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Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, by Richard Holmes

I was recommended Richard Holmes’s Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by my friend James, who was so impressed by it that his recommendation came to me all in caps. I don’t know what exactly the book is – Holmes himself calls it a “mongrel book” – but it’s awfully good. It is both a work of biography and a work of autobiography, and because of the approach to biography that Holmes takes, it is also a book of travel too. For the “footsteps” of the title are no measly metaphor, but real tracks in the ground. Holmes sees biography not merely as the result of months and years spent absorbed in dusty tomes, but as the fruit of reliving the life of a dead, retracing their steps through the places that had once charmed them so much.

It is this approach that makes Footsteps so special. For what the book really shows is a different way of reading to the usual, casual, one of reading and moving on. Holmes’s approach is marked by a passionate relationship with the author and his or her works. It somehow turns reading from a passive activity into an active one, a tussle with the past. Reading Footsteps, I thought back to the times when I myself had felt great passion for authors – for Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Conrad, Foster Wallace and Pynchon and many others – and I found myself wanting. I had not fanned the flame of my own desire, not dug deep into either the books or their authors, but rather been content to glide upon their surfaces. Most importantly, I had not slowed down. Following an artist’s footsteps forces us to stop, to breathe, to focus and enjoy.

Reading Footsteps, I saw how I should be reading. In some sense, the book and its approach are an antidote to the pressures of our time and our relentless rushing about. That’s why it’s so worth reading.

The Structure of Footsteps

Footsteps is divided into four parts, each taken from a different part of Holmes’s life and detailing his encounter with a different writer. These are: Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and finally the French poet Gérard de Nerval. I can’t describe myself as “knowing” any of them well. I had read a story by Stevenson, a few poems by Shelley, and nothing by either Wollstonecraft or Nerval (the latter I’d not even heard of). But a familiarity with the writers is not a prerequisite to enjoying Footsteps, not at all. For Holmes is not offering an appraisal of their works so much as their lives. He uses their works, letters, journals, to emphasise the connection between the writers and the places they’ve been. He anchors each writer in their experience of a moment and place, rather than trying to grab hold of all of them at once.

Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the heroes of *Footsteps*. Holmes does an excellent job in making us interested in people we’d never been interested in before.

In each section of Footsteps there is a different question obsessing Holmes which he hopes to find the answer to. In Stevenson’s case, for example, Holmes soon discovers that some apparently simple travel writing about a journey in France is much more complex than it first appears. Instead of simply following Stevenson around, Holmes is forced to follow him into his heart, as the writer faces down his doubts about his love for a married American, Fanny Osbourne. In Percy Shelley’s case, Holmes wants to understand the nature of the relationship between the poet and Claire Clairmont, a woman who accompanied him and his wife, Mary, during much of their stay in Italy. In the case of Nerval, by contrast, who went mad and committed suicide, Holmes wants to try to salvage some kind of fact from the mass of fabrication and incoherence left in the poet’s wake.

These questions and focuses keep Footsteps from getting out of hand, as is perfectly possible with biography. (Holmes’s full biography of Percy Shelley is over 800 pages). Even in these comparatively short pieces we are introduced to a bewildering array of characters, and each of them seems deserving of detailed investigation. Holmes, who absolutely has done his research, is always able to approach his problems from multiple angles, through multiple voices. Alongside his physical tramplings, this polyphonic approach makes the past come alive not just as a single reanimated authorial figure, but as a vibrant crowd. It makes us aware of just how interesting even a minor figure is, and how we all fit together into a whole.

Mr Holmes

Holmes is a wonderful guide, though not just because he knows his stuff, is passionate, and writes well. He’s also a great guide because of his own almost confessional tone. Just as in Footsteps he draws us near to the dead men and women, so too does he draw us near to himself. It is this that makes the text feel so alive. When he cracks a puzzle, like why Wollstonecraft describes herself as seeing something from her rooms in Paris that ought to have been geographically impossible (it turned out her rooms were on the roof, not the fashionable front rooms biographers expected her to have been given), we share his joy. Likewise, when he is struck with grief – for example, when finding the bridge that Stevenson had crossed “broken, crumbling, and covered with ivy” and being forced to accept that he cannot follow him forever – we share that too.

His openness about the process of biography is part of this. Before Footsteps I had read very little biography, and never thought seriously about the form, especially in respect to other genres. Holmes readily describes the challenges of producing “the living effect, while remaining true to the dead fact”, and the way that unlike a novelist, “ordinariness… family intimacy, is the very thing that the biography… cannot share or re-create”. He made me aware of the genre’s limitations – for example, a happy couple will be mostly together, and less likely to write journal entries because each member will have each other, leaving a blank space where the biographer was hoping to find material. Then there is “the fatal past subjunctive” (would have), when the biographer is forced to claim what evidence cannot provide. All things I’d never considered.

Past and Present

Holmes’s active role in Footsteps is also important for another reason. It draws together the past and present (or at least, the latter 20^th century). Holmes, who was in his twenties during the May 1968 protests in France, uses the experience of Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Shelley in and after the French Revolution to illustrate his own generation’s ambiguous feelings towards the protests and what they achieved and failed to. Like any historian, Holmes naturally finds connections, and because of his focus on the personal over the general, these connections seem much more fresh and relevant, even to the modern reader, whose hopes for revolution may long have turned to ashes. They make the past immediate, and remind us that reading history is more than a school exercise, but rather gives us a new lens through which to view our own time.

In seeing how writers responded to their times, Holmes also gives us a new way of looking at more modern writers. How does Pynchon’s treatment of the 1960s and disillusionment compare to Shelley’s or Wordsworth’s once the French Revolution was done and dusted? Without biography, it can be hard to ask such questions – we don’t know where to begin.

A photograph of the poet Nerval, one of the subjects of Footsteps — Gérard de Nerval, a French poet whose madness alas was more permanent and fatal than that of Holmes’s. While I found the lack of translations frustrating, Holmes’s own increasingly deranged quest to understand Nerval more than made up for it.

Nerval – journey into madness

The treatment of the character of Gérard de Nerval – for where does the man Gérard Labrunie end and Nerval begin? – was for me the unexpected highlight of Footsteps. The poet himself I can’t say I encountered in any serious way, thanks to Holmes’s unwillingness to translate French quotes. What was interesting, however, was the way that as Holmes pursued Nerval through masses of confusing and often contradictory evidence, he himself began to feel that a normal biography would not be able to make sense of Nerval. Instead, there was an “overflowing of the irrational into the normal forms of biography”, in which Holmes began to believe that it was Tarot cards which held the key to the mystery, rather than books or facts.

In his search to “save” Nerval, Holmes finds himself “slipping further and further into a peculiar and perilous identification with my lunatic subject, as if somehow I could diagnose Nerval by becoming him”. When he finally finishes, he has seven different notebooks in seven different colours, like a kind of talisman. But he has found no answers. He has only succeeded, thankfully only temporarily, in losing himself. It is a final warning for us, that biography, like everything else, must be enjoyed in moderation. We should not seek to become our quarries, only to draw level with them. Otherwise we risk losing our very selves.

Conclusion – Following in Holmes’s Footsteps

I was recently at the museum-house of the poet and painter Max Voloshin, on the coast of the Black Sea. I had not heard of him, but at the museum we were given a detailed tour. He had built the house himself, and it is an insane mass of staircases and doors and secret passageways. One detail I loved was that the windows in Voloshin’s study were arranged so that the sunlight would get in his eyes at exactly midday, as a warning to the artist that it was time to take a break. I left that evening, determined to read him when I had the chance.

The next morning my girlfriend and I decided to visit Voloshin’s grave, which lies above the town at the top of a hill. The tradition is to bring a stone from the seashore up to him, and we both did. The walk took two hours as we fought sweltering heat and tumbling rocks to get to the top. But in the end we made it, and were met with his grave, covered with stones and pebbles, many of them signed with messages for the poet. We both added our own, then we went a little further, and sat down to enjoy the view.

The grave of Max Voloshin, covered with pebbles from the beach below. I was glad to make my own small literary pilgrimage, following in Holmes’s own footsteps.

I was glad, so soon after finishing Footsteps, to put into practice, in a small way, the ideas implicit in Holmes’s book. In climbing that hill I had made my relationship with an author, even one whose works I have not read, personal and active rather than simply passive. As I sat on the hill, looking out over the sea, I stopped, I thought, I breathed. And I felt grateful that I still have plenty of authors to love and plenty of time to love them. Read Footsteps, and then read everything else in the world!

Evgeniy Baratynsky – Four Translations of his Poetry

Evgeny Baratynsky is one of the great poets of the Golden Age of Russian poetry, but he is generally overshadowed by A.S. Pushkin and M. Yu. Lermontov, both of whom are more accessible, in part because of their prose works, and in part because of their easily-digestible content. Baratynsky is a solitary figure compared to those others because of his pessimism, comparable to that of Leopardi in Italy. Where Lermontov might look sadly upon his generation, he nonetheless lived a life of action, of active revolt. Baratynsky often gives the impression he doesn’t think it’s worth even trying. He is bitter, but what makes him interesting is that he is also intellectual in vision, where other poets are more emotional. He is not always easy to read in Russian, but teasing out his meanings is a pleasant exercise. Each reading leaves you feeling you’re a little closer to understanding him.

These translations are only my first attempts at trying to pin down the poet’s soul. I like Baratynsky enough that I can see myself returning to him later, but for now I’ve only prepared these four pieces. After each poem I’ll leave a few words, describing the poem and anything I found interesting about it.

A sketch of Evgeniy Baratynsky — Young and unhappy, as most of us these days are, Evgeniy Baratynsky spent some time in Finland as a soldier, married, then died in Italy at the age of 44, which is pretty old for a Russian poet.

The Poems

Prayer

Lord of Heaven, grant your peace
To a soul ill at ease.
For the errors I've seen
Send oblivion's dark screen;
And to rise to your height,
Give me strength to do right.

This is short and sweet, the kind of prayer that you really can mumble to yourself going to bed. Baratynsky doesn’t seem particularly interested in God – He’s rarely mentioned elsewhere – but I still like this poem. It seems a prayer for our own times, with its sense of anxiety and unease. The divided hopes of the poet – both for strength and for forgetting – reflect his ultimate lack of confidence. An alternative translation for comparison is here .

The unusual anapaestic “- – / – – /”meter and rhyme are the same as are used in the original.

“O thought…”

O thought, your fate’s that of the flower
Which calls the moth with every hour;
Draws in the golden bumblebee;
To whom the loving midge does cling
and whom the dragonfly does sing;
When you have seen your wonders flee
And in your turn have faded grey -
Where then those wings that blessed your day?
Forgotten by the host of flies -
Not one of them has need of you -
Just as your failing body dies
Your seeds bring forth another you.

Baratynsky here shows an interest in the nature of thought. However much an idea may hold interest, that interest often turns out only to be temporary. Ideas come in and out of fashion. But what those who look beneath the surface see is that even a brief contact with an idea can be enough to lead to the creation of a new one from out of the old, so that even apparently forgotten thoughts are never truly in vain.

To a Wise Man

Carefully between our lives’ storms and the cold of the grave, o philosopher,
Hope you to find a safe port - "Calm" is the name that you give it.
We, who are called from the void by the tremulous word of creation
- Our lives are worries alone: life and our worries are one.
He who’s escaped common turmoil will think up a care
For himself: palette or lyre or the words of a pen.
Infants, the world’s newest entrants, its laws as if sensing,
Cry in their cradle the instant they’re born.

This is probably my favourite of Baratynsky’s poems, but of course that doesn’t mean I’ve successfully translated it. The theme is the suffering of existence. We may try to find calm, but ultimately all of us will struggle, whether from our own minds or from the external world. That’s all there is to it, probably. The meter is weird and Classical though, which is cool.

Baratynsky spent a formative period in his youth up in Finland. The picture shows part of Karelia, now Russian but once partially Finnish. The landscape is the same on both sides of the border. I was there last week.

“What use to those enchained…”

What use to those enchained are dreams of being free?
Just look – the river flows, and uncomplainingly,
Within its given banks, according to its course;
The mighty fir is powerless before the force
That binds it where it stands. The stars above are caught
Within the paths an unknown hand believes they ought
To go. The roaming wind’s not free – for it a law
Dictates the lands in which its breath has right to soar.
And to the lot which is our own shall we submit –
Rebellious dreams accept as dreams or else forget.
We, reason’s slaves, must learn obediently to bind
Our deep desires to all those things fate has in mind –
Then happiness and peace shall demarcate our time.
What fools we are! Is it not boundless freedom’s sign
That gives us all our passions? Is it not freedom’s voice
We hear within their torrents? O how hard’s for us the choice
To live while feeling in our beating hearts the fire
That rages in the bounds set by our fate's desire!

Another particular favourite of mine. Baratynsky here does not argue for freedom, as do those rebellious Romantics. Instead, he sees us as failing to follow the subservient example of nature, which happily obeys the limits it has been assigned at birth. But are doomed to suffering precisely because this is something we cannot do. We have passion, which fights against our fate, leading us to our downfalls. This poem is fun because of its form and punctuation and whatnot. Baratynsky shows how enchained nature is by controlling when he begins and ends the sentences, relative to the line.

Conclusion

Anyway, I like Baratynsky, just as I like Leopardi. Both of them went against the grain with their pessimism, but I like it as an antidote to the baseless optimism we sometimes encounter in our own days. There is a kind of glamour in despair that both capture, and though it is dangerous to wallow, there can certainly be some pleasure in spending time in the poets’ company.

Here are two articles providing more information about Baratynsky. This one includes a translation of Baratynsky’s awesome long poem, “Autumn”, which I could not possibly attempt to translate myself. The other, meanwhile, compares two recent book translations and gives some information about Baratynsky’s life.

A Russian Woman’s Lot – Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life

Ask any Russian who their great 19th century women writers were and you’ll get little except confused looks. After discussing it with several Russian friends we decided to discount Nadezhda Teffi and Zinaida Gippius, both of whom really flourished in the early 20^th century, leaving us with nobody at all. Russia had no George Sand, no Jane Austen, no Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. However, with the republication of Barbara Heldt’s translation of Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life, alongside a new afterward by Daniel Green, the scene is set for Columbia University Press’s Russian Library to finally tell the Russians once and for all what they were unable to work out for themselves – that they had a great writer after all, and her name was Karolina Pavlova. A Double Life, her novel of 1848, is apparently her masterpiece.

When it appeared on my reading list, I was sceptical, to say the least. A Double Life is mentioned nowhere; there is no Russian edition published later than the days of the Soviet Union; it is impossible to buy it within Russia. But now that I’ve read it, I’m coming round. Pavlova is not a great writer of fiction, however much we might nobly wish that she were. (I’ve not read her poetry so can’t judge it). But nor is she talentless, shoehorned into my upcoming exams solely on the basis of her sex. A Double Life is an interesting book, it is an hilarious and tragic book, and most importantly it’s a valuable, eye-opening book. It may not stack up to Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky, or Gogol, but we shouldn’t hold that against Pavlova. Few of us, whatever our background or sex, can do that.

A painting of Karolina Pavlova, author of A Double Life. — Karolina Pavlova, author of poetry and the novel A Double Life, as painted by V. F. Binemann

What follows is a summary of the plot of A Double Life, an overview of its main themes, and finally a brief look at Pavlova’s life.

A Double Life – Plot Summary

Our heroine is Cecily von Lindenborn, an 18-year-old girl who has only just entered society. Her life’s goal, as it was for most young women in those days, is to get herself a good husband. The man she’s settled on is the alluring and rich Prince Viktor. Cecily has been trained her whole life long to live and succeed within high society’s bounds, with the result that she cannot commit or conceive even a single “peccadillo”. She’s about as interesting as we all were at that age, which is to say that she scarcely has a personality at all. This may perhaps be jointly blamed on her upbringing and on her environment. Her closest friend, Olga, is even more dull than she is.

Although Cecily thinks she’s in charge of her fate, she is much mistaken. She is unwittingly a pawn in a much greater game, played between the adults of A Double Life – the men and the mothers – to ensure suitable matches are made. And Olga’s own mother, Madame Valitskaya, has her own plans in mind involving the prince. Soon enough, Cecily will learn just how little control she really has.

A Double Life is by the standards of the 19^th century Russian novel, awfully short. There are ten chapters, in all, and their structure is the same throughout – a daytime, waking scene, focusing on the banalities of aristocratic life, is then followed by an introspective bedroom scene where our heroine is alone, and then finally a few pages of poetry as she falls asleep. This contrast between day and night as two different “lives” is suggested both by the title and by the epigraph from Byron at the beginning of A Double Life.

Conversation and Propriety

A Double Life is built on conversation. So much is obvious from the novel’s very first words, “But are they rich?” But this is not the speech of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, that tortured desperate working out of questions like “what must I do?” and “how must I live?” In A Double Life there is not one moment where the dialogue serves to answer great questions. It’s purpose is the opposite – to suppress questioning, to control the tone, and to pass the time. People are incessantly talking, and Pavlova skilfully weaves her narration through different groups, giving us snatches at a time, which further lessen any chance of meaningful development of spoken ideas. What I noticed straight away was just how much blank space there was on the page. Pavlova’s characters are always uttering a few remarks, without expansion. They are simply filling the air.

“But are they rich?” Money, of course, is the most important thing for a young man or woman and the thing at the forefront of their minds. But not just money. People are obsessed with their appearance too. When mourning a dead woman, all Prince Viktor has to say is “She was not at all bad looking.” A Double Life’s world is a world in which people have forgotten how to express true feelings. Or rather, one where society forbids them too. When trying to assess Cecily as a match, one man says “I’ve never discussed anything with her except the weather and dances”. Later on, the narrator writes “How and by what means may one in an aristocratic drawing room distinguish the vulgar man from the brilliantly intelligent one? Surely only by the fact that the former usually seems more clever”. There is no way even to judge successfully.

The Language of A Double Life

Even if we cannot rely on people’s conversation as a source of truth, that doesn’t mean the spoken language of A Double Life is pointless. After all, it does show character. In addition to the vapidity of mourning, above, I was shocked and amused (a common feeling, reading this book), by the words of Dmitri, Prince Viktor’s competitor, when he tries to enlist the help of Olga’s mother: “I love Cecily Alexandrovna. I fell in love with her long ago”. This is a lie – he has “loved” her all of five pages. Vera Vladimirovna loses her daughter’s hand in an extremely distressing sequence in which Prince Viktor’s mother talks of a wonderful suitor, all without mentioning once that she is representing Dmitri and not Viktor himself. But Vera Vladimirovna cannot ask for clarification, because that would be beyond what is proper. Language is much more a straightjacket than a liberation here.

Outside of the dialogue, Pavlova’s language serves its purpose well – demonstrating the sheer soullessness of the world her characters inhabit. The word “nice”, is a common giveaway. For example, concerning Cecily’s talents she writes: “She sang very nicely and sketched very nicely as well”. Another word is “luxurious”, showing the materialism of the characters. This wonderful description of a summer residence demonstrates unequivocally how the aristocrats wish to be seen: “surrounding the luxurious cottage was a luxurious garden, its greenery always an excellent, a choice, or one might say an aristocratic greenery”. I also liked the comment that “nature made herself unnatural” – just as the characters must lose their nature to survive in society, so too must the landscape itself. Finally, Pavlova is quite like Austen in that she draws a distinction between native and foreign words. Frenchisms like “Comme il faut” all indicate society’s unnaturalness.

Boredom and Loneliness

If you are an aristocratic girl of 18 at the height of the Russian Empire, your options for enjoyment are rather limited. Unlike your male acquaintances you are unable to murder pawnbrokers, philosophise, or even go on a spree. The result is that everyone, knowingly or unknowingly, is awfully bored. As in Austen’s Emma, characters scheme and gossip away to pass the time. Even the talents they have, like Cecily’s singing, are limited in that they are only means to an end – securing an attractive husband. We are also made keenly aware of the lack of movement options for the women of A Double Life. Spatially, they are restricted to the drawing room and the bedroom. When Cecily finds a moment’s freedom on a horse, she is immediately stopped for going too fast – even the outdoors is no escape.

Cecily’s boredom is compounded by those around her. Olga, ostensibly her best friend, is amusingly banal. After a poetry reading Cecily turns to her:

“How fine that was,” said Cecily into Olga’s ear.
“Very good,” Olga replied, looking intently at someone through her lorgnette.

This is not the only example of a time where Olga immediately lowers the tone, preventing Cecily from expressing higher thoughts by depriving her of an interlocutor. At other times, Olga is simply a mouthpiece for her mother, manipulating Cecily so that she can secure the Prince for herself. And then class gets in the way of any other options. When Cecily is alone in her room with her old nanny, we are told that it means “in other words, completely alone”. With nobody to talk to it is no surprise that she is ultimately an undeveloped, boring, person.

Another representation of Pavlova. The next time you read a Russian novel in the 19th century, pay attention to the women. Male novelists rarely give them much character at all, leaving them either pure and spotless or irredeemable. Pavlova’s women may not be better, but they do provide a counterbalance to the women we might in the men’s works.

Freedom’s Enemies – Mothers…

We may blame “society” for the restrictions on Cecily’s freedom, and certainly there are many unspoken rules that bind her. But there are also people who are to blame – mothers, and men. A Double Life sees Cecily’s problems not only as stemming from her environment, but also very much from her upbringing. At the heart of the novel is the question of why mothers, whose experience of the world cannot have been any better than that of their daughters, continue to bring them up just as they themselves were brought up.

“All these educators have been young once, and had been brought up in the same way! Were they really so satisfied with their own lives and with themselves that they are happy to renew the experience with their children?”

Cecily’s mother leaves her with “her mind in a corset”. Vera Vladimirovna fears “any development of imagination and inspiration, those eternal enemies of propriety”, so much that even Cecily’s dreams are controlled by her: “instead of dreaming of the Marquis Poza, of Egmont, of Lara and the like, [Cecily] could only dream of a splendid ball, a new gown, and the outdoor fete on the first of May.” At no point do mother and daughter seriously talk. Cecily has no emotional support anywhere. I thought this line, from the first chapter, was particularly telling: “A child needs an English nurse more than a mother”. That is to say, that propriety and outward appearance is considered more important than actually nurturing the child. Instead, Vera Vladimirovna sees her role as guiding Cecily to the right husband, with lines like this: “a virtuous wife can completely reform a flighty husband”. Hardly emotional support.

…And Men

Next to the mothers, the men are not nearly so bad. However, I don’t wish to absolve us of guilt. The two main male characters are Dmitri and Prince Viktor, and both of them are equally faulty. Dmitri is a gambler, a self-centred lout. He only comes to “love” Cecily when he hears she might get a big inheritance. When he imagines her after that he thinks she is someone “who could make a husband very happy”. He does not once think of her own happiness. Dmitri is also a master of using society’s rules to his benefit. After Cecily’s brief burst of freedom galloping on horseback everyone wants to keep a watchful eye on her. Dmitri comes up and says “let me ride beside you. The last time you frightened me”. A horrible, stomach churning moment, precisely because she cannot say no.

Prince Viktor is not so bad. He breaks the rules more often, but Vera Vladimirovna is willing to make an exception for him because he’s rich. Around him Olga’s mother schemes so that he will marry Olga, however at the end of A Double Life he declares that he is going to go to Paris. It is a significant point. However talented the machinations of the mothers may be, the men of the novel still have the ultimate freedom because it is they who make the proposals. If Prince Viktor is disappointed that he’s missed out on Cecily, then he can go to Paris if he wants. As a man, nobody controls him.

The Poet and The Double Life

But there is one man in A Double Life who is controlled by others, just as the women are. In the third chapter there is a poetry recital by a young poet, who performs his rendition of Schiller’s “The Bell”. Immediately he comes under attack by one of the audience members. “We demand action,” he says. “Poetry should be useful; it should hold vice up to shame or set a crown on virtue”. The poet, surrounded by important aristocrats, is unable to defend himself. Like the women, his environment determines his identity even as his heart wishes to rebel in the name of higher feelings. Cecily is not a poet, but during A Double Life she begins moving down a path towards becoming one. Though she has been made to understand that being a woman poet is “the most pitiable, abnormal condition”, every night she hears poetry in her dreams.

This is the voice of her muse, at least I take it to be so. It comes as a warning, trying to warn Cecily before it’s too late both that society is not all there is to life, and that her “love”, when it comes, is not all it seems to be. The poems are translated without rhyme, focusing on the images. They were quite repetitive, filled with the usual chains and repressive bits and pieces. The speaker in them is a “he”, which adds a nice sense of reflection. In her poetic night-time double life Dmitri has another rival, but Cecily is not able to see that man’s worth until it is too late. The tone becomes one of resignation. “You will understand earthly reality / With a maturing soul: / You will buy a dear blessing / At a dear price.” Cecily will suffer, but she will learn.

At the end of A Double Life Cecily speaks for the first time a snippet from one of her poems. Olga calls it nonsense, and Cecily for her part refuses to claim it, saying she simply heard it somewhere. But that night there’s a change in the poems, and for the first time the voice is in the first person. Speaking of her poetry, it says: “Long had it lived mid worldly noise, / Free and bright within me”. Even as Cecily’s external world has suddenly grown constricted her internal world has reached a new level of freedom. For the narrator, who seems like an older, wiser woman, A Double Life’s plot is marked with a melancholy inevitability. “What maidenly soul does not understand the charm of these slight transgressions?” The narrator asks of Cecily’s first deluded moments in love.

For Cecily is only one of many women who were trapped within their society, and near the end of A Double Life she realises this in a moment of revelation.“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”. Cecily is in that moment all women, and it is here that A Double Life stakes its claim on universality. Just as Pavlova wrote a book to give knowledge of aristocratic women’s plight to the world, so too, do we feel, one day will Cecily. But before that time much suffering awaits. A Double Life marks the end of one of Cecily’s lives, but it also marks the birth of another. But that life is for another story, and Pavlova never wrote it – she lived it.

Karolina Pavlova and Her Critics

Reading about Karolina Pavlova’s life is not fun. The Introduction and Afterward give ample evidence to support the view that Pavlova was treated horrendously by the men of the world she inhabited. And, indeed, by the women too. In spite of her impeccable literary credentials – she rubbed shoulders with all of the major Russian writers of the period, including Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, and others – she found herself insulted by many of the critics of the day, and constantly demeaned. As a man, much of this makes for uncomfortable reading. An anonymous critic writes of his experience reading: “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”. Reading this I wanted both to laugh and cry.

An old photograph of Adam Mickiewicz, Polish national poet — Adam Mickiewicz, perhaps the most important Polish poet, was one of the many influential literary figures who got to know Pavlova well. But somehow, she never rose to be as successful as they. Who, or what, is to blame for this?

But for Pavlova, there were only tears. Born Jaenisch in Yaroslavl in 1807 to a German professor, she was forced, a few years after the publication of A Double Life, to flee Russia to Dresden, where she lived for four decades in poverty, cut off from her home. At every turn she made enemies, such as when she initiated (perfectly justified) criminal proceedings against her husband for wasting all of her inheritance on gambling. Her dedication to her poetry made her an outsider – as a woman she was supposed to be raising children. Only Aleksei Tolstoy, himself a minor poet, was of any real literary support in her later years. When she died in 1893 she was already forgotten, waiting for the Silver Age poets to rediscover her poetry, and then critics like Barbara Heldt to rediscover her prose.

Conclusion

To say that Pavlova lived in a hostile environment would be a horrible understatement. Everyone, everything, men and women alike, conspired to insult and humiliate her and denigrate her poetic calling. Though she attempted to be stoical, no amount of character will let you withstand such hostility forever. I cannot fault her character, and I was truly shocked at her treatment. But heroism in life alone does not make for a good book.

A Double Life is not a great novel, Russian or otherwise. It has a number of faults that are simply impossible to look past. Its characters are poorly drawn, both the men and the women; the heroine is boring; the poetry’s repetitive; and the arguments are rarely subtle. In spite of this, you should definitely read it. It’s short, and it’s fascinating to see the world of ballrooms from a different perspective, even if Pavlova has an axe to grind. Pavlova is no Jane Austen – she lacks the subtlety of her characterisation and irony. But she is by no means talentless. A Double Life is at its best when it’s comic and satirical, rather than when it attempts loftiness. I really did laugh out loud at several moments.

Many diamonds in the rough can slip through literary history unnoticed, but rarely do truly polished ones. Ultimately, A Double Life is just the former, not the latter. So read it, but keep your expectations tempered, and you’ll no doubt enjoy it a lot.