NATASHA

very different from Alexandra Muraviev, the wife of the Decembrist Nikita Muraviev, who came from a rather less aristocratic background than Maria Volkonsky. It was romantic love that compelled Alexandra to give up everything for a life of penal exile in Siberia - she even claimed that it was her 'sin' to 'love my Nikitishchina more than I love God'.⁶¹ Maria's conduct, by contrast, was conditioned by the cultural norms of a society in which it was not unusual for a noblewoman to follow her husband to Siberia. Convoys of prisoners were frequently accompanied by carts carrying their wives and children into voluntary exile.⁶² There was a custom, moreover, for the families of officers to go along with them on military campaigns. Wives would speak about 'our regiment' or 'our brigade' and, in the words of one contemporary, 'they were always ready to share in all the dangers of their husbands, and lay down their lives'.⁶³ Maria's father, General Raevsky, took his wife and children on his main campaigns - until his young son was injured when a bullet pierced his breeches as he gathered berries near the battlefield.⁶⁴

It has also been suggested that Maria was responding to the literary cult of heroic sacrifice.⁶⁵ She had read Ryleev's poem 'Natalia Dolgoru-kaya' (1821-3), which may indeed have served as the moral inspiration for her own behaviour. The poem was based on the true story of a young princess, the favourite daughter of Field Marshal Boris Shereme-

tev, who had followed her husband, Prince Ivan Dolgoruky, to Siberia when he was banished there by the Empress Anna in 1730.*

I have forgotten my native city, Wealth, honours, and family name To share with him Siberia's cold And endure the inconstancy of fate.⁶⁶

Maria's doting father was convinced that the reason she followed Sergei to Siberia was not because she was 'a wife in love' but because she was 'in love with the idea of herself as a heroine'.⁶⁷ The old general never stopped suffering over his beloved daughter's voluntary exile - he blamed Sergei for it- and this led to a tragic break in their relationship. Maria felt her father's disapproval in his infrequent letters to Siberia. No longer able to suppress her anguish, she wrote to him (in the last letter he received before his death) in 1829:

I know that you have ceased to love me for some time, though I know not what I have done to merit your displeasure. To suffer is my lot in this world - but to make others suffer is more than I can bear… How can I be happy for a moment if the blessing which you give me in your letters is not given also to Sergei? ⁶⁸

On Christmas Eve Maria said farewell to her son and family and left for Moscow on the first leg of her journey to Siberia. In the old capital she stopped at the house of her sister-in-law Princess Zinaida Volkonsky, a famous beauty and close friend of the late Emperor Alexander, called by Pushkin the 'Tsarina of the arts'. Zinaida was the hostess of a dazzling literary salon where, unusually for that time, no Fench verses were declaimed. Pushkin and Zhukovsky, Viazemsky and Delvig, Baratynsky, Tiutchev, the Kireevsky brothers and the Polish poet Mickiewicz were all habitues. On the eve of Maria's departure there was a special evening where Pushkin read his 'Message to Siberia' (1827):

*Allowed to return to St Petersburg in the 1730s, Natalia Dolgorukaya became the first woman in Russian history to write her memoirs.

In deep Siberian mines retain A proud and patient resignation; Your grievous toil is not in vain Nor yet your thought's high aspiration. Grief's constant sister, hope, is nigh, Shines out in dungeons black and dreary To cheer the weak, revive the weary; The hour will come for which you sigh,

When love and friendship reaching through Will penetrate the bars of anguish, The convict warrens where you languish, As my free voice now reaches you.

Each hateful manacle and chain Will fall; your dungeons break asunder; Outside waits freedom's joyous wonder As comrades give you swords again.⁶⁹

One year after Maria had arrived in Siberia, her baby boy Nikolenka died. Maria never ceased to grieve for him. At the end of her long life, after thirty years of penal exile, when someone asked her how she felt about Russia, she gave this reply: 'The only homeland that I know is the patch of grass where my son lies in the ground.'⁷⁰

3

Maria took eight weeks to travel to Nerchinsk, the penal colony on the Russian-Chinese border where her exiled husband, Sergei Volkonsky, was a convict labourer in the silver mines. It was about 6,000 kilometres across the snow-bound steppe by open carriage from Moscow to Irkutsk, at that time the last outpost of Russian civilization in Asia, and from there a hazardous adventure by cart and sledge around the icy mountain paths of Lake Baikal. At Irkutsk the governor had tried to dissuade Maria from continuing with her journey, warning her that, if she did so, she would be deprived of all her rights by a

special order of the Tsar for all the wives of the Decembrists. By entering the penal zone beyond Irkutsk, the Princess would herself become a prisoner. She would lose direct control of her property, her right to keep a maid or any other serfs, and even on the death of her husband, she would never be allowed to return to the Russia she had left. This was the import of the document she had signed to join her husband in Nerchinsk. But any doubts she might have had about her sacrifice were immediately dispelled on her first visit to his prison cell.

At first I could not make out anything, it was so dark. They opened a small door on the left and I entered my husband's tiny cell. Sergei rushed towards me: I was frightened by the clanking of his chains. I had not known that he was manacled. No words can ever describe what I felt when I saw the immensity of his suffering. The vision of his shackles so enraged and overwhelmed my soul that at once I fell down to the floor and kissed his chains and feet.⁷¹

Nerchinsk was a bleak, ramshackle settlement of wooden huts built around the stockades of the prison camp. Maria rented a small hut from one of the local Mongolian settlers. 'It was so narrow,' she recalled, 'that when I lay down on my mattress on the floor my head touched the wall and my feet were squashed against the door.'⁷² She shared this residence with Katya Trubetskoi, another young princess who had followed her Decembrist husband to Siberia. They survived on the small income the authorities allowed them from their dispossessed estates. For the first time in their lives they were forced to do the chores that had always been performed for them by the huge domestic staff in their palaces. They learned to clean clothes, bake bread, grow vegetables and to cook their food on the wood stove. They soon forgot their taste for French cuisine and began to live 'like Russians, eating pickled cabbage and black bread'.⁷³ Maria's strength of character - reinforced by the routines of the culture she had left behind - was the key to her survival in Siberia. She scrupulously observed all the saints' days and the birthdays of the relatives in Russia who had long forgotten hers. She always made a point of dressing properly, in a fur hat and a veil, even on her journeys to the peasant market in Nerchinsk. She played the French clavichord she had carefully packed up and carted all the way across the frozen Asian steppes,

no doubt at enormous inconvenience. She kept up her English by translating books and journals sent out in the post; and every day she took dictation from the prisoners, who as 'politicals' were strictly barred from writing letters in the camp. They called Maria their 'window on to the world'.⁷⁴

Siberia brought the exiles together. It showed them how to live truly by the principles of communality and self- sufficiency which they had so admired in the peasantry. In Chita, where they moved in 1828, the dozen prisoners and their families formed themselves into an artel, a collective team of labourers, and divided up the tasks between themselves. Some built the log huts in which their wives and children were to live, later to be joined by the prisoners themselves. Others took up trades like carpentry, or making shoes and clothes. Volkonsky was the gardener-in-chief. They called this community their 'prison family' and in their imaginations it came close to re-creating the egalitarian simplicity of the peasant commune.⁷⁵ Here was that spirit of togetherness which the men of 1812 had first encountered in the regiment.

Family relations became closer, too. Gone were the servants who had taken over child care for the noble family of the eighteenth century. The Siberian exiles brought up their own children and taught them all they knew. 'I was your wet nurse,' Maria told her children, 'your nanny and, in part, your tutor, too.'⁷⁶ Misha, a new son, was born in 1832; Elena ('Nellinka'), a daughter, in 1834. The following year the Volkonskys were resettled in the village of Urik, thirty kilometres outside Irkutsk, where they had a wooden house and a plot of land, just like all