SOURCE: Lehrman, Alexander. “The Poetics of Karolina Pavlova.” In Essays on Karolina Pavlova, edited by Susanne Fusso and Alexander Lehrman, pp. 3-20. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Lehrman explores the verbal quality in representative examples of Pavlova's verse to show what constitutes her excellence as a poet.

In Russia, her homeland, Karolina Karlovna Pavlova (or Caroline von Pawloff, as she signed her printed works and letters during the German period of her life) is remembered only by a few specialists, which is to say hardly at all. The hundredth anniversary of her death (1993) passed virtually unnoticed there. Yet, beginning in the early 1970s, something like a quiet Pavlova revival has been under way in the West, primarily in the United States and in Germany. This revival is unfortunately due less to Pavlova's literary work per se than to two sociocultural factors: first and foremost...