A Double Life

by Barbara Heldt

  Reading a new book for a review, first of all you try to determine its main idea and what exactly the author wanted; this is particularly difficult when the main idea is unclear even to the author, when it moves into mysticism and wanders through the magnetic visions of the soul.4

  What all the reviewers had in common, though, was an obsession with Pavlova’s femininity. Rozen was thus able to dismiss one positive response to A Double Life by Pavlova’s friend Konstantin Aksakov as “chivalric praise.”5

  In the mid-nineteenth century, Russian criticism was still in its infancy, but its attitude toward women writers had already been established. Women were thought to have a narrower perspective, one that focused inward upon the self. In contrast, men were considered better able to creatively imagine the lives of others.6 Of course, women were also restricted in the range of experiences open to them; unlike noblemen, noblewomen did not work and could not serve the state in any official capacity.

  What would soon become known as the “woman question”—the discussion of the position of women in society—is an overt theme of A Double Life. The reviewer for the journal The Contemporary applauds Pavlova for dealing with such a topic. He writes: “in it the poet touches on extremely important questions, namely the upbringing of society girls, their position in high society, their conditional marriages, and finally their adult childhood.”7 The expression “adult childhood” suggests that women occupy not just a marginal but even a liminal place in society, stuck in limbo between the irresponsible status of the children they raise and the full-fledged agency of true (which is to say, masculine) adulthood. Yet while the reviewer may ostensibly empathize with the plight of women, he nonetheless prioritizes not women’s experience but how female behavior might impact men, as the quotation in Heldt’s introduction shows (see page xxiv).

  Baron Rozen goes further in his review. Not only is he uninterested in the female social concerns raised by the character of Cecily in A Double Life, but he takes her love interest Dmitry’s part and expresses gratitude that the story stops before the reader sees the difficult life Dmitry will have with Cecily: “and it is very good that the curtain falls: someone of the likes of Dmitry Ivaginsky [sic] most likely would not cope with such a wife: she will make things miserable for him!” These acts of sidelining and erasing female experience demonstrate a lack of ability or will on the part of the male critics to embrace a female perspective. They go hand in hand with the restrictions on what were considered acceptable experiences for women in society as laid out in the story. For example, Cecily is warned away from contact with poetry by her mother:

  And although, as we have seen, Vera Vladimirovna greatly respected and loved poetry, she still considered it improper for a young girl to spend too much of her time on it. She quite justly feared any development of imagination and inspiration, those eternal enemies of propriety. She molded the spiritual gifts of her daughter so carefully that Cecily, instead of dreaming of the Marquis Poza, of Egmont, of Lara and the like, could only dream of a splendid ball, a new gown, and the outdoor fête on the first of May.

  When Cecily is exposed to poetry, though, she cannot help but be inspired. When she goes to bed at night she is free from social expectations, and her poetic sensibilities are given free rein in her dreams. Cecily, in fact, has been warned off just those interests that Pavlova herself possessed and that she harnessed to shine a light on society in A Double Life. Vera Vladimirovna is glad that Cecily does not dream about characters in literary works by people who interested Pavlova: Lara is the heroine of an eponymous narrative poem by Byron, with whose poem “Dream” A Double Life is in direct dialogue; Egmont is the hero of a play by the same name by Goethe, with whom Pavlova corresponded; and the Marquis Poza is a character from Don Carlos, a play by Friedrich Schiller, a writer whose works Pavlova translated. Most dangerous for Cecily in the eyes of her mother is the composition of original artistic works. She is praised instead for her feminine accomplishments of sketching and singing.

  One feature that makes A Double Life unique is its unusual combination of poetry and prose. Each chapter covers a day’s events in the more “realistic” medium of prose, then Cecily’s subsequent nighttime dream life is rendered in poetry. No matter how much her creative impulse might be suppressed during the day, it finds an outlet at night. The move from prose to poetry marks two boundaries: between night and day and between a life following social conventions and one in which Cecily is free to roam creatively. This idea is echoed in the title, which is taken from Byron’s 1816 poem “Dream,” whose first two and a half lines are given as the epigraph to the story:

  Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world,

  A boundary between the things misnamed

  Death and existence

  The reader is prompted to ask whether the “real” Cecily is the one who wears ball gowns and falls in love with inappropriate men during the day or the one who dreams in poetry at night. The quotation also raises the question of whether sleep or a life of conventions is most akin to death.

  While critics were mostly impressed by the inclusion of poetic interludes, another genre question puzzled them: Pavlova’s choice to subtitle the story a “sketch” (“ocherk” in Russian). The term “sketch” brings to mind the “physiological sketch,” which had its origins in France. These introduced the reading public to a variety of “types” of people from the lower classes whom the reader might not have examined closely otherwise. In an introduction to The Physiology of Petersburg, a celebrated almanac of Russian physiological sketches edited by Nikolai Nekrasov, the critic Vissarion Belinsky characterizes the sketch as a genre that places greater emphasis on observation and mimetic accuracy than on literary quality.8 Pavlova’s version is thus unusual in its length, literary quality, and focus on a highborn subject in the form of Cecily.

  Pavlova used the genre designation of “sketch” to suggest that the Russian noblewoman was just as deserving of scrutiny and pity as a poor Russian man on the street.9 However, Pavlova’s version of the sketch goes far beyond the genre’s ordinary confines, asking the reader not only to pity Cecily but also to understand her and the world of which she is a part. Just as Cecily struggles against social strictures, A Double Life oversteps the boundaries of the sketch genre. Cecily pushes against the banal life set out for her by society and the story pushes against the bland norms of the genre, bringing the life of a young girl on the marriage market into the realm of rich narrative prose and poetry. In doing so, Pavlova turns the sketch into something more inclusive of a female perspective and more penetrating into the inner life of its main protagonist.

  Pavlova puts Cecily’s feelings at the heart of the story and adds to them the experiences of a widening circle of female voices from the narrator to her imagined readers. For example, the reader is invited to share the narrator’s recognition of the delights of Cecily’s romantic infatuation:

  What woman, making a confession to herself, has not admitted that to touch these heartfelt, troubling joys on the sly, casually, with fear and trembling, is a hundred times more intoxicating than to taste them openly and calmly? And that we, daughters of Eve, all share more or less the opinion of that Italian countess who, eating some delicious ice cream on a torrid day, exclaimed sincerely, “Ah, what a shame that this is not a sin!”

  That male critics might feel excluded from the “we” of this passage is perhaps not surprising. Yet some were able to see beyond their differences in gender and grasp the universal experiences of humanity in A Double Life. For others, however, the perspective of a young woman was too alien, and thus they felt that it lacked what they thought of as the more universal perspective of male writers. In readings of Russian literature, this assumption that a male perspective is the norm against which others are to be measured was not significantly challenged until recently.

  PAVLOVA AS TRANSLATOR AND SALON HOST

  Pavlova, of course, could not know how history would treat her writing, but she was well aware o
f the particular challenges she faced as a female writer in mid-nineteenth-century Russia. One activity that offered her the possibility of advancement was translation. Yet translation also reinforced her inferior status as a female interpreter of a masculine world.

  Pavlova’s first published volume, The Northern Lights (Das Nordlicht), which appeared in 1833 under her then surname, Jaenisch, linked her creative work (producing translations and writing original poetry) with that of successful men. In it, Pavlova presented her German translations of contemporary Russian poetry and a small amount of prose and appended several original poems of her own. The poems she translated were by those recognized as Russia’s leading poets of the time, among them Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Iazykov, and Baratynsky. All of the Russian poets whose works Pavlova translated into German in The Northern Lights were translators themselves. Indeed, translation was seen as both an important literary endeavor in its own right and a common means of advancing one’s literary career. For Pavlova it held an additional attraction: translation was considered an acceptable creative activity for women and was certainly more tolerated than writing original works. She had decades of precedents as a female translator: noblewomen, who were often well educated in foreign languages, had been prolific translators since the 1760s. However, they rarely received as much recognition for their work as their male counterparts.10

  In The Northern Lights, Pavlova associates herself with another influential man by addressing one of her poems to the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt, whom she had met a few years previously, and by noting that the suggestion that she produce translations of Russian literature for a German audience had come from him. In her foreword she is careful not to emphasize her creativity and makes no mention of her own poetry. Furthermore, when she writes about her translation work she provides numerous justifications for her project: her qualifications as a translator as well as the reasoning behind how she compiled the volume and made her translation choices in terms of meter and rhyme. We can see the addition of her own original work to the volume as a step toward setting herself on the same level as other writers, yet her poems are included only tentatively, at the end, set apart from what comes before. Unlike the earlier poems, they are presented as poetry written by a translator rather than someone who is a poet in her own right.

  By all accounts, Pavlova was right to have low expectations for how much credit she would receive for her creative work. She received little acknowledgment for the volume either in the Russian critical press or from the men whose works she was introducing to a German-speaking audience. Baratynsky, for instance, gave his ignorance of German as an excuse for not showing Pavlova gratitude for translating his poems.11

  There was an additional factor that contributed to the paucity of socio-literary capital that she gained through her translation work: her choice of language. Pavlova faced the double obstacles to being accepted into literary circles of her gender and her German origins. This disdain toward Germans in society appears on the first page of the story. Ilichev, who also later shows contempt for women by persuading Dmitry to cheat on the heroine of the story, Cecily, here expresses his negative feelings toward her ethnicity, saying: “I can’t stand all these Germans and half-Germans.” Pavlova, as a Lutheran in Russian Orthodox society, grew up as an outsider in the country of her birth. That her translations did not result in acceptance among her Russian peers also cannot have been helped by the kind of translation she was performing: not into Russian but from Russian into German and sometimes French.

  Whereas translators into Russian produced works that were read and discussed by a circle of acquaintances in Russia, translating a Russian work into a foreign language gave an individual writer a wider international audience, but did not have much impact within Russian society. Russian poets therefore would not have felt the results of Pavlova’s translations particularly strongly. It is notable that in her two other big translation projects, which were published six years later, she moved away from Russian poetry as a source of translation material. Her second volume, The Preludes (Les Préludes), published in French in Paris in 1839, also included her own poetry alongside her translations. What made it different from The Northern Lights was not only the language she was translating into but also her choice of what to translate. In The Preludes Pavlova includes only a handful of translations from Russian; the rest comprises masterpieces of European writing originally in English, Polish, German, and Italian. The same year, she also published a rendering into French of Schiller’s Maid of Orleans (Die Jungfrau von Orleans) under the title Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc). It seems that toward the end of the 1830s, Pavlova was less seeking recognition from her fellow Russian poets for her translation work and more a place on the European literary stage.

  We can see a similar progression in Pavlova’s relationship with Russian literary society in her role as salon host. By the time Pavlova published A Double Life in 1848, the salon she ran with her husband was already well established. Salons, particularly two run by women, proved key places where Pavlova could make important literary contacts. She was first introduced into literary high society at Avdotya Elagina’s salon. Later, at Zinaida Volkonskaya’s, she met, among others, Russia’s national poet, Alexander Pushkin, and his exiled Polish counterpart, Adam Mickiewicz, to whom she became engaged before her marriage to Nikolai Pavlov. Once she was married, she became eligible in the eyes of society to run her own literary salon. Yet there, too, male voices were privileged and thus predominated. Ostensibly, in a salon, women and men could meet as equals: both could act as hosts. However, female roles were also limited by gender expectations. Female hosts were expected to be an audience, critic, and muse for male guests. Pavlova, in contrast, broke the mold and presented her own work to her guests, something that provoked stinging criticism from some quarters.12

  The job of the translator and that of a salon host are not entirely dissimilar. Just as a skillfully orchestrated salon brings together talented people of varying artistic and intellectual backgrounds, the thoughtfully rendered translation unites the styles and worldviews of two different cultures. Pavlova was excellent in both these roles deemed acceptable by the gender conventions of her day. She received pushback from her peers, however, when she strayed outside others’ expectations and asserted her right to employ her talents to act and write as she wished.

  CONCLUSION

  Translation was entwined with questions of creativity and gender both in how Pavlova came to write and publish A Double Life and in how we have the story today in Heldt’s translation. Translation also gives us a way to consider gender in the story: just as Heldt had to consider how to render Pavlova’s Russian text in a way that is accessible to the modern English-speaking reader, Pavlova was faced with the question of how to present the particular experiences of a marriageable young Russian woman to a readership that was reluctant to take such a perspective seriously.

  The complexity of this challenge can be seen in the relationship between the prosaic and poetic elements in the text. There is an irony in the liberation Cecily experiences in the poetry, which is a form regulated by rhyme and meter. To this we can add another set of considerations when looking at the translation into English. Heldt renders the poetic sections of A Double Life without regard for the original rhyme or rhythm, choosing instead to prioritize another important feature of poetry: the imagery. This is an excellent example of the translator’s talent for cultural matchmaking. Not only does it make these sections sound more natural to the modern English ear (rhyme being far more common in the Russian tradition), but it also makes them feel more relevant to readers today. By choosing to render the poetry without rhyme, Heldt anticipates her readers’ cultural context, making it possible for them to engage more directly with a work from a very different time and place.

  The transformative power of translation can also be seen directly within the story of A Double Life. The poetry that first sets Cecily’s imagination ablaze is not an original work but a tra
nslation of Schiller’s 1799 poem “The Song of the Bell” (“Das Lied von der Glocke”) read out as part of an evening’s entertainment. Yet although Cecily is fascinated, the narrative focuses on the boredom of the audience. The majority of the soirée’s attendees are indifferent to the poem and unappreciative of the translation work of the poet. Where they manage to find a compliment, it is delivered in a condescending manner, as demonstrated in the exchange below:

  One lady among the charming neighbors of the man of letters leaned close to him and asked sympathetically, “How long did this marvelous translation take you?”

  “I don’t know,” answered the poor confused young man.

  She turned away with a barely perceptible smile.

  A subsequent conversation about the purpose of poetry takes place without once involving the poet-translator. The audience is also particularly adept at not engaging with the poetry itself: alongside their empty praise, people criticize its length and its lack of usefulness and contemporaneity. The reader is drawn along with the rest of the gathering, experiencing the reading through the perspective of the high-society crowd. Like any other member of the audience, the reader initially accepts the norms of reception before the feelings of the poet provide a contrast. The reader is thus challenged to engage in the same struggle as Cecily: deciding whether to follow social norms or to break free in order to appreciate another side of life.