SOURCE: Fusso, Susanne. “Pavlova's Quadrille: The Feminine Variant.” In Essays on Karolina Pavlova, edited by Susanne Fusso and Alexander Lehrman, pp. 118-30. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Fusso argues that in Pavlova's narrative poem Quadrille, she offers a feminine critique of Russian Romanticism by presenting post-Romantic heroines with inner lives that are represented in vivid detail.

Does a writer's gender matter? Literary criticism, especially Western literary criticism, has in the last twenty-five years answered yes, devoting much thought and study to the question of the specific, distinctive character of writing by women. Writers, on the other hand, are often heard to answer no, and interviews with women who are writers often include some version of the sentence “I am not a woman writer, I am a writer.”¹ It is not clear how Karolina Pavlova would have answered the question, because although she was deeply...