Authors

Ludmilla Trigos¹;  ¹ Independent Scholar, United States

Discussion

Maria Nikolaevna Volkonskaia née Raevskaia, is well known in Russian literary culture and history not only as one of Pushkin’s muses but also as the wife of the Decembrist Sergei Volkonskii. Her pretty little feet inspired Pushkin to write famous lines in Evgenii Onegin and there has been much scholarly speculation about the nature of their relationship and its influence on his poetry. By following her Decembrist husband into exile, she also became renowned as a dekabristka, and further mythologized in Russian literature after Pushkin, most famously by Decembrist poets and Nikolai Nekrasov. However, Volkonskaia herself was a writer, though a private and self-deprecating one. Not only did she maintain an extensive correspondence with family and friends in European Russia and in Siberia, but she also wrote memoirs for a very limited audience. She penned her memoirs in the 1850s, but they were only published in 1904 by her son, Mikhail, in an expensive edition illustrated with several portraits and photographs. Due to their popularity, they were re-issued in 1906 and continue to be republished throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

In this presentation, I will focus on the representation of Siberian exile that Volkonskaia provides in her memoirs. Volkonskaia gives us new perspectives on Siberia and on herself that diverge from the traditional portrayals in contemporary accounts. In addition, I will discuss the interplay of her text and the images that her son included in the publication. Beyond referring to the scholarship on Siberia in the geographical imagination, my work will employ frameworks elaborated by Sara Dickinson (Breaking Ground: Travel and National Culture in Russia from Peter I to the Era of Pushkin), Mary Louise Pratt (Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation), and Alan Stilltoe (Leading the Blind: A Century of Guidebook Travel 1815-1914). By situating how Volkonskaia’s memoirs worked within and diverged from the context of contemporary travel writing and other accounts, I will illuminate how Volkonskaia and her family experienced Siberian exile.