how a translation can play a role in changing the way academia, and the reading public more broadly, thinks about a particular literary tradition. Although Pavlova achieved significant recognition in her lifetime for her poetic talent, rubbed shoulders with some of the great names of Russian literature’s Golden Age (including Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol), and later inspired the Symbolist poets of the Silver Age, she has had long periods of relative obscurity. A Double Life appeared just once as a stand-alone book in Russian: at the time of its first publication in 1848. Since then, it has appeared only in collected works, the most recent of which dates back to 1964.1 It has not been in print in Russian since then. In contrast, Heldt’s translation, along with a slow but steady stream of scholarship on Pavlova, has kept A Double Life and its author in the mind of the anglophone reader for the last four decades.

  This translation of A Double Life has been part of a fundamental transformation in how the English-speaking world sees Russian literature, driven by what has been called the “rediscovery” or “recovery” of nineteenth-century women writers. For much of the twentieth century, even women whose works had achieved significant readerships and recognition in their lifetimes were largely written out of literary histories and their works were little published. Heldt and others threw down the gauntlet and challenged readers to reimagine the Russian literary canon as something that included a wider variety of voices than just the “great men” whose names are still most familiar to audiences today. In doing so, they sought both to better reflect the range of Russian literature as it was produced and read and to uncover the cultural processes that privileged certain types of writing and literature by certain kinds of people over others.

  From a practical standpoint, this translation of A Double Life finally made it possible for teachers to include a nineteenth-century female writer on syllabi for Russian literature courses in translation. As a result, for the first time in an English-language context, Pavlova was able to stand on equal footing in university courses with her better-known male contemporaries. A wave of translations of women writers followed. A Double Life now sits on the bookshelf alongside a growing number of texts by nineteenth-century Russian women in English, including titles in the Russian Library series.

  The practice of translating women writers coincided with scholarly reappraisals of Russian literature as a space in which questions of gender were reflected and played out. Heldt’s own Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) provided the first substantial critique of the male-dominated Russian canon. It was followed a few years later by two other pioneering works: Catriona Kelly’s History of Russian Women Writers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) and the Dictionary of Russian Women Writers by Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal, and Mary Zirin (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994). These significantly fleshed out the contextual landscape of female writing, whose relationship and interconnection with the dominant male literature of the time has since been explored by Jehanne Gheith and others.2

  NEW KINDS OF SCHOLARSHIP

  With the rediscovery of writing by women and the changing understanding of who was writing in nineteenth-century Russia came a recognition of the need for new scholarly approaches. Toward the end of the twentieth century, scholars were already paying more attention to the social and economic circumstances in which works were produced. This approach proved extremely important for the study of women writers, whose status within society informed not only how they wrote and published but also what they wrote about.

  Modern writing on gender differs from that of the nineteenth-century critics in its move away from essentializing female writing, which is to say, finding something innately female in the way wo
men write. Since Judith Butler’s 1988 essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” the notion of gender as something performed rather than inherent has informed our understanding not only of how women present their writing but also of how they navigate social and literary norms. A feminist reading requires a reanalysis of literary institutions—from the salon to the journal to the critical response—and a new understanding of genre—the conventional forms a work takes. The result is to read female writing on its own terms, rather than as a poor relation to the mainstream male tradition, but not to separate it from the male-dominated culture in which it was produced.

  This approach suits A Double Life very well, uncovering how the themes of the story are connected with how it was produced and read. While it would be a mistake to assign to Pavlova modern feminist critical views on the structures of society, we may still read the text and Pavlova’s life through that lens. That it is natural for us to do so is a testament not only to Heldt’s work as a translator and scholar but also to changes in the field of Russian studies that she and others helped bring about. When reading this English translation of A Double Life, we are thus engaging with a cultural product of both the 1840s and the 1970s that helped to define how writing by women was to be read.

  CRITICAL RESPONSES TO A DOUBLE LIFE

  By the late 1840s Pavlova had seen her original poetry in print many times. To get to this point, she had followed a well-trodden path available to both men and women: making connections and a name for herself by doing translation work. Her poetry appeared in journals edited by friends whom she had met at various salons, where literary figures could socialize and share their work. A Double Life, too, appeared with a press used by others in her circle. Yet its publication was only the first step to her being taken seriously as a writer.

  Although many contemporary reviews of A Double Life were positive, Pavlova still had to contend with expectations of what female writing should be like. An anonymous critic writing in The Library for Reading praised A Double Life, but packaged his admiration in gendered language: “I admit that, in the middle of the book, I suddenly had my doubts and looked again at the book’s title page to make certain—‘did I not make a mistake?—was it really written by a woman? I had somehow thought that only men could be so sharp.’”3 Others were less positive, such as Baron Rozen, who wrote in the journal The Son of the Fatherland: