Unpublished poems by N. D. Khvo shchinskaya from an album of the Alyabyev family

Abstract

The Department of Manuscript Collections of the State Literary Museum holds a handwritten album from the Alyabyev family that may have belonged to Natalia Pavlovna Khvoshchinskaya, Alyabyev’s wife. But it is also quite likely that the first owner of the album was Ekaterina Avraamovna Khvoshchinskaya, married to Akinfov, whose granddaughter became the wife of B. I. Alyabyev. Both N. P. Alyabyeva and E. A. Akinfova maintained relations with their cousin, the writer Nadezhda Dmitrievna Khvoshchinskaya, whose prose, signed with the pseudonym V. Krestovsky, was already famous in the middle of the 19th century. The introductory part examines the history of the writer’s relationship with each of her cousins and hypothetically establishes the ownership of the album. In 1857 N. D. Khvoshchinskaya recorded 22 of her poems from 1848–1852 in this album under the general heading “From the poems of Nadezhda Dmitrievna Khvoshchinskaya”. Khvoshchinskaya’s poetry, contrary to the unfounded opinion of her as a supporter of “pure art,” is imbued with civic sentiments. Unlike most poetesses, she was interested in social and philosophical problems, and she often spoke on behalf of the collective “we”, that is people of her generation, whose maturity occurred in the 1850s. Some of the rewritten texts had previously been published, but nine poems, which particularly clearly expressed the author’s social ideals and her abiding interest in European political processes, could not be published at the time. These never-beforepublished poems are included in this selection.