Hvoschinskaya (V. Krestóvskiy-pseudonyme)

A very sympathetic woman writer, who belongs to the same group and deserves in reality much more than a brief notice, is N. D. HVOSCHINSKAYA (1825–1869; Zaionchkóvskaya after her marriage). She wrote under the masculine nom-de-plume of V. KRESTOVSKIY, and in order not to confound her with a very prolific writer of novels in the style of the French detective novel-the author of St. Petersburg Slums, whose name was VSEVOLOD KRESTOVSKIY — she is usually known in Russia as “V. Krestóvskiy-pseudonyme.”

N. D. Hvóschinskaya began to write very early, in 1847, and her novels were endowed with such an inner charm that they were always admired by the general public and were widely read. It must, however, be said that during the first part of her literary career the full value of her work was not appreciated, and that down to the end of the seventies literary criticism remained hostile to her. It was only towards the end of her career (in 1878–1880) that our best literary critics — Mihailóvskiy, Arsénieff and the novelist Boborýkin — recognised the full value of this writer, who certainly deserves being placed by the side of George Eliot and the author of Jane Eyre.

N. D. Hvóschinskaya certainly was not one of those who conquer their reputation at once; but the cause of the rather hostile attitude of Russian critics towards her was that, having been born in a poor nobleman’s family of Ryazán, and having spent all her life in the province, her novels of the first period, in which she dealt with provincial life and provincial types only, suffered from a certain narrowness of view. This last defect was especially evident in those types of men for whom the young author tried to win sympathy, but who, after all, had no claims to it, and simply proved that the author felt the need of idealising somebody, at least, in her sad surroundings.

Apart from this defect, N. D. Hvóschinskaya knew provincial life very well and pictured it admirably. She represented it exactly in the same pessimistic light in which Turguéneff saw it in those same years — the last years of the reign of Nicholas I. She excelled especially in representing the sad and hopeless existence of the girl in most of the families of those times.

In her own family she meets the bigoted tyranny of her mother and the “let-me-alone” egotism of her father, and among her admirers she finds only a collection of good-for-nothings who cover their shallowness with empty, sonorous phrases. Every novel written by our author during this period contains the drama of a girl whose best self is crushed back in such surroundings, or it relates the still more heartrending drama of an old maid compelled to live under the tyranny, the petty persecutions and the pin-prickings of her relations.

When Russia entered into a better period, in the early sixties, the novels of N. D. Hvóschinskaya also took a different, much more hopeful character, and among them The Great Bear (1870–70 is the most prominent. At the time of its appearance it produced quite a sensation amidst our youth, and it had upon them a deeper influence, in the very best sense of the word, than any other novel. The heroine, Kátya, meets, in Verhóvskiy, a man of the weakling type which we know from Turguéneff’s Correspondence, but dressed this time in the garb of a social reformer, prevented only by “circumstances” and “misfortunes” from accomplishing greater things. Verhóvskiy, whom Kátya loves and who falls in love with her — so far, at least, as such men can fall in love — is admirably pictured. It is one of the best representatives in the already rich gallery of such types in Russian literature. It must be owned that there are in The Great Bear one or two characters which are not quite real, or, at least, are not correctly appreciated by the author (for instance, the old Bagryánskiy) ; but we find also a fine collection of admirably painted characters; while Kátya stands higher, is more alive, and is more fully pictured, than Turguéneff’s Natásha or even his Helen. She has had enough of all the talk about heroic deeds which “circumstances” prevent the would-be heroes from accomplishing, and she takes to a much smaller task — she becomes a loving school mistress in a village school, and undertakes to bring into the village — darkness her higher ideals and her hopes of a better future. The appearance of this novel, just at the time when that great movement of the youth “towards the people” was beginning in Russia, made it favourite reading by the side Of MORDÓVTSEFF’S Signs of the Times, and Spielhagen’s Amboss und Hammer and In Reih und Glied. The warm tone of the novel and the refined, deeply humane, poetical touches of which it is full — all these added immensely to the inner merits of The Great Bear. In Russia it has sown many a good idea, and there is no doubt that if it were known in Western Europe, it would be, here as well, a favourite with the thinking and well inspired young women and men.

A third period may be distinguished in the art of N. Hvóschinskaya, after the end of the seventies. The novels of this period — among which the series entitled The Album: Groups and Portraits is the most striking — have a new character. When the great liberal movement which Russia had lived through in the early sixties came to an end, and reaction had got the upper hand, after 1864, hundreds and hundreds of those who had been prominent in this movement as representatives of advanced thought and reform abandoned the faith and the ideals of their best years. Under a thousand various pretexts they now tried to persuade themselves — and, of course, those women who had trusted them — that new times had come, and new requirements had grown up; that they had only become “practical” when they deserted the old banner and ranged themselves under a new one — that of personal enrichment; that to do this was on their part a necessary self-sacrifice, a manifestation of “virile citizenship,” which requires from every man that he should not stop even before the sacrifice of his ideals in the interest of his “cause.” “V. Krestovskiy,” as a woman who had loved the ideals, understood better than any man the real sense of these sophisms. She must have bitterly suffered from them in her personal life; and I doubt whether in any literature there is a collection of such “groups and portraits” of deserters as we see in The Album, and especially in At the Photographer’s. In reading these stories we are conscious of a loving heart which bleeds as it describes these deserters, and this makes of “The groups and portraits” of N. D.Hvóschinskaya one of the finest pieces of “subjective realism” we possess in our literature.

Two sisters of N. D. Hvóschinskaya, who wrote under the noms-de-plume of ZIMAROFF and VESENIEFF, were also novelists. The former wrote a biography of her sister Nathalie.