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Chapter Six “V. Krestovskii,” Writer of the Fifties I am the narrator of the fifties. —V. Krestovskii Khvoshchinskaia belonged entirely to the generation of the fifties. . . . People of her generation included Chernyshevskii, Saltykov, and Eliseev. —P. F. Nikolaev KRESTOVSKII’S CAREER in fiction lasted nearly fifty years (1842–89). Beginning as a poet, she switched primarily to prose in 1850.1 Krestovskii continued to write literally up until her death; she began a novella three days before she died (only six lines survive).2 Her works, which include several novels, many novellas, and a series of sketches and stories, were collected several times. Despite her frequent protestations to the contrary, she was a prolific author: these collected works total six volumes of over 800 pages each.3 Krestovskii’s works cover a broad range of styles, thematics, and genres (novellas, novels, stories, sketches). Her early fictions are mainly satires of the provinces. Perhaps the most brilliant of these is the trilogy The Provinces in the Olden Days (Provintsiia v starye gody).4 These works—and many others, including her first novel, Anna Mikhailovna (1850)—take place in the town of “N,” a kind of Any-Provincial-Town. Krestovskii’s later works are more diverse in tone and style, and she increasingly focuses on the inner worlds of her characters as well as on the surfaces of satire. Krestovskii’s fiction demands a reconceptualizing of conventional periodizations of the second third of the nineteenth century. In a letter to Mariia Tsebrikova in 1885, Krestovskii noted: “I am, after all, of the generation of the fifties.”5 As this comment and the epigraphs suggest, Krestovskii conceived of herself and was perceived as a writer of the 1850s.6 This simple fact is enormously important, for it departs from the usual literaryhistorical modes of understanding nineteenth-century Russia which divide the midcentury into “the forties” and “the sixties.” The little-discussed context of the fifties is the ground of much of Krestovskii’s work. The fifties are a kind of forgotten decade, subsumed by 156 the forties and sixties (the forties last into the early fifties and the sixties are generally considered to have begun in 1855).7 In writing about the problems with the 1860s, and by focusing on the 1850s, Krestovskii suggests a new way of framing the century. Of course, there is no particular reason that one must analyze historical periods in decades, but the fact of the “interval ” of the fifties, as Krestovskii puts it, is intriguing: the fifties are a forgotten decade, perhaps a repressed decade.8 In ignoring the fifties, are people trying to forget something, and if so, what? Some very well-known works by Russia’s most famous authors came out in this period. Goncharov’s Oblomov frames the decade, with Oblomov’s Dream being published in 1849 and the entire novel in 1859. Tolstoy’s trilogy (Childhood, Boyhood, Youth) came out in the 1850s, as did his Sevastopol Stories (1855–56), Sergei Aksakov’s Family Chronicle (1856), and several of Turgenev’s works, including Diary of a Superfluous Man (1850), Notes of a Hunter (1852), Rudin (1856), and A Nest of the Gentry (1859). These are some of the well-known markers of the 1850s if the decade is characterized by date of publication. The 1850s were also a time when women’s writing came to prominence . Many Russian women writers published some of their finest prose in this decade: the Khvoshchinskaia sisters, Avdot’ia Panaeva, Karolina Pavlova, Nadezhda Sokhanskaia, Marko Vovchok, and others.9 Women were able to publish more in the 1850s (loosely defined as the late 1840s to 1860) partly because it had become more acceptable for women to write and publish (since many women had been doing so since the 1830s) and partly, ironically , because of the increased censorship in the period from the 1848 revolutions in Europe until Nicholas I’s death in 1855. As note 9 indicates, many women’s first prose works came out in 1848 and 1849; this is directly related to the increased censorship. In this period, the fact that women’s writings were not considered part of the realm of the “social” worked in their favor: it was easier to get such writings published in a time of especially restrictive censorship. Many works published in the 1850s were widely influential in their time but have since received relatively little scholarly or readerly attention. I submit that part of the reason for this is that...

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