SOURCE: Greene, Diana. “Karolina Pavlova's ‘At the Tea Table’ and the Politics of Class and Gender.” The Russian Review 53, no. 2 (April 1994): 271-84.

In the following essay, Greene discusses the literary qualities of Pavlova's short story, “At the Tea Table,” and asserts that it overturns the popular paradigm of the upper class woman “victimizing” her male lover. Greene maintains that the story presents women with dignity, exploring power relations and gender and class hierarchies.

Cora Kaplan's assertion that “the doubled inscription of sexual and social difference is the most common, characteristic trope” of nineteenth-century Anglo-American fiction holds true for nineteenth-century Russian literature as well.¹ While analyses of class politics in Russian literature have been discredited by the excesses of Soviet socialist realism, such an approach to literature can have its uses.² Certainly, in nineteenth-century Russian society several factors served to polarize class relations and also to make them an...