SOPHIE KOVALEWSK Y.* THE short preface which introduces the curious
book before us explains its story. S-iphie Kovalewsky, a young Russian of good birth, obtained during her brief life a considerable scientific celebrity, carrying off, amongst other things, the Bordin prize from the Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1888,
"record" in the case of a woman. The first part of the book, her childish memories, was written by herself in Russian ; the second, the continuation of her life, was added in Swedish by her bosom-friend, the Duchess of Cajanello, herself a lady of literary celebrity, author of some dramas acted at Stockholm and elsewhere, and of romances, amongst which the Recits de la Vie reelle took the fore- tuost place in success. Both died under painful circum- stances, and both died young, while the life of the first reads more like a romance of the "new woman" than any transcript of reality. The Duchess Anna Charlotte, indeed, avows at starting that such was her idea in undertaking to write a memoir of her friend. It was after a consultation upon the point with no less a person than the inevitable Ibsen, that she decided that any search for "objective truth" would be out of place in Sophie's story, objective truth being as nothing when the purpose was to explain a soul. "A sub- jective description of an eminently subjective form of mind" was the task she undertook, leaving it to others, if they could, to describe her objectivity. If we venture to describe this strange biographical view as nonsense, we fear that we shall rather be borne out by the fact that the Duchess's portion of the work strikes us as rather dull, and bearing no com- parison whatever to the vivid and picturesque interest which attaches to Sonia's own part of her story,—" Sonia" being the affectionate diminutive by which Sophie Kovalewsky was known to her friends. Both in manner and matter, the scientific lady appears to us to have a very clear advantage over her literary friend. She must have been a very odd little lady, but a very interesting one. We have spoken of the use of Ibsen's name in her story, and we also find that of the other Scandinavian personality, Nansen, in the same con- nection. The two were great friends, and but for those terrible things called circumstances, the biographer opines that they might have been more.
It is for the curious insight into Russian life that it gives us that the autobiography is chiefly interesting, and it is Sonia's part of the story, and not her friend's, which possesses the interest of a romance. Like a true romance- writer, Sonia does not choose herself for her real heroine, but elevates her beautiful elder sister, Aniouta, into that position. She was attached to her with a kind of hero-worship. Aniouta hated the solitude of her country life, and, like another Charlotte Brontë, relieved her feelings by writing a novel, which she sent to one of the most famous of the Russian editors, consulting him as to a literary career. He made her the practical answer of publishing her story, and asking for another; and the pride of the two sisters in the delightful mystery is delightfully told. The terrible father, who only looked on his children as playthings to admire his uniforms, and the well-meaning and nervous mother, who only made things worse, when, through a post- office error, he discovered his daughter's awful delin- quency, are like figures in a romance; and pretty is the account of the trembling author being ordered to read some of her chapters to the stern parent, and melting him to tears and consequent forgiveness. The editor afterwards became, in Petersburg, their friend in the flesh, and fell madly in love with Aniouta, while the precocious Sonia fell as much in love with him. Of course it ended in his marrying a third person, Aniouta, in the meanwhile, having been alternately a devote, addicted to close study of Thomas a Kemple, and a passionate amateur desirous to go on the stage ; while the young Sonia was dabbling in psychological and scientific inquiry. The very traditional soldier-father must certainly have been puzzled ; and the story and dismissal of the bewildered English governess, and the detection of a retired ex-beauty, who lived in the household at once as a sempstress and a friend, in the character of a habitual thief, are material parts of this strange romance of Muscovy. Let the most characteristic piece of the story speak for itself :— • Souvenirs d'Enfance de Sophie Kovalewsky. Ecrits par Elle-rndme tt suivis de ea Biographie. par Mine. A. Ch. Leffler, Duchelise de Cajanello. Paris Hachette a Cie. 1895. "The period of 1860 and 1870, one may say, saw only one and the same question exercising the intellectual parts of Bassi: n Society : that of the rupture in families between the young and 1h old. If, at this time, news of some noble family was asked for, the answer was nearly always the same. The parents and children have quarrelled.' Nor did the quarrels rise from any material difficulty : the question was one of theoretical difference of the most abstract character. Their conditions differ '—that was all, but that all was enough to separate children from their parents, and to make parents hostile or indifferent to their children. Children, especially young girls, became the prey of an epidemic mania, desertion of the father's house. Our imme- diate neighbourhood had been so far exempt, but reports reached us that at such and such a house and then another, the daughter of the family had run away : one to study abroad, another to join the Nihilists at Petersburg. The principal subject of dread for parents and teachers all round Palibino [the young author's home] was a certain commune established, it was said, at Peters- burg, where rumour said that all the young girls who left their fathers' house were received. Young people of both sexes lived there together. Young girls of good family cleansed the floors and did the rest of the work with their own hands : for they allowed no servants. Those who spread the report had, it is true, never seen this commune, and did not even know where it was, and how it could exist at Petersburg under the eyes of the police. But that existence was doubted by no one."
A further result of the same strange system was the agree- ment by which many of the young people formed a society, the members of which entered into the married state amongst themselves, merely for the sake of emancipation from their parents, and with the avowed intention of living their lives apart. At one part of the story we are told bow the two sisters and another lady, Sonia being still a mere child, went in a body to the rooms of a young professor, who was reported to be closely connected with this peculiar association, and in a body proposed to him, for any one of the three whom he might prefer to take for his wife. He received them civilly, declined all three of them on purely argumentative grounds, and parted politely and on the best of terms, to laugh it all over in later years with Sonia, when she had taken to herself a flesh-and-blood husband. We have been living up to this point in an atmosphere of domestic drama; but here we seem suddenly transported into simple opera-bouffe.
Offenbach or Gilbert could scarcely have devised for grotesque treatment a situation more suggestive than the proposal of the three girls, the youngest being still in short frocks. In this strange way the life of Sophie Kovalewsky pro- ceeded. After she had grown up and become married, under another series of dramatic events in the middle of her scientific occupations, she and her husband became involved in several financial speculations by way of increasing their income, and failed lamentably, under the malign influence of a partner who became the complete master of M. Kovalewsky's will for the purpose of "exploiting him." In her dread of this man, Sophie left her husband, and her first
feat was characteristic. In the train she was consoled in her tears by the sympathy of a good-natured fellow-passenger,
who took her for a little nursery-governess, and so much consoled her that they agreed to break the journey at an interesting town on the road, where they accordingly stayed and lionised together for a couple of days on friendly terms, and parted on their respective roads without so much as exchanging cards. Afterwards, she entered upon a firmer and more sentimental, but equally Platonic alliance, from which her husband's illness detached her, while living in her scientific work at Stockholm. For, in the course of her excitable life, Sophie was a universal traveller; at one time
studying mathematics at Heidelberg, while her husband was deep in geology at Vienna, at another visiting England, and making acquaintance with George Eliot and Spencer, with Huxley and with Darwin. On October 5th, 1879, Eliot wrote in her journal of a visit from M. and Madame Kovalewsky, "She, a charming and modest creature, attractive in manners and conversation." The history of her work is told in the course of her friend's subjective review of her life; bat, in
truth, there is very little that is subjective in the account of their first introduction, of which the Duchess took advantage
to give her the full particulars of the plot of her next play. They became collaborators after this, for there seem to have been Eko limits to Sophie's many-sidedness, and the dramatist admits to having been more inspired by one of the young Russian's fancies than by any of her own,—so much so that she wrote the whole play in five sittings of two hours each, at one sitting a day. Both they and their friends augured great things of the drama ; but alas for human ambition ! no manager would produce it. And we rather fear from the context, though it is not plainly set down, that the Duchess of Cajanello grew jealous of her collaborator's talents, and that their parting, though friendly enough, was something in the nature of a dissolution of partnership. Both of the writers died young, as before them died poor Aniouta, who leaves somehow upon the reader's mind—at all events, the unsubjective reader's—the impression of being the most attractive and interesting character of the three. But the book, with its strange and attractive variety of scenes and events and character, the dreamy psychology of quaint little Sonia, and the mystic halo of Northern romance which per- vades the whole with a feeling of utter unreality, is quite a thing apart. One carries away two definite impressions,—one that everybody in the Scandinavian round becomes personally involved with Ibsen and Nansen ; the second that French enterprise in translation is infinitely and reproachfully ahead of English. No English publisher we know of would be likely to introduce to the reading public in their own language a book so well worth reading that it comes quite naturally through the medium of Hachette. Poor little "new woman"! After all her scientific and literary triumphs and incursions into the unknown, how sad is Sophie's own plaint at the end, that she never could obtain of life that which, above all, she asked,—" to be truly, entirely, and exclusively loved " ! "I could give more than most women ; but the most insignificant women are loved, and I am not" The more practical Duchess opined that she expected too much.
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