Alexander Vasilchikov
Alexander Semyonovich Vasilchikov (Russian: Александр Семёнович Васильчиков, tr. Aleksandr Semënovič Vasil'čikov; 1746–1813) was a Russian aristocrat who became the lover of Catherine the Great from 1772 to 1774.
Vasilchikov was an ensign in the
The relationship was short-lived. Catherine found Vasilchikov's gentleness cloying, saying "His tenderness made me weep."[2] When Vasilchikov was away on a journey, sent by the empress, Grigory Potemkin replaced him as her lover. She wrote to her friend Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm about Vasilchikov's dismissal: "Why do you reproach me because I dismiss a well-meaning but extremely boring bourgeois in favour of one of the greatest, the most comical and amusing, characters of this iron century?"[2]
Vasilchikov later complained that he felt like a hired gigolo: "I was nothing more to her than a kind of male cocotte and I was treated as such. If I made a request for myself or anyone else, she did not reply, but the next day I found a bank-note for several thousand rubles in my pocket. She never condescended to discuss with me any matters that lay close to my heart."[2]
Catherine characteristically rewarded her former lover richly. Vasilchikov was given a pension of twenty thousand rubles and valuable properties. He lived the rest of his life in
References
- ^ Simon Sebag Montefiore : Potemkin: Catherine the Great's Imperial Partner (New York, Vintage Books 2005, p. 90)
- ^ a b c Kaus, Gina (trans June Head), Catherine: The Portrait of An Empress, Viking Press, New York, 1935, pp.312-16.
External links
- Media related to Alexandr Semenovich Vasilchikov at Wikimedia Commons