Zinaida Volkonskaya

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A portrait by Orest Kiprensky

Princess Zinaida Aleksandrovna Volkonskaya (Зинаида Александровна Волконская; 14 December 1792 – 24 January 1862), was a Russian writer, poet, singer, composer, salonist and lady in waiting. She was an important figure in 19th-century Russian cultural life. She performed in Paris and London as an amateur opera singer.

Biography

She was born in

Rurikid
ancestry.

Zinaida was lady-in-waiting to Queen Louise of Prussia in 1808 and was close to Emperor Alexander I of Russia, who became her lifelong correspondent and, possibly, lover. To stem gossip, Zinaida married Alexander's aide-de-camp, Prince Nikita Volkonsky, in 1810. They were prominent during the Congresses of Vienna and Verona.

She moved to Russia in 1817, and to Moscow in 1822. In the 1820s the "Corinna of the North" hosted a literary and musical salon on Tverskaya Street in Moscow, in a mansion later rebuilt into the Yeliseyev food store. Adam Mickiewicz, Yevgeny Baratynsky, Dmitry Venevitinov, and Alexander Pushkin frequented her house. Pushkin's verse epistle to her, "The queen of music and beauty", is well known.

Zinaida's salon in Moscow, as painted by Grigoriy Myasoyedov

After Alexander I's death her brother-in-law

Jesuit
agent.

These pressures led to Zinaida's moving to

Sir Walter Scott. Nikolai Gogol wrote much of Dead Souls
at her villa.

Princess Volkonskaya died of pneumonia (apparently after giving her warm cloak to an old street woman) and was buried at Santi Vincenzo e Anastasio a Trevi . An English-language biography by Maria Fairweather, Pilgrim Princess: A life of Princess Zinaida Volkonsky,[1] made its appearance in 1998.

English translations

  • The Dream: A Letter, (story), from An Anthology of Russian Women's Writing, 1777–1992, Oxford, 1994.

References

External links