No Good without Reward – Selected Writings: A Bilingual Edition

Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University, where he teaches in the master's and doctoral programs in translation. He is co-editor of Volume XII of the ATA Scholarly Monograph Series, Beyond the Ivory Tower: Re-thinking Translation Pedagogy (2003), and editor of the volume Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia (2011). He is the founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies and the general editor of the Kent State Monograph Series in Translation Studies. He has published widely on issues of gender and sexuality in Russian culture and has translated literary and scholarly works from Russian by such authors as Sergei Dovlatov, Mikhail Zhvanetsky, and Yuri Lotman.

"A female contemporary of Alexander Pushkin, Liubov Krichevskaya makes her Anglophone debut in an excellent translation of her fiction, drama, and poetry, which deftly capture women's estate in the early nineteenth century. Krichevskaya intriguingly combines Sentimentalist preoccupations—sensibility, virtue, and men's moral reformation through confrontation with exemplary women's passive piety—with the uncontrollable passions and volatile hero popularized by the Byronic strain of Romanticism. Her gynocentric texts poignantly convey the stringent limitations imposed upon women's agency by a society that paradoxically credited them with the seemingly limitless capacity to exert a civilizing influence as icons of probity. Readers acquainted with Rousseau, Richardson, and Goethe will discover familiar feminized turf, but cultivated in a Russian vein."

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction 1The Other Voice 1The Historical Context 3Biography and Works 8Analysis of Krichevskaya’s Works 12Conclusion 35Preface 38To My Readers [Foreword to My Moments of Leisure] (1817) 41Several Excerpts from a Journal Dedicated to My Friends (1817) 42My Comments 44A Plan for a Temple of Love in the Heart 46Thoughts 47Blind Mother, or The Reward of Virtue Tested; A Drama in Three Acts (1818) 49No Good without Reward; A Comedy in Three Acts (1826) 84Two Novellas (1827) 117Corinna 117Emma 141Count Gorsky, a Novel (1837) 165Selected Poetry (bilingually, on facing pages) 268To Rtishchev (1817) 269To a Frame without a Picture (1817) 269A White Sheet of Paper (1817) 271On the Militia of 1812 (1817) 273The Dniepr. May 25, Evening (1817) 275To Gr——ry F——ch Kv——ka in Answer to His Verses of September 17 (1817) 275Another Song (1817) 277Truth (1817) 277In Answer to the Question: Why Do I Sleep So Much? (1817) 279From the Banks of the Ternovka (1824) 279Bibliography 280Index 283