Nadezhda Dmitrievna Khvoshchinskaia was one of the most popular and respected Russian writers of the nineteenth century. From 1842 to 1889 she established a substantial reputation as a prose writer, although her literary output also included poetry, drama, translations, and critical articles. Her fictional emphasis on psychological analysis and narrative subjectivity aligns her prose with that of writers such as Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoevsky, while her thematic examination of individual freedom, social responsibility, love, work, and generational conflict suggests influential predecessors among the works of Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov, and Aleksandr Nikolaevich Ostrovsky. Like other Russian nineteenth-century writers, her exploration of family conflicts created a vital, small-scale workshop for examining larger social issues, while avoiding the watchful eye of the censor.

Nadezhda Dmitrievna Khvoshchinskaia was born 20 May 1824 to impoverished gentry in the Pronskii district of Riazan' province. Her mother, Iuliia Vikent'evna Drobyshevskaia-Rubets, of Polish extraction, married...