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Karolina Karlovna Pavlova (1807-1893) |
The daughter of a teacher of physics and chemistry at the Moscow Medical-Surgical Academy, Karolina Jaenisch was educated at home, and she soon developed linguistic proficiency in several European languages, including English, German, and French. Her first book, Northern Lights (Das Nordlicht), came out in 1833, and consisted of German translations of Russian poetry. In 1835, Karolina married the writer Nikolai Pavlov (1805-64). Their home became the site for one of Moscow's leading literary salons from 1839 to 1844. Pavlov, however, had told friends that he had married Karolina for her money, and he began to squander her funds through gambling and the establishment of a second household with one of Karolina's cousins. His behavior ultimately led her family to seek his arrest. When a search of Pavlov's possessions turned up several books prohibited by government censorship, his supporters criticized Karolina for her part in getting Pavlov in trouble with the authorities. Pavlova left Russia in 1853, moving to Dorpat (Tartu) in Estonia. There she met a law student named Boris Utin, and her relationship with him resulted in a cycle of love poetry. Though critics had welcomed Pavlova's earlier work, the utilitarian critics of the 1860s regarded her verse outdated and self indulgent. In 1858, Pavlova settled in Dresden, where she remained in financial straits until her death in 1893.
A keen observer of the world around her, Pavlova was acutely sensitive to the difficulties faced by women writers in Russia during the first half of the nineteenth century. She felt a biting tension between the conflic tin roles of "writer" and the role of "wife" and "mother." Something of this tension can be detected in her most celebrated work, the novel A Double Life (1848). In it, Pavlova drew upon the conventions of the society tale to illustrate the constraints placed on a young woman's life by family and friends more concerned with financial status than with spiritual or emotional qualities. Alternating between narrative passages in prose and lyric passages in verse, the novel illuminates the contrast between the rigid routine of the heroine's waking life and the complex realm of inner insight that opens up to her during her dreams at night. Pavlova's penetrating irony creates a memorable portrait of social hypocrisy and deceit.
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