SOURCE: Kelly, Catriona. “Karolina Pavlova (1807-1893).” In A History of Russian Women's Writing 1820-1992, pp. 93-107. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.

In the following excerpt, Kelly presents an overview of Pavlova's background and writing career—discussing her dual role as a writer and a woman; the details of her work; and the criticism it drew during her lifetime.

Like Elisaveta Kulman, Karolina Pavlova, whose maiden name was Jänisch, was partly of non-Russian descent; her father was of German extraction, and Pavlova was to grow up trilingual in German, Russian, and French. Her earliest published collection was a volume of original German poetry, and translations of Russian poetry into German, Northern Lights (1833); her second collection was a similar mixed edition of original French poems and translations, Preludes (1839). It is tempting to attribute her remarkable, even unique, achievement in creating herself as a Romantic woman poet to her mixed origins, and...