A Double Life by Karolina Pavlova

A Double Life by Karolina Pavlova

translated from Russian by Barbara Heldt and published by Columbia University Press is enchanting.

Pavlova was a famous although pretty unlucky and misunderstood writer and poet. She lived in 1800s and A Double Life was written in 1844-1845. 

Feminist, she married Nicholai Pavolov but their wedding wasn't just unhappy; once she was forced to leaving her country, her son and family. 

Although permeated by this disgraceful condition, poor and without friends Pavlova found great intensity in poetry and literature, appearing to the other ones pretty cold, because happy with this new existence. 

Pavlova couldn't accept the simplicistic role of women and their sad destiny as structured in the Russian society: becoming wife soon or late of someone, trapped in unhappy marriages, most of the times, and symbolically in cage. 

Karolina thought that there was another way of life. A woman like a man is a creature with thoughts, passions, desires, and the same fact that being born women meant to be repressed by men was, to her, unacceptable. 

A double Life is symbolically a title that explains also the book and what you will find inside. 

The same structure of the book is a double work of fiction for representing to my point of view the apparently beautiful condition of women and what there was behind: but also the duplicity of people and their role played in this story as you will read. For this reason the first part of every chapter, ten in total, and pretty briefs is written in prose. In this case the protagonist, Cecily 18 years during the day appears as a remissive, happy, sunny girl after all, dominated by events, friends, her mother and circumnstances of life. In the night, where creativity becomes more wild, so, in the second part of every chapter she appears as a thinker, as someone who wouldn't want to be constricted at taking decisions that she wouldn't want to take, thinking at the meaning of life.

She knows perfectly well, considering that she is rich, pretty, that soon or late she will become the wife of someone but she is unhappy. 

You won't never read the unhappiness of Cecily in the prose, if not in the words of friends and neighbors invited at the wedding. In the prose there is just the social condition where Cecily lived in, teas, events, her birthdays, time spent with her friends. 

You will discover in the poems, the highest concentration of sadness, restlessness, anxiety, unhappiness but at the same time beautiful soul of this girl. 

What scared Cecily the most, and so the author, was losing her personal freedom not just like a woman but as an individual, trapped in a society where it didn't exist any kind of escapism, where it didn't exist any possibility for building, choosing by herself the best for her existence.

Maybe Cecily for the rest of her existence will be forced to live a double life or as it happened to the author, she would have probably re-started her existence somewhere else.

The prose is a clear and a serious portrait of the Russian upper clas society of 1800s . 

I promised to myself of reading more of this author, for the enchanting words she uses, and for the profoundity of feelings expressed, with clarity, touching, with extreme elegance the most profound chords of the existence.

One of the passages in poem

It is in me your soul believes,

Me that you love, not him.

But in the midst of changing vanity

In your routine of every day,

I will remain an unclear sadness,

A dream of the heart unrealized.

And sensing light in the depths of gloom,

Trusting in an unheartly secret,

You will travel from ghost to ghost,

from one sorrow to another.

.....

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori