As an undergraduate at Columbia in the eighties, I was required to take two survey courses on Russian literature taught in English: one on nineteenth-century prose, taught by William Harkins, and the other on twentieth-century prose, taught by Robert Maguire. If memory serves, there was not a single woman author on either syllabus. Thanks to the persistent work of a number of scholars over the past thirty years, however, we now have a significant body of research on women's prose writing in Russian and, no less importantly, a growing number of high-quality translations, such as Karen Rosneck's translation of Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia's The Boarding School Girl, Nora Seligman Favorov's translation of Sofia Khvoshchinskaia's City Folk and Country Folk, Helena Goscilo's translation of Anastasiia Verbitskaia's Keys to Happiness, Robert Chandler's translations of Teffi, my own translations of Liubov Krichevksaia, and Barbara Heldt's translation of Karolina Pavlova's A Double Life, not to mention several anthologies of Russian women's writing. These translations make possible not only entire courses dedicated to Russian women's writing but also the integration of these works into survey courses on Russian literature and on international women's writing. The republication of Heldt's translation of Pavlova's novel, first published in the seventies, in an attractive and inexpensive edition in Columbia University's Russian Library series, is thus a welcome event. The volume contains Heldt's original introduction along with a new afterword by Daniel Green, in which he assesses the scholarly advances that have been made since the 1970s in the study of Russian women's writing, inscribes Pavlova in her time, and integrates her prolific translation activity into her other writerly pursuits.

When scholars in the field of US literature, such as Jane Thompson, began in the 1980s to challenge the exclusion of women authors from the canon, they argued that writing by women deserved a place there, first, because men had established the aesthetic criteria that tended to exclude women's writing, especially of the sentimental variety, and, second, because works by women were among the most widely read of their time—just compare the enormous popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to the tepid reaction to Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Except for Verbitskaia, the latter argument cannot be made for Russian women's writing, nor need it be. Pavlova's A Double Life stands up to the most highly-esteemed works of nineteenth-century Russian prose fiction, both aesthetically and for its daring. The use of poetry, which ends every chapter, to represent the unconscious dreamlife of the heroine is as experimental a play with genre as Aleksandr Pushkin's novel in verse or Nikolai Gogol΄’s satirical poema. In his postface, Green finds it ironic that Cecily's liberation is experienced in poetry, which is highly structured, but Pavlova may have been aiming to contrast the non-mimetic nature of lyric poetry (see Culler's 2015 Theory of the Lyric) to the mimetic world of prose narrative. (In terms of generic experimentation, one could compare Pavlova's novel to Krichevskaia's Count Gorsky of 1837, the first part of which is an epistolary novel and the second part a more conventional third person narrative, suggesting that Russian women writers of this generation were not passive imitators of the dominant forms but real innovators.) Moreover, Pavlova's characters are subtly and insightfully drawn, and her satire is biting and often quite humorous, as when Olga quips that a rival's dress should be awarded a medal for its many years in service. In addition, her posing of the “woman question” is highly original. By representing the rich poetic dreamlife of her heroine, she presents the problem of female “muteness”—the word mute appears repeatedly throughout the novel—not as evidence that women have nothing to say but that there are no avenues through which to say it. Moreover, when Cecily, quite to her surprise, suddenly remembers a line of verse from her dreamlife, Pavlova offers a nuanced understanding of women's agency—Cecily's fertile imagination will attempt to find a way into her waking life, whether Cecily wants it or not. This contributes to the radical open-endedness of Pavlova's plot—she eschews both a happy resolution and a tragic one, leaving the future of her characters entirely unpredictable. This novel, therefore, should be read and reread not as a novelty or a token—a woman's work in a still overwhelmingly male canon—but as a daring and sophisticated work of nineteenth century Russian prose.