The prose poem “White Panna” was written by Grigory Alexandrovich Machtet. Alexander Ivanovich Ertel and his wife Mariya Vasilyevna became closely acquainted with the author in Tver, where Ertel served his sentence of administrative exile.
The writer Nikolay Nikolayevich Zlatovratsky reminisced about that time,
Back then, Tver became something quite extraordinary compared to other provincial towns. We joked that it turned into a real ‘Russian Zurich’, where various so-called politically unreliable elements came together, whether willingly or unwillingly so. Alexander Ivanovich and his family occupied a relatively large apartment in Tver, which became a gathering place for many intellectuals. ˂…˃ there was great excitement among the Tver intelligentsia, especially due to the rapid development of the Tolstoyan movement, which caused heated and prolonged debates in both Moscow and Tver. These debates often took place in Ertel’s apartment.
The people close to Alexander Ertel included a variety of people with different political and philosophical views, such as the Petrunkevitch brothers, the philosopher Vladimir Viktorovich Lesevich, the writer Grigory Alexandrovich Machtet, the son of the famous painter Nikolay Nikolayevich Ge, and many others. Ertel recalled,
In Ge’s disputes with me, Machtet, who lived in Tver at that time, Bakunin and the Petrunkevitchs, many aspects of Leo Tolstoy’s thoughts became clear to me, and I saw many inconsistencies in my past opinions ˂…˃ In short, the first two winters in Tver allowed me to reinforce my worldview with much broader grounds than before and to find sense in this seemingly chaotic life.
Grigory Machtet and Alexander Ertel belonged to the same group of writers who collaborated with the Russkaya Mysl (Russian Mind) magazine. Machtet was part of the Narodnik movement in Russian literature, and critics praised his knowledge of the life of the people and deep psychological insights, although they noted some tendentiousness and superficiality, as well as an overly sentimental and far-fetched narrative.
Machtet’s prose of the 1870s–1880s is characterized by the presence of the “miracle” element. In search of romantic stories, the writer sometimes turned to ancient legends and tales. One of these legends became the basis of the prose poem “White Panna” about a young descendant of an ancient Cossack family who finds himself in the lands of a Polish count and challenges the haughty count’s son.
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