The 19th-Century Feminist Novel Pushed Out of the Russian Canon

Karolina Pavlova, born in 1807, wasn’t a woman who acted in accordance with social norms. The leader of a respected Moscow literary salon, she was also devoutly committed to her own writing. That trait was greeted with animosity from many of her male contemporaries, who disparaged her readiness to share her work as unwomanly and approached her soaringly emotive poetry with suspicion. Even so, Pavlova’s novel shook the Russian literary world when it was published in 1848, earning widespread praise for its revolutionary form and psychological acuity. Pavlova had written a book depicting a woman’s struggle against social constraints, and—a full half century before Freud popularized the idea of the subconscious—insisting