SOURCE: Heldt, Barbara. “From Folklore through the Nineteenth Century.” In Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature, pp. 111-15. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

In the following excerpt, Heldt offers an introduction to Pavlova's poetry, emphasizing her feminine themes and position as a woman poet.

Russia's greatest nineteenth-century woman poet, Karolina Pavlova (1807-1893), repeatedly used images of the self, embedding them in a body of poetry whose varied themes and forms seem, at first reading, to disguise the fact that a female self is present in them at all. Often her poems are allegorical: the poet-craftsman is destroyed by society. Her most extensive treatment of the feminine condition occurs in her novel A Double Life, a mixed work of prose and poetry, sparing of words like her lyrics, but rich in a peculiarly female irony, which specifically points to the shallowness of men.

Its heroine, about to be forced into...