City Folk and Country Folk Read online

  CITY FOLK AND COUNTRY FOLK

  RUSSIAN LIBRARY

  The Russian Library at Columbia University Press publishes an expansive selection of Russian literature in English translation, concentrating on works previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations. Works of premodern, modern, and contemporary literature are featured, including recent writing. The series seeks to demonstrate the breadth, surprising variety, and global importance of the Russian literary tradition and includes not only novels but also short stories, plays, poetry, memoirs, creative nonfiction, and works of mixed or fluid genre.

  Editorial Board:

  Vsevolod Bagno

  Dmitry Bak

  Rosamund Bartlett

  Caryl Emerson

  Peter B. Kaufman

  Mark Lipovetsky

  Oliver Ready

  Stephanie Sandler

  Between Dog and Wolf by Sasha Sokolov, translated by Alexander Boguslawski

  Strolls with Pushkin by Andrei Sinyavsky, translated by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski

  Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays by Andrei Platonov, translated by Robert Chandler, Jesse Irwin, and Susan Larsen

  Rapture: A Novel by Iliazd, translated by Thomas J. Kitson

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Published with the support of Read Russia, Inc., and the Institute of Literary Translation, Russia

  Copyright © 2017 Nora Seligman Favorov

  Introduction copyright © 2017 Hilde Hoogenboom

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-54450-4

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Khvoshchinskai︠a︡, Sofʹi︠a︡ Dmitrievna, 1828-1865, author. | Favorov, Nora Seligman, translator.

  Title: City folk and country folk / Sofia Khvoshchinskaya; translated by Nora Seligman Favorov.

  Other titles: Gorodskie i derevenskie. English | Russian library (Columbia University Press)

  Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. | Series: Russian library | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016057704 (print) | LCCN 2016059922 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231183024 (cloth) | ISBN 9780231183031 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780231544504 (electronic)

  Subjects: LCSH: Country life—Russia—History—19th century—Fiction. | Gentry—Russia—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PG3447.V47 G6713 2017 (print) | LCC PG3447.V47 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/3–dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057704

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  Cover design: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich

  Book design: Lisa Hamm

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction by Hilde Hoogenboom

  Notes on the Translation

  City Folk and Country Folk

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It was Beth Holmgren (then of the University of North Carolina, now of Duke University) who first steered me in the direction of nineteenth-century Russian women writers, so it is she, first and foremost, who deserves credit for introducing me to Sofia Khvoshchinskaya. On Holmgren’s advice, I acquainted myself with all of the nineteenth-century female authors publishing (usually anonymously or under a pseudonym) prose in Russia at that time. While there was much of interest, Khovshchinskaya and this novel in particular struck me as offering the greatest possibilities for both scholarly investigation and pure reading pleasure. My first draft translation was completed with a great deal of help from native Russian speakers, primarily Dr. Rimma Garn (who, as a professor of Russian literature and culture, could offer her expertise as a professional) and my husband, Oleg Favorov (who, as a scientist with no literary credentials whatsoever, is nevertheless an exceptionally insightful interpreter of nineteenth-century prose, having spent a sizable proportion of his life with his nose in books from or about that period in Russia’s history).

  Beth Holmgren also deserves thanks for putting me in touch with Mary Zirin, a name that comes up in many of the acknowledgments written by translators of nineteenth-century Russian women. Zirin read an early draft of my translation in parallel with the Russian (being “constitutionally incapable,” as she wrote, of sticking to the spot-check she had planned) and somehow managed to sound extremely encouraging about the quality of the translation despite making dozens upon dozens of corrections. Paul Debreczeny, one of my graduate school professors at the University of North Carolina who, alas, did not live to see this work published, also made extremely helpful corrections and comments. A unique contribution to the project was made by Karen Rosneck, translator and scholar of Sofia’s better known sister, Nadezhda. As someone working on a translation nobody was waiting for by an author nobody had heard of, I found Rosneck’s enthusiasm, encouragement, and advice to be invaluable.

  Useful input was offered by dear family friend and retired Brooklyn College English professor Dick Miller. A few other friends—Gail Murrow, Dan Ryder, Lynne Seligman—also read early drafts of City Folk and Country Folk and wrote up thoughtful and insightful comments. I was heartened by their assurances that the novel would be of interest to a broad audience. The more mature version of my translation represented in this book reflects recent help. My dear friend Elana Pick, English-to-Russian translator and interpreter extraordinaire, helped out with questions about nuances of the Russian. I was fortunate to have two close friends and colleagues whose abilities as writers and translators of Russian I greatly respect—Lydia Razran Stone and Laura Wolfson—compare my translation to the original Russian, catch a few errors and infelicities, and make a number of suggestions that, I believe, have resulted in a much improved final product. Finally, I would like to thank Read Russia, Russia’s Institute of Literary Translation, and the editorial board, editors, production staff, and backers of Columbia University Press’s Russian Library for making this publication possible—and Christine Dunbar, in particular, for her support and assistance.

  INTRODUCTION

  In the 1860s, unbeknownst to Russian readers, at the same time as they were reading Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, Russia had its own trio of writing sisters. Like the Brontës, the Khvoshchinskaya sisters wrote under male pseudonyms, endured hardships, and lived in the provinces, in the city of Ryazan, about 120 miles southwest of Moscow.1 The Brontë sisters became well known not long after their deaths, thanks to Elizabeth Gaskell’s myth-making Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), written at the request of their family to protect their reputations. The story of the Khvoshchinskaya sisters remains to be told.2

  This silence is a familiar situation for women writers, but the sisters bear some of the responsibility. Nadezhda (1822–1889), Sofia (1824–1865), and Praskovia (1828–1916) refused requests to print their names and biographies, although writers and editors knew who they were and encouraged them to write under their own names to promote their works. After Nadezhda’s death, despite having given her word to remain silent, Praskovia wrote a brief “family chronicle” for Nadezhda’s collected works in 1892, in a riposte to critics who portrayed the sisters as leading a gloomy life as they supported their greedy family. Praskovia explained that they used pseudonyms because provincial society was suspicious of women writers, and in the capital St. Petersburg, “there were few women writers and they hid behind pseudonyms and their labor was considered improper, not feminine.” Praskovia did not explain what did not need to be explained to readers at the time, namely that these were important
considerations for the Khvoshchinskaya sisters and their family because they were nobles. Indeed, most Russian writers, the characters they created, and the readers who enjoyed their works were from the nobility. This fundamental fact is essential to understanding their lives, their works, and the comedy of manners in City Folk and Country Folk.

  The Khvoshchinskys were a large old noble family that dated back to 1615 and the reign of the first Romanov, Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich, who gave them land in recognition of their military service. Their father, Dmitry Kesarevich Khvoshchinsky, served as an officer and then retired to marry Yulia Vikentyevna Drobyshevskaya-Rubets. With the help of his family, he bought an estate with a distillery and turned his attention to distributing alcohol and breeding horses. The family, however, lost their estate, livelihood, and reputation when Khvoshchinsky was falsely accused of embezzlement. The fourteen-year case was resolved in 1845, and he was then able to join the civil service as a land surveyor for the treasury. Nadezhda worked as his clerk, managing the office and copying plans (like her heroine in the novel Ursa Major). In 1850, Nadezhda switched from publishing poetry to novels, and later criticism, dramas, sketches, and translations to support their extended family, which included the three sisters (a fourth sister had died in 1838), a brother, and their father’s five spinster sisters (who appear in fictionalized form in various works). Later their brother married, and his wife and two sons, who would be the family’s only descendants, lived with them while he served as a military officer. After their father’s sudden death in 1856, Nadezhda convinced Sofia not to take a job as the director of a gymnasium (an elite high school) in Samara but to remain at home and publish her writing.3 In 1862, Nadezhda compared their division of labor within the family to branches of government: “Sofia is reflection and counsel. Pasha is executive power. I am the treasury.”4

  Central to their story is the extraordinary intellectual, creative, and emotional bond between Sofia and Nadezhda, who was regularly compared to George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, and George Sand.5 After a brief career of nine years that showed her equally considerable talents and promise, Sofia died young, while Nadezhda’s writing career spanned nearly five decades (1842–1889). She remains the most important nineteenth-century Russian writer that most Russians have never heard of. Praskovia wrote two tales and four short stories (1864–1865, 1879) that were republished twice as a collection, In the City and in the Country (1881, 1885).

  Before Sofia died in 1865 at age 41 from abdominal tuberculosis, she informed Nadezhda that she did not want her works to be republished. Of her two novels, ten novellas, and seven published sketches (1857-65), City Folk and Country Folk, which was included in a Soviet anthology in 1987, is her only work to be republished since her death. An article about her work by the radical critic Dmitry Pisarev was not published. A single rogue obituary for Sofia appeared in The Illustrated Gazette, published by Vladimir Zotov, their supporter and (unfortunately overly intrusive) editor of Nadezhda’s poetry.6 The obituary revealed the true identities of both Sofia and Nadezhda behind their respective pseudonyms, Iv. Vesenev and V. Krestovsky. With the death of her soulmate, Nadezhda despaired: “I could be alive for Sofia, enjoy myself together with her, seek out people for her sake. Without her, I cannot live, there is no gaiety, I don’t know people.”7 Six weeks later, she married a twenty-seven-year old doctor, Ivan Zaionchkovsky (1838-72), moved to St. Petersburg, began writing for the newspaper The Voice, and stopped writing novels for two years. But by 1870, with Ursa Major, Nadezhda was the most well-respected and well-paid novelist after Turgenev and Tolstoy in the “thick” journals where most Russian literature was initially published in serial form.8 In 1876, Ivan Kramskoi painted her portrait in the series commissioned by Pavel Tretyakov of Russia’s most important cultural figures, which included Tolstoy, Ivan Goncharov, and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. To this day it is in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

  Like the Brontë sisters, as children Sofia and Nadezhda were inseparable, and they were constantly working on family literary projects. With Nadezhda as editor, they created a weekly journal, “The Little Star,” for their father. They also liked to stage dramatic scenes. Like their mother, who was educated at the home of a wealthy relative, the daughters were well educated, initially at home, in Russian, literature, Latin, and drawing. Thanks to a wealthy uncle, Sofia attended the St. Catherine Institute for Young Noblewomen in Moscow from 1835 to 1843, and did not see her family during that time, as was customary. She graduated with an education in Russian, French, German, and English, and as the best student, received a gold medal that entitled her to an official position as teacher or the right to run a private school, known as a pension. This same uncle invited Nadezhda to Moscow for a year, where she studied French, Italian, and music. She also learned German and continued to read and translate from these languages for the rest of her life. Back home, in Sofia’s absence, Nadezhda took up with a family friend her age, with whom she wrote poetry, tales, and three novels in the spirit of Walter Scott and Casimir Delavigne’s Marino Faliero, which they first translated from French.

  When Sofia returned home in 1843, Nadezhda already had begun to publish her poetry through their contacts in Moscow. Sofia wrote “The Cemetery,” an imitation of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”9 When a friend, Princess Alexandra Shchetinina (later the second wife of Alexander Pushkin’s editor and publisher Petr Pletnev) asked whether she was going to publish her writing, Sofia replied (in French) that, “there is nothing more terrible than to see your own words, your own thoughts published in a book, read by the whole world, judged by the whole world, criticized, and never does one see the faults of one’s pen so well as when one sees it leaving a bookstore, still smelling of the odor of printer’s ink. No, there is no road steeper, rougher to travel than that of the poor poet, and I have one under my eyes now, who is an acquaintance of mine.” In 1845, Sofia wrote her that she and Nadezhda were painting an eighteenth-century landscape of a hunting scene with forty dogs from the era of Louis XV; Nadezhda added that Sofia needed models for her painting.10 The family archive, discovered in a relative’s home in Ryazan in 1979, contains caricatures of all the well-known men writers, most likely by Nadezhda.11

  Beginning in 1852, once Nadezhda had begun to publish fiction, she traveled to Moscow and St. Petersburg to meet her editor Andrei Kraevsky at the liberal and later radical journal Notes of the Fatherland, which was her publishing home until it was closed by the censors in 1884. From 1857, once Sofia had launched her career as well at Notes of the Fatherland, they went together and separately nearly every year to Moscow and for several months at a time to St. Petersburg, staying with relatives and later renting rooms. There they met with editors, who encouraged them to move to St. Petersburg, and with writers, including Nadezhda’s friend the conservative poet Nikolai Shcherbina. They went to concerts and to the theater, and had access to the Hermitage Museum and the Imperial Academy of Arts to draw and paint. Their friend Alexandra Karrik, a feminist and the wife of the British photographer William Carrick, described Sofia as a small, thin blonde and as nearsighted; on first acquaintance, she appeared to be a cold society woman. In 1858, Sofia quickly became friends with the painter Alexander Ivanov, who had returned from Italy to exhibit his famous painting The Apparition of Christ Before the People at the Academy; she even agreed to go to Italy with him as his student.12 However, he died that same year and she visited him several times during his illness. Sofia painted his portrait, which Kraevsky sold for her to the industrialist and collector Vasily Kokorev for his gallery in Moscow, the first public collection of Russian art.13 Through Zotov and Kraevsky, she sought commissions among the aristocracy. In 1859, Sofia traveled to Europe, to Germany, Switzerland, Paris, and perhaps England; the paper of four letters to Kraevsky is embossed with a crown and the name of the city of Bath.14 In August 1860, she took a painting to St. Petersburg in the hope that it would be selected for the Academy exhibition.15 In 1861, Sofia wrote to Kraevs
ky, “We are reading many journals. What an abundance of women writers there is at the present time.”16 That same year, as journals proliferated and fought for readers, Nadezhda reported that, “There are journals, that is, their editors, some of whom have sometimes never even seen me, who love me greatly: all are proposing to me. This year I have forgotten how many I have refused.”17 Among those she refused were the Dostoevskys (for the journal Time) and another celebrated female author, Evgeniia Tur.

  Life as women writers agreed with the sisters because their careers coincided with the end of the Crimean War and the great reforms of the reign of Alexander II (1855–1881). He ended Nicholas I’s three decades of repression, which had long throttled literary publication and had become even stricter after the European revolutions of 1848. In addition to reforms in the judiciary, administration, military, and education, in 1861, the serfs were emancipated. Less censorship led to a period of glasnost with fewer restrictions on publications. The Russian literary market finally began to expand to meet the demand of an increasingly literate population that wanted to read Russian literature in addition to the mostly French, English, and German literature—both in translation and in the original—that Russians had long been reading. In Russia, in 1830, there were around 260 productive writers, with about 300 by 1855, and 700 by 1880. As there were more writers, the number of women writers increased disproportionately, from 3.5 percent of productive writers in 1830, to 10.4 percent in 1855, and 16.1 percent in 1880.18 The enormous changes in noble life brought by Alexander II’s reforms, viewed from the perspective of the provinces, provide the setting for City Folk and Country Folk and Sofia’s other works.

  With more newspapers, journals, and books, professional writers like the Khvoshchinskaya sisters could begin to earn a living by publishing in greater quantity. Dostoevsky, a poor businessman, relied on his brother and then his wife, who was also his stenographer, to handle publishing, while Tolstoy was adept at the business of literature, and his wife, who was also his copyist, learned from Dostoevsky’s wife how to make money self-publishing.19 As in England in the eighteenth century, Russian publishers realized that biographies helped sell books. Both men published fictionalized autobiographies. Unfortunately, the Khvoshchinskayas, who did all their writing and copying themselves, were not businesswomen. Forced to rely on others to handle their publications, they remained poor.20