Heldt’s translation beautifully conveys the prose narrator’s astringent tone as well as the emotional intensity of the dreamworld’s poetry ... Pavlova’s tightly constructed novel sheds light not only on Cecily’s double life, of which the heroine is unaware, but also on the double life of a society that conceals greed and ambition beneath a veneer of propriety ... The verse section of the final chapter shows the doubtful yet defiant prose narrator reflecting on her own ability to put her innermost thoughts into words that have 'crossed over to the outer world.' Her ambivalent feelings about her poetic gift are explained in Heldt’s succinct and lucid introduction: Pavlova herself was repeatedly ridiculed as unwomanly for demonstrating her devotion to her art.

How do you write a novel about boredom without being boring? A Double Life chooses a reliable strategy: a narrator who is wiser and smarter than any of the characters comments sardonically on the threadbare opulence of Cecily’s life ... The other solution this novel offers lies in the most striking aspect of its design, that is, its formally innovative combination of prose and verse ... What sets A Double Life apart is how this interpolated poetry realizes the novel’s central conceit of a woman poet’s duality ... The novel extends no promise that either art or love can provide a lasting refuge or grant meaningful freedom. Instead, it offers just a hint of that other life, just enough, perhaps, to leave a lingering sense that there is something wrong with this one.

Pavlova excels in the topography of social relations: who sits near whom and who walks with whom determine whole years of a character’s life. The breaking of a blossom or closing of the latch on a jeweled bracelet symbolizes a future life broken or encircled ... Pavlova, as unabashedly as any of the nineteenth-century male writers that were her contemporaries, makes clear in her fiction her own preferences and values in life. Thus, the novel’s attitude toward poetry is the measure of the society of the novel. When a poet suffers and is ridiculed, society is condemned ... Pavlova possesses a romanticism that is characteristic of her time but mixed with an ironic sense of reality ... The strength of this novel, as of Pavlova’s view of life, is that both merge these romantic concepts into an ultimately clear realism. The countless ironic touches...prevent the reader from becoming too lost in the enjoyment of the details of how rich aristocrats live. Similarly, as much as we could wish a happier ending for Cecily, Pavlova leaves her, and us, with the one weapon against life that does not destroy life: consciousness. The double awareness that this is the way things are and ought not to be, and the high quality of Pavlova’s narrative and poetic style, are themselves a vivid protest against the destiny of women.

Pavlova’s novel A Double Life shook the Russian literary world when it was published in 1848, earning widespread praise for its revolutionary form and psychological acuity. Pavlova had written a book depicting a woman’s struggle against social constraints, and—a full half century before Freud popularized the idea of the subconscious—insisting on the independence of the unconscious mind ... Pavlova constructed a strikingly prescient psychological vision: a mind responding to extreme social pressure by slowly and completely separating itself into parts, but giving few external indications of change ... The familiar marriage plot has few narrative twists, and while Cecily’s plight is persuasive, her character is too lightly sketched to elicit real empathy. Pavlova’s prose and poetry are so radically distinct in style that seeing the novel as a cohesive whole is sometimes difficult. A Double Life is compelling but unwieldy—too modern for its time, yet also too yoked to its own literary period to transition easily into the present day. Even so, the book is remarkable for its insights about the workings of internalized oppression.

Pavlova's touch is light and delicate, but her portrait of this class is searing, acknowledging the emptiness and boredom so much of it involves, as well as the constant positioning the actors engage in in playing their roles ... Pavlova's picture of this society is nicely drawn -- quite simply, even obviously, but with a cutting sharpness that is softened by her humor ... A Double Life is an appealing novel, offering a colorful, penetrating portrait of Moscow's high society in those times, especially the lives of the wives and women in it. The story that goes with it -- Cecily being married off -- is amusing and poignant, a so significant turn in the young woman's life, but one she has in no way been prepared for, and a union which all the parties...peripherally and directly affected, essentially stumble their way through and into ... It's an enjoyable novel, and for all the light, quick presentation has a layered depth to it, making for a work that's fascinating in quite a variety of ways.

Pavlova, who completed this, her only novel, in 1848, was reviled by many of her Russian contemporaries. She had the distinct misfortune of writing at a time when the very idea of a woman writer was at best considered laughable and at worst monstrous. One of her contemporaries wrote that, in Pavlova, 'there is nothing serious, profound, true, and sincere.' He couldn’t have been more wrong. Her only novel (she mostly wrote poetry) is brimful with wit and with sharp observations of the class in which she was raised. Pavlova has Jane Austen’s fine eye for social manners and hypocrisies even if she doesn’t quite maintain Austen’s level of subtlety. It’s possible that her own bitterness about her world sometimes thwarts the artfulness of the novel ... Rich with wit, Pavlova’s only novel is a masterful sendup of high society.