'Ia zhivu ot pochty do pochty...' Iz perepiski Nadezhdy Dmitrievny Khvoshchinskoiby Arja Rosenholm;...

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'Ia zhivu ot pochty do pochty...' Iz perepiski Nadezhdy Dmitrievny Khvoshchinskoi by Arja Rosenholm; Hilde Hoogenboom Review by: Catriona Kelly The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 81, No. 3 (Jul., 2003), pp. 530-532 Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4213749 . Accessed: 14/06/2014 17:23 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavonic and East European Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.2.32.141 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 17:23:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Transcript of 'Ia zhivu ot pochty do pochty...' Iz perepiski Nadezhdy Dmitrievny Khvoshchinskoiby Arja Rosenholm;...

Page 1: 'Ia zhivu ot pochty do pochty...' Iz perepiski Nadezhdy Dmitrievny Khvoshchinskoiby Arja Rosenholm; Hilde Hoogenboom

'Ia zhivu ot pochty do pochty...' Iz perepiski Nadezhdy Dmitrievny Khvoshchinskoi by ArjaRosenholm; Hilde HoogenboomReview by: Catriona KellyThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 81, No. 3 (Jul., 2003), pp. 530-532Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4213749 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 17:23

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and EastEuropean Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavonic andEast European Review.

http://www.jstor.org

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Page 2: 'Ia zhivu ot pochty do pochty...' Iz perepiski Nadezhdy Dmitrievny Khvoshchinskoiby Arja Rosenholm; Hilde Hoogenboom

530 SEER, 8 i, 3, 2003

Rozanov and V. M. Protopopov, recent graduates of the Moscow Slavo- Graeco-Latin Academy. They made independent translations of the same short story, a French version of a German original, which they then exchanged; and, having borrowed renderings from one another, they published their works separately in Moscow in I 788 and i 789 respectively.

Other distinguished papers on such subjects as the treatises of Lev Krevza and Zakhariia Kopystenskii, Meletii Smotritskii's Uchitel'noe evangelie, Polish and neo-Latin elements in Simeon Polotskii's poetics, and the translated novel in eighteenth-century Russian literature, complete a volume of remarkable range and quality.

Imperial College London C. L. DRAGE

Rosenholm, Arja and Hoogenboom, Hilde (eds). 'Ia zhivu otpochty do pochty. . .' Izperepiski Nadezhdy Dmitrievny Klhvoshchinskoi. Frauen Literatur Geschichte, 14. Texte und Materialien zur russischen Frauenliteratur. Frank Goep- fert, Fichtenwalde, 2001. 271 Pp. Notes. EI8.50: ?17.50 (paperback).

NADEZHDA KHVOSHCHINSKAIA (i 824- 1889) was perhaps the premier woman realist of the late nineteenth century, as well as a prolific, if minor, poet. All but forgotten for decades after her death (though a selection of her short stories appeared in the Soviet Union in i 984), she is gaining increasing recognition from scholars in both her homeland and in the West. Now, from Arja Rosenholm and Hilde Hoogenboom, both of whom have a distinguished record as scholars of nineteenth-century women's prose, comes this substantial edition of more than i 00 previously unpublished letters by Khvoshchinskaia, as well as a smaller selection from her sisters Sof'ia (i 828- I 865) and Praskov'ia (after i 830- I9I6). The letters, in particular Nadezhda's, to a variety of addressees including N. F. Shcherbina, M. M. Stasiulevich, A. A. Kraevskii, and 0. A. Novikova, provide a revealing glimpse into the world of a cultivated provincial woman of the mid-nineteenth century (the Khvoshchinskaia sisters were luminaries of Riazan'), and also insights into the publishing process of the day. We hear Khvoshchinskaia expressing (understandable) annoyance when a poem of hers appears without her permission in Moskvitianin in September I853 (P. i), arranging to send corrections that have been pointed out to her by 'kind friends' (p. 29), and heaving a sigh of relief when the censors prove less strict than she feared with her latest novel (p. 37).

Alongside recording the minutiae of her own dealings with the literary world, Khvoshchinskaia set down her responses to the publications of, and discussions among, writers and litterateurs who were closer to the centre of things: these include an acerbic (if rather wrong-headed) assessment of WTlar and Peace, for which she had little time, and some entertainingly tart comments on topical discussions from October i859: having accused various female contemporaries, such as Kokhanovskaia (the pen-name of Nadezhda Sokhan- skaia, I823-I884) of unwarranted egotism and self-importance, she then turns her guns oni their male counterparts: 'I muzhchiny, muzhchinv-to, Ol'ga! Esli by vy znali, kak ia znaiu, chto svoimi "Karnavalami", rasskazami iz Proshlogo i ANastoiashchego, pozhalui, iz Budushchego oni voobrazhaiut

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REVIEWS 531

povernut' Vselennuiu! Esli by vy slyshali eti gromadnye tolki, znali eti bol'shie i malen'kie lzhi, i samovoskhvalaiushchie, i voskhvaliaiushchie kruzhki (v Moskve), i ustupki neobkhodimosti (v Peterburge), i rebiachestvo, i rutinu i vse prochee!' (p. 87). Khvoshchinskaia had some reason for indignation, given that, as an observer of her own literary work, she was modest to the point of excess: while some of her pleading of incompetence with regard to the financial side of literary life can possibly be put down to fishing for advice from her correspondents, there is unmistakable frankness in a self-assessment of 24 August 1859 to Ol'ga Novikova. Protesting against Novikova's assertion that 'all educated people' ('vse obrazovannye liudi') have found talent in her works, Khvoshchinskaia insists that they are simply recognizing her 'common sense' ('zdrav-yi um'), while failing to note her total lack of capacity for fantasy ('u menia net voobrazheniia') (p. 8 i). Her comments on work in progress are comparably dismissive, so that in January I859 she notes 'Vy sprashivaete, chto ia pishu. Predlinnyi roman, i daleko ne v rode "Uchitelia"; dazhe i vovse protivnyi emu, toi krotosti i fantaziiam, kotorye byli vozmozhny dlia menia desiat' let nazad' (p. 79). In a sense, it is a wonder that Khvoshchinskaia continued for so long as a writer, and was so prolific: the stimulus no doubt lay in her pervasive sense of boredom with life in Riazan', alongside the intellectual opportunities offered by her craft, and possibly, though her letters are genteelly discreet on this point, in the remuneration she gained from publishing.

In their Introduction, Hoogenboom and Rosenholm emphasize some of these points, such as Khvoshchinskaia's squeamishness about financial negotiations and perceptions of these as a 'masculine' concern (p. 6), while also giving considerable weight to psychobiography: Khvoshchinskaia's letters to Novikova are seen as illuminating the history of female friendship, laying bare the letter as a genre in which women could escape social conventions and speak freely (p. 7). Yet on the whole, personal factors, in the sense of Khvoshchinskaia's emotional world and relationships with relations and friends, appear in rather muted form in this selection. It is not clear how much Khvoshchinskaia's concentration on literary topics is a function of editorial choice (on p. 3 they state that the selection was made on the basis of 'central themes', such as that of writerly identity). At any rate, potentially more intimate letters, such as those to Khvoshchinskaia's husband Zaionchkovskii, do not appear, which gives the edition concentration and focus, if sometimes at the expense of variety.

No sample of the original manuscripts of the letters is given, so it is impossible to pronounce on the accuracy of the transcription, but the low level of misprints would suggest that the texts of the letters are reliable. Somewhat less satisfactory is the character of the apparatus. It would have been helpful to have the texts that Khvoshchinskaia is discussing in her letters identified (though this wvould no doubt have taken a great deal of work, with such a prolific writer), while notes on journals such as Vestnik Evropy and Moskvitianin provide general information of the kind that can be found in any work of reference, rather than providing a context for Khvoshchinskaia's remarks about them. (There has been no attempt to identify, for instance, the poem whose publication in Aloskvitianin aroused Khvoshchinskaia's indignation in

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532 SEER, 8 i, 3, 2003

September I853). However, the editors of the collection are apparently planning to translate it into English, with a more substantial apparatus, so in time this desideratum will be satisfied; in the meantime, those who can read Russian have been provided with an important new source for the understand- ing of women's writing, and of Russian literary activity in the second half of the nineteenth century more generally.

New College, Oxford CATRIONA KELLY

Markovich, Vladimir and Schmid, Wolf (eds). Paradoksy russkoi literatury. sbornik statei. Peterburgskii sbornik, 3. Inapress, St Petersburg, 2001. 352 pp. Notes. Index. Price unknown.

THIS collection is the product of a symposium which took place in Hamburg in October I999. The twenty essays are contributed chiefly by scholars in Russia and Germany. They explore the theory and application of paradox and related devices in Russian literature from a wide variety of perspectives in philosophy, psychology, rhetoric and aesthetics, and the resultant volume can be treated as a sourcebook on the diversity of literary paradoxality in Russia. As the editors stress (p. 7), by definition a paradox in its simplest sense a statement that contradicts accepted wisdom implies a 'doxa' which is to be challenged or rejected. Therefore, although for historical reasons Russian literature may seem to have a more than usual affinity with paradoxality, in fact in Russia as elsewhere paradox comes to the fore principally at times of transition. In literary historical terms it is thus particularly characteristic, for example, of the renaissance and baroque, of romanticism and modernism, less so of periods of classicism or realism. As Markovich and Schmid acknowledge, paradox is also a phenomenon much appreciated by post- modernist writers and theoreticians because, at least so long as a conception of normativeness is maintained, it implies a deconstructive process funda- mental to the questioning of epistemological truth.

This conceptual framework is reflected in the various topics on which the contributors have chosen to focus, though in fact the postmodern, and for that matter the twentieth century, receive surprisingly little attention and by far the largest group of essays deals with 'classic' authors of the nineteenth century. The first few chapters consider theoretical issues relating to the use of paradox and provide useful context for the more textually based essays that follow. Topics covered include: the history and definition of the term 'paradox' (Wolf Schmid), the relation of paradox to other rhetorical devices (Renate Lachmann), the role of metapoetic reflection in overcoming the psychological phenomenon known as the 'double bind' (Matthias Freise and Ulrike K. Seiler), and the centrality of paradox to the narrative device of skaz (Robert Hodel).

After this the book proceeds more or less chronologically, beginning with a discussion of the tensions between literature and non-literature, saints and demons, hagiography and mythology in the seventeenth-century Povest' o besnovatoi zhene Solomon ii (Walter Koschmal) and the paradoxes in genre, theology and history which underlie Feofan Prokopovich's school drama

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