"The genius of pure beauty" - the fate and love of Anna Kern. The scandalous life and tragedy of Anna Petrovna Kern - a kaleidoscope
The woman who inspired the famous poet for one of his main masterpieces had a bad reputation
First fleeting meeting Anna Petrovna Kern and young poet Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, which had yet to earn the status of "the sun of Russian poetry", happened in 1819. At that time, the young beauty was 19 years old and she had been married for two years.
Unequal marriage
Down the aisle, a hereditary noblewoman, the daughter of a court councilor and a Poltava landowner, who belonged to an old Cossack family, Anna Poltoratskaya left at the age of 16. The father, whom the family unquestioningly obeyed, decided that the 52-year-old general would be the best match for his daughter. Ermolai Kern- it is believed that later his features will be reflected in the image of the prince gremina in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin».
The wedding took place in January 1817. To say that the young wife did not love her elderly husband is to say nothing. Apparently, she was disgusted with him on a physical level - but she was forced to portray a good wife, traveled with the general to the garrisons. At first.
In the diaries of Anna Kern, there are phrases that it is impossible to love her husband and that she “almost hates” him. In 1818 they had a daughter Katia. Anna Petrovna also could not love a child born from a person she hated - the girl was brought up in Smolny, and her mother took part in her upbringing to a minimum. Two of their other daughters died in childhood.
fleeting vision
A couple of years after the wedding, rumors began to circulate about the young wife of General Kern that she was cheating on her husband. Yes, and in the diaries of Anna herself, references to different men are found. In 1819, during a visit to St. Petersburg to his aunt, Kern first met Pushkin - at her aunt's. Olenina had its own salon, many famous people visited their house on the Fontanka embankment.
But then the young 21-year-old rake and wit did not make a special impression on Anna - he even seemed rude, and Kern considered his compliments to her beauty flattering. As she later recalled, she was much more fascinated by the charades that Ivan Krylov, who was one of the regulars at the Olenins' evenings.
Everything changed six years later, when Alexander Pushkin and Anna Kern got an unexpected chance to get to know each other better. In the summer of 1825, she was visiting another aunt in the estate in the village of Trigorskoye near Mikhailovsky, where the poet was serving a link. Pushkin, who was bored, often visited Trigorskoye - it was there that the "fleeting vision" sunk into his heart.
At that time, Alexander Sergeevich was already widely known, Anna Petrovna was flattered by his attention - but she herself fell under the spell of Pushkin. In her diary, the woman wrote that she was “in awe” of him. And the poet realized that he had found a muse in Trigorsky - the meetings inspired him, in a letter to his cousin Anna, Anne Wolf, he reported that he was finally writing a lot of poetry.
It was in Trigorskoye that Alexander Sergeevich handed over to Anna Petrovna one of the chapters of "Eugene Onegin" with an enclosed sheet on which the famous lines were written: "I remember a wonderful moment ..."
At the last moment, the poet almost changed his mind - and when Kern wanted to put the sheet in the box, he suddenly grabbed the paper - and did not want to give it back for a long time. As Anna Petrovna recalled, she barely persuaded Pushkin to return it to her. Why the poet hesitated is a mystery. Perhaps he considered the verse not good enough, perhaps he realized that he overdid it with the expression of feelings, or maybe for some other reason? Actually, this is where the most romantic part of the relationship between Alexander Pushkin and Anna Kern ends.
After the departure of Anna Petrovna with her daughters to Riga, where her husband then served, they corresponded with Alexander Sergeevich for a long time. But the letters are more like light playful flirting than they speak of deep passion or the suffering of lovers in separation. Yes, and Pushkin himself, shortly after meeting Anna, wrote in one of his letters to her cousin Wulf that all this “looks like love, but, I swear to you, there is no mention of it.” Yes, and his “I beg you, divine, write to me, love me”, mixed with witty barbs towards an elderly husband and reasoning that pretty women should not have character, rather speaks of admiration for the muse than of physical passion .
The correspondence continued for about six months. Kern's letters have not been preserved, but Pushkin's letters have come down to posterity - Anna Petrovna took care of them very much and regretfully sold them at the end of her life (for a pittance), when she faced serious financial difficulties.
Whore of Babylon
In Riga, Kern started another romance - quite serious. And in 1827, her break with her husband was discussed by the entire secular society of St. Petersburg, where Anna Petrovna moved after that. She was accepted in society - largely due to the patronage of the emperor, but her reputation was damaged. However, the beauty, who had already begun to fade, seemed to spit on this - and continued to twist novels, sometimes - and several at the same time.
What is interesting - the younger brother of Alexander Sergeevich fell under the spell of Anna Petrovna a lion. And again - a poetic dedication. “How can you not go crazy, listening to you, admiring you ...” - these lines of his are dedicated to her. As for the "sun of Russian poetry", sometimes Anna and Alexander crossed paths in the salons.
But at that time, Pushkin already had other muses. “Our harlot Anna Petrovna of Babylon,” he casually mentions the woman who inspired him to create one of the best poetic works in a letter to a friend. And in one letter he even speaks about her and their once-existing connection rather rudely and cynically.
There is evidence that the last time Pushkin and Kern saw each other shortly before the death of the poet - he paid Kern a short visit, expressing condolences on the death of her mother. At that time, 36-year-old Anna Petrovna was already in love with a 16-year-old cadet and her second cousin Alexander Markov-Vinogradsky.
To the surprise of secular society, this strange relationship did not quickly end. Three years later, their son was born, and a year after the death of General Kern, in 1842, Anna and Alexander got married, and she took her husband's surname. Their marriage turned out to be surprisingly strong, neither regular gossip, nor poverty, which eventually became simply catastrophic, nor other trials could destroy it.
Anna Petrovna died in Moscow, where her already adult son moved her, in May 1879, having outlived her husband for four months and Alexander Pushkin for 42 years, thanks to whom she remained in the memory of her descendants still not a Babylonian harlot, but "a genius of pure beauty ".
The life story of Anna Kern is of interest to many fans of Pushkin. Who was she: a "Babylonian harlot" or a "genius of pure beauty" who fell because of the injustice of life's ups and downs and the fate of a villain?
Who are we talking about?
Anna Petrovna Poltoratskaya-Kern was sung by the great Russian poet Pushkin in his famous poem: “I remember a wonderful moment ...”, already in her first marriage, which did not stop the ardent Alexander Sergeevich at all. Thanks to the inspiration that she gave him, in 1825 many amazingly beautiful poems were written. At that time, an enthusiastic couple met in Trigorsky. Having lived for almost eighty years, the woman until the end of her days kept in her heart a tender affection for the poet, although she was condemned by society for her “exploits”.
The young years of the girl
The biography of Anna Kern is quite eventful, but most of them are piquant because of the girl's love for entertainment and men. Anna was born in 1800 into a noble family who lived at that time in Orel, in the estate of her mother's father, Ivan Wolf, the governor of the city. A little later, the family moved to Lubny, where the girl grew up and studied at home with a governess, specially discharged from St. Petersburg. The young noblewoman loved to read, especially foreign novels, which, most likely, influenced her perception of the world and relations with the opposite sex.
As soon as Anna began to be “taken out into the world”, she immediately plunged headlong into fun and dancing at balls, flirting with men and turning their heads. Her father categorically did not like this, and he quickly married her off to Yermolai Kern, who had English roots and the rank of general. Literally a year later, the first child was born, and three years later another. Considering that the military family constantly had to move, Anna Kern had enough impressions, as well as a constant change of admirers who went crazy for her beauty and ease of communication.
Whore Anna Petrovna
Keeping a personal diary was then in vogue: her entries were full of various memories of petty intrigues and strong hobbies. Everything goes so far that in 1827 she finally leaves her husband because of the all too well-known relationship with Alexei Wulf, the author of memoirs and a close friend of Pushkin himself, who was already a famous poet at that time. This relationship lasted about four years, and then Anna Kern suddenly falls in love with a young man. Their romance is rapidly gaining momentum and ends not only with a wedding, but also with the birth of a child.
At the same time, the couple officially marry only after the death of General Kern in 1841. The second husband, Alexander Vasilyevich, was a simple official, so the family lives practically in poverty. Anna works part-time as a translator, while her husband suffers from stomach cancer and eventually dies in agony. And four months later, Anna also dies, who for many years suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis. This happened in Moscow in a squalid apartment on the corner of Tverskaya, where her son moved after the death of his father.
Parents
The story of Anna Kern could have turned out quite differently if her father (Pyotr Markovich) hadn’t been such a tyrant: he decided at all costs to make his daughter the general’s wife, so all young men below this rank were carefully expelled from the girl’s environment. Almost every appearance of her at home ended in a stormy scandal and a whole bunch of reproaches that she was paying attention to the wrong candidates, not thinking at all about her future.
The landowner Poltoratsky tried to arrange his leisure time as interestingly as possible: either he decided to build elite houses in Kyiv and was looking for investors, because the land was handed out then for next to nothing, then he unexpectedly invented bouillon cubes from boiled fat, even tried to patent the product, then he arranged desperate feasts at home , from which the glory of the owner thundered, as a daring Cossack joker.
Anna's mother, Ekaterina Ivanovna, was a sickly woman, and therefore quiet and submissive to fate, she interfered little in family strife. Apparently, this left a peculiar imprint on the girl, which subsequently resulted in the same relationship with her children.
First marriage
Anna's first marriage (with Kern) took place at the beginning of 1817, at that time she was less than seventeen years old, and he was 52. In her memoirs, she recalls that at the engagement, the general only asked her if he was disgusting to her. The discouraged girl could only squeeze out an indistinct "no" from herself and ran away. The age gap and imposed relationships played a decisive role: Anna hated her husband with all her heart, mentioning this in her diary and letters to her friend: "... he constantly smokes, the rest of the time he either sleeps or is on exercises."
And as soon as the opportunity presented itself, the girl took revenge on him (and her parents too) for spoiled youth: just a few months after the wedding, she accepts the courtship of Emperor Alexander the First, whom she had the honor to meet at the ball. The emperor was prone to petty intrigues, but at the same time he generously rewarded his mistresses. Already the next morning after the incident, General Kern was sent 50 thousand rubles for military exploits, but the local society knew for whose particular merits the money was. Later, the emperor even became the godfather of Anna's daughter and the general, giving her a diamond jewelry, and Yermolai - a new appointment in the military unit.
Sad end
The young wife often went to visit close friends and relatives, which gave her the opportunity to turn the heads of the men she liked and start new novels. But all these adventures required money, which her husband sent her with increasing reluctance, apparently, this was the main reason for their reconciliation in 1825: he was flattered by her success in high society, and she needed check payments. Reconciliation did not last long, since Anna could no longer stop in the cycle of new hobbies.
In 1826 they parted completely, and in 1833 her youngest daughter Olga died, the eldest Ekaterina had been living and studying at the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens for a long time. After that, General Kern, tired of gossip, stops sending boarding houses to his lecherous wife. In 1841, he dies, finally giving her complete freedom of action.
Second marriage
Officially still married, but living separately from her husband, Madame Kern, at the request of her relative, visits a student of the St. Petersburg Cadet Corps, 18-year-old Alexander Markov-Vinogradsky, her second cousin. And there is truly a “chemistry of two souls”: they fall selflessly in love with each other, carrying this feeling through all the hardships until their death. Anna at that time was 38 years old. A year later, their son Sasha is born. Only two years later, after the death of Yermolai Kern, the couple officially marry, before that living in fornication, despite the condemnation of society and Anna's parents, who, because of this, deprived her of her rights to inheritance and financial support during her lifetime.
The rejected, but happy couple had to leave for the estate, which consisted of only 15 souls (by those standards - nothing) and live in poverty, but spiritual harmony. All the cravings of the "Whore of Babylon" disappeared in an instant, and Anna was faithful to her husband until the end of her days, tremblingly remembering him in letters to friends. In 1855, Markov-Vinogradsky received a teacher's position from Prince Dolgorukov, which made it possible for the couple to move to St. Petersburg. Ten years of an ideal life - that's what Anna Petrovna Kern calls it. Meetings with famous writers and poets, discussions of new works bring her much more pleasure than past romances with admirers. At the end of 1865, the couple had to leave again for the province and return to a poor life, but this in no way affected their relationship. At the end of January 1879, Markov-Vinogradsky dies of stomach cancer.
Death
At the time of her husband's death, Anna was already suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis, which completely knocked her down due to grief. Due to unbearable poverty, she sells several of Pushkin's letters written by her, which she considers the most important relic, almost a shrine.
But, as you know, need sets its priorities. At the end of May 1879, a woman, exhausted by suffering, dies. Contrary to the wishes of Anna Kern, her grave is not near her husband, as she bequeathed, but in the village of Prutnya, which is located six kilometers from her husband's grave. When the time came for the funeral, the coffin with her body simply could not be delivered to the right place due to heavy rains and washed out roads, and therefore they were buried in a modest rural churchyard. Some historians believe that it is not known for certain where Anna Kern is buried, and the place that is shown to rare tourists is only symbolic.
What did this lady have to do with the genius of poetry?
How did it happen that the great poet dedicated a verse to Anna Kern? Pushkin first spotted her back in 1819 at a dinner party at the Olenins, who were Anna's relatives. He was 21, she was 19. She was absorbed by the pretty Krylov and did not react at all to the rude attempts to attract attention from the novice poet. The next fateful meeting between Anna Kern and Pushkin took place only six years later, during which he managed to become an outstanding personality, and she - to acquire gossip about numerous love affairs.
It was after this meeting that the poetic genius produced the now-famous poems: in Trigorskoye, where the coquette Anna stopped on her way to her husband, Alexander Sergeevich is visiting, accepting the courtship of one lady and looking at another. No, the climax of passion is not yet here, but only a flash that is transferred to paper: she leaves for her husband and from there eagerly corresponds with the poet in French. Their correspondence is quite intimate, but sarcastic, which Pushkin recalls in letters to other recipients, calling Anna "the Whore of Babylon." The apogee of their romance happens two years later, but this is more of a point than a continuation, since the poet is already carried away by a new passion, and this story is mentioned in passing by rather obscene phrases in correspondence with a close friend.
How did her friends describe her?
Most people who personally knew Anna Petrovna Kern considered her rather pretty, easy-going and slightly ingenuous, which was to be expected from her behavior. Turgenev, who met her several times at dinner parties, believed that Pushkin should not have dedicated a poem to her with such a high soul, since she looked more like a village maid than a well-born noblewoman.
In just ten years of her first marriage, she gained the status of an “outcast anti-moralist”, it was even said in society that she could not even name the father of her third daughter for sure, because at that time she had several lovers at the same time, not counting her lawful husband.
Everything could be different
Who knows, if Mademoiselle Kern's father had allowed the girl to choose with her heart, perhaps there would not have been this huge cavalcade of love adventures in which the young woman tried to find a little warmth and care. In order to find happiness, it took Anna almost twenty years and dozens of men, among whom the "luminary of Russian poetry" flashed only a dim star. This once again proves that fame and success in society are not a measure of spiritual comfort.
I remember a wonderful moment:
You appeared before me
Like a fleeting vision
Like a genius of pure beauty.
I look at such a familiar portrait, it is considered the only reliable one, and I try to imagine this woman as the muse of our Genius, who inspired him to an immortal poem, which later, on another occasion, by coincidence, another Genius made a romance.
The idea of beauty, its canons, unwritten criteria in different eras were different. Now, already accustomed to other examples of beauty, in this portrait I don’t see the “genius of pure beauty,” but the poet did, although by that time he had already seen many of the first beauties of the world and knew how to appreciate beauty, of course.
Most likely, the poet saw something more interesting and deep in this very young, but already very unhappy woman. Not actually the beauty and secular manners that were so valued then, Pushkin sang.
In "Eugene Onegin" the poet writes about that, practically, first meeting:
"She wasn't in a hurry.
Not cold, not talkative
Without a look, impudent for everyone,
No claim to success
Without these little antics
Without imitative undertakings;
Everything is quiet, it was just there."
I think, as it often happens, the circumstances of that meeting, after which immortal poems were born, explain a lot. In Mikhailovsky, "in the wilderness, in the darkness of confinement", despite all the ease of that local life, the poet was bored after cozy patriarchal Moscow and especially after the brilliant sovereign St. Petersburg.
As for the "darkness of imprisonment", the poet, of course, went too far, after all, the family estate is not the Peter and Paul Ravelin, but, I'm sure, it was very boring, it was the wilderness.
Mikhailovskoye and around it are dazzlingly beautiful places in Central Russia. But it is one thing to come here to visit good friends, and quite another to live here for a long time, and even in a very peculiar position of an exile. Boring...
In summer there is still some variety in walking to neighboring estates, but in Russia there is still a long autumn-winter period, when it is not boring, but very boring.
Anna Petrovna wrote about her life in the garrisons - there was nothing to do, "reading is already dizzy"....
The Wulf sisters no longer inspire, the “wonderful moments” with them are behind them, and the poet needs inspiration like air.
And this is where she comes in. Once, 6 years ago, their paths had already crossed in the northern capital, but then they, twenty years old, did not notice each other.
Now He is a famous poet, exiled to his estate for free-thinking, She escaped to the estate next to Mikhailovsky to visit her sisters from her martinet husband, a general 35 years older than her, married at 16, not only did not love him, but physically disgusted with him. According to a good friend of the family, "thick epaulettes were his only right to be called a man." After several years of wandering around the garrisons with their specific environment, after "he, angry and unbridled, exhausted all kinds of insults on her", in the summer of 1825 she meets in a cozy estate relatives of a poet already known to Russia with a difficult character, with frequently changing mood.
It was at this moment that the meeting took place. Anna Petrovna herself said about herself that she looked "a little nailed to the flower", I think, rather, she felt like that, which is very understandable.
That meeting was preceded by a humorous ironic correspondence through a common good friend who said:
"The exquisite aroma of scandal emanated from her even then."
A month in the village flew by unnoticed, before leaving, Anna Petrovna receives a sheet enclosed in the first chapter of Eugene Onegin with the very dedication that immortalized her name. The poet, as it happens with poets, could see more than others saw, the imagination of the Genius of poetry completed the Genius of beauty for him.
Neither Kern herself, nor any of her contemporaries-memurists testified that any of the parties lost their heads from that love. In Kern's memoirs, the thought slips through that Pushkin did not love anyone except his nanny and his sister. Everything was in the spirit of that time, that era, when it was considered normal to live easily and cheerfully for your own pleasure, which did not always work out for various reasons. It was flirting, such a game, easy, non-committal, not always so innocent, one of the participants in that game turned out to be the Genius of Russian poetry.
This is the clue...
After leaving with the children from the general, and after his death, marriage to a second cousin who was much younger than her, the attitude towards the poet's muse in the world was ambiguous. Some contemporary memoirists, describing well-known episodes of that time in which Kern definitely took place, considered it inappropriate to mention her name.
Pushkin's attitude towards her did not change later:
"When your young years
Noisy rumor shames
And you, by the verdict of the world
Lost the right to honor
Alone, among the cold crowd,
I share your suffering...
Anna Petrovna, one might say, having run away with her daughters from her general, loses all means of subsistence.
She even had to write the following to the tsar: “The complete ruin of the father of my court adviser Poltoratsky, which involved all my property, as well as the refusal of my husband, Lieutenant General Kern, to give me a legal support, deprive me of all means of subsistence ... the disease has exhausted the rest of the means ..."
Later, when she gets married, she loses the right to a general's pension, her husband loses his career because of the reprehensibleness of his marriage "
Here from this letter to his brother (1871) one can judge the position of Anna Petrovna in her advanced years:
“Help me again, probably for the last time, because I’m on a very thin strand: I almost went twice this winter this winter. Don’t refuse me, please, this last time, please come out 100 to St. .; part I owe her, and for the rest she will renew my wardrobe, because my wardrobe was eaten by mice.
The only priceless wealth of that time were several letters from Pushkin to her, which (except the very first one) were already sold in a completely hopeless situation for nothing, one might say, given into good hands.
And despite all the hardships, she and her husband, who lived together for 36 years, wrote to their relatives:
“We, having despaired of ever acquiring material contentment, cherish every moral impression and pursue the pleasure of the soul and catch every smile of the world around us in order to enrich ourselves with spiritual happiness. The rich are never poets ... Poetry is the wealth of poverty.”
Her letters have not survived. But her memoirs remained, which are considered a very accurate and sincere touch to the portrait of that era.
The same age as the century, she died in 1879, having outlived her husband by 4 months.
"The coffin with the body of A.P. was taken to Pryamukhino, Tver province, where her husband is buried,
but they didn’t take it because of the mud and buried it in the village of Prutnya"
We have paved the road to the Cosmos, our hands have not yet reached the country roads.
***
The poem that had once been presented to Glinka was then lost to him.
The verses responded with music much later, at a meeting with Anna Petrovna's daughter Ekaterina.
So in one romance three Russian Geniuses met ...
*****
Memoirs of A.P. Kern and her contemporaries.
Reviews
Again, Anna Petrovna met Pushkin only 2 years later, already in St. Petersburg. There she entered into a fleeting relationship with the poet; Pushkin reacted to this event ironically and in a rather rude tone mentioned what had happened in a letter to his friend Sergei Sobolevsky.
Careless!
You do not write to me about 2100 rubles, which I owe you, but you write to me about M-me Kern,
which, with God's help, I've killed the other day.
Even earlier, in a letter to Alexei Wulff dated May 7, 1826, Pushkin calls Anna Kern "our Babylonian harlot Anna Petrovna."
...1819. St. Petersburg. The living room in the Olenins' house, where the color of Russian writers gathered - from Ivan Andreevich Krylov to the very young but already famous Sasha Pushkin. Traditional readings - Krylov reads his fable "Donkey". The traditional "charades" of the Olenins. The role of Cleopatra fell to the niece of the mistress of the house - a young general. Pushkin absently glances at the "actress". Above the basket of flowers, just like a flower - a tender female face of amazing beauty ...
A.P. Kern: “After that, we sat down to dinner. At the Olenins’, they dined on small tables, without ceremony and, of course, without ranks. And what ranks could there be where an enlightened host valued and valued only sciences and arts? At dinner, Pushkin sat down with my brother behind me and tried to attract my attention with flattering exclamations, such as: "Est-il permis d" etre aussi jolie! (Is it possible to be so pretty! (fr.)). Then a playful conversation began between them about who is a sinner and who is not, who will be in hell and who will go to heaven. Pushkin said to his brother: "In any case, there will be a lot of pretty ones in hell, you can play charades there. Ask m-me Kern if she would like to go to hell?" I answered very seriously and somewhat dryly that I don't want to go to hell. "Well, how are you now, Pushkin?" the brother asked. "Je me ravise (I changed my mind (fr.))," replied the poet, "I don't want to go to hell, although there will be pretty women..."
A. Fedoseenko. Anna Petrovna Kern
...Anna Petrovna Kern was born on February 11, 1800 in Orel, in a wealthy noble family of court adviser P.M. Poltoratsky.
Both her father and grandmother - Agafokleya Alexandrovna, from a very rich family of Shishkovs - were domineering, despotic people, real petty tyrants. The sickly and quiet mother - Ekaterina Ivanovna Wulf - was completely under the heel of her husband and mother-in-law. The impressionable girl for the rest of her life retained memories of the rather primitive environment in which she grew up - and this same environment had the most direct impact on her character and fate.
Anna received a very good home education for those times, she read a lot, which, combined with her natural quickness of mind and curiosity, gave her a sensitive, romantic and, as they would say now, intellectual nature, while being sincere and intellectually very different from many young ladies of their circle ...
... But, having barely begun, her life turned out to be broken, "nailed to the flower." On January 8, 1817, a charming seventeen-year-old girl, at the insistence of her relatives, marries General Yermolai Kern, who was 35 years older than her. The petty tyrant's father was flattered that his daughter would be a general's wife - and Anna obeys in despair. A refined, dreaming of ideal romantic love girl was in no way suitable for a rude martinet, poorly educated, who had become a general from the lower ranks. Her peers envied her - and the beautiful general shed tears, looking with disgust at her husband - pure Arakcheev military - the provincial garrison environment and society were unbearable for her.
She later writes: “Against such marriages, that is, marriages of convenience, I have always been indignant. It seemed to me that when entering into a marriage, a criminal sale of a person as a thing is committed from the benefits, human dignity is violated, and there is deep depravity that entails misfortune ... "
... In 1817, during a celebration on the occasion of great maneuvers, Emperor Alexander drew attention to Anna - "... I was not in love ... I was in awe, I worshiped him! .. I would not exchange this feeling for any others, because it was quite spiritual and aesthetic, there was no ulterior motive in it about obtaining mercy through the favorable attention of the king - nothing, nothing like that ...
All love is pure, selfless, self-satisfied ... If someone told me: "This person, before whom you pray and revere, fell in love with you like a mere mortal," I would bitterly reject such a thought and would only wish to look at him, to be surprised at him, to worship him as a higher, adored being! .. "For Alexander - an easy flirtation with a pretty, very similar to the famous beauty, the Prussian Queen Louise, a general. For Anna - the beginning of awareness of her attractiveness and charm, the awakening of female ambitions and - an opportunity to escape from the gray and terrible anguish of garrison life with a husband unloved to the point of suffering. The children were not happy either - in 1818, a daughter, Katya, was born, then two more girls. In her diary, which she addressed to her relative and friend Feodosia Poltoratskaya, she wrote with brutal frankness: “You know that this is not frivolity and not a whim; I told you before that I did not want to have children, the thought of not loving them was terrible for me and now it is still terrible. You also know that at first I really wanted to have a child, and therefore I have a certain tenderness for Katenka, although I sometimes reproach myself that she is not quite great.Unfortunately, I feel such hatred for this whole family, it is such an irresistible feeling in me that I am not able to get rid of it with any effort. "This is a confession! Forgive me, my angel!". Fate did not give these unwanted children - except for Katya - a long life.
... She was 20 years old when she fell seriously in love for the first time - the name of her chosen one is unknown, she calls him in the Diary Immortel or Rosehip - and Kern seems to her even more disgusting.
Describing his behavior, she pleads with a relative:
"After this, who will dare to assert that happiness in marriage is possible without deep affection for your chosen one? My suffering is terrible."
union and, of course, will not wish my death, but in such a life as mine, I will certainly die. "..."... my parents, seeing that even at the moment when he marries their daughter, he cannot forget his mistress, allowed this to happen, and I was sacrificed."Inevitably, a riot was brewing. As Anna Petrovna herself believed, she had a choice only between death and freedom. When she chose the latter and left her husband, her position in society turned out to be false. Since 1827, she actually lived in St. Petersburg with her sister in the position of a kind of "straw widow".
... And shortly before that, she came to visit Trigorskoye, to her aunt Praskovya Alexandrovna Osipova, with whom she was very friendly, and whose daughter - also Anna - was her constant and sincere friend. And not long before that, she was visiting her friend-neighbor, the landowner Rodzianko, and together with him wrote a letter to Pushkin, to which he vividly responded: "Explain to me, dear, what is A.P. Kern, who wrote a lot of tenderness about me to your cousin? They say she's a pretty thing - but glorious Lubny is beyond the mountains. Just in case, knowing your amorousness and extraordinary talents in every respect, I suppose your work is done or half done. Congratulations, my dear: write an elegy on this, or at least an epigram ". And then he writes jokingly:
"You're right: what could be more important
In the world of a beautiful woman?
Smile, the look of her eyes
More expensive than gold and honors,
More expensive than discordant glory ...
Let's talk about her again.
I praise, my friend, her hunting,
Having a rest, give birth to children,
like his mother;
And happy who will share with her
This pleasant care ... "
The relationship between Anna and Rodzianko was light and frivolous - she was resting ...
... And finally - Trigorskoe. Arriving at the house of his friends, Pushkin meets Anna Kern there - and for the whole month that Kern spent with her aunt, Pushkin often, almost daily appeared there, listened to her sing, read her his poems. The day before Kern's departure, together with her aunt and cousin, she visited Pushkin in Mikhailovsky, where they went from Trigorskoye in two carriages, the aunt and her son rode in one carriage, and the cousin, Kern and Pushkin - chastely in another. But in Mikhailovsky, they still wandered around the neglected garden for a long time at night, but, as Kern states in his memoirs, "I did not remember the details of the conversation."
There is still debate about whether this poem is really dedicated to Anna - so the nature of their relationship with the poet and his subsequent very impartial reviews about her do not correspond to the highly romantic tone of admiration for the Ideal, the Genius of Pure Beauty - but in any case, this masterpiece in the subsequent reader's perception is associated ONLY with it.
And the outburst of the poet, when he grabbed the gift, was most likely associated with an outburst of jealousy - his happy rival turned out to be his friend and Anna's cousin - Alexei Wulf, and much of his behavior was caused by this rivalry. Yes, and Anna had no special illusions about him: “Livingly perceiving goodness, Pushkin, however, it seems to me, was not carried away by him in women; he was much more fascinated by wit, brilliance and outward beauty in them. A coquettish desire to please him more than once attracted the attention of the poet more than a true and deep feeling, they suggested ... The reason that Pushkin was rather fascinated by the brilliance than by the dignity and simplicity in the character of women was, of course, his low opinion of them, which was completely in the spirit of that time.
“You assure me that I don’t know your character. What do I care about him? I really need him - do pretty women have to have a character? The main thing is eyes, teeth, arms and legs ... How is your husband doing? I hope "He had a major attack of gout the day after your arrival? If you knew what disgust... I feel for this man!... I beg you, divine, write to me, love me"... "... I love you more than you think ... You will come? - won't you? - and until then, do not decide anything about your husband. Finally, be sure that I am not one of those who will never advise drastic measures - sometimes it is inevitable, but first you need to think carefully and not create a scandal unnecessarily. It is now night, and your image rises before me, so sad and voluptuous: it seems to me that I see ... your half-open lips ... to me it seems that I am at your feet, I squeeze them, I feel your knees - I would give my whole life for a moment of reality.
He is like a timid naive young man, realizing that he did something wrong, trying in vain to return the moments of missed opportunities. Poetry and real life, alas, did not intersect ...
At that moment, 
in July in Mikhailovsky (or Trigorsky) their thoughts did not coincide, he did not guess the moods of an earthly real woman who for a moment escaped from the bosom of her family to freedom, but Alexei Wulf caught these moods ...
... Pushkin understood this - later. Self-esteem - a poet, a man - was wounded. 
In a letter to her aunt, he writes: "But still the thought that I mean nothing to her<(курсив мой>that, having occupied her imagination for a moment, I only gave food to her cheerful curiosity - the thought that the recollection of me would not overtake her absent-mindedness in the midst of her triumphs and would not darken her face more in sad moments - that her beautiful eyes would stop at what some Riga veil with the same piercing and voluptuous expression - oh, this thought is unbearable for me ... Tell her that I will die from this ... no, better not say it, otherwise this delightful creature will laugh at me. But tell her that if there is no hidden tenderness for me in her heart, if there is no mysterious and melancholic attraction in it, then I despise her - you hear - I despise, not paying attention to the surprise that such an unprecedented feeling will cause in her. .
The poet is offended, angry, caustic - the beauty is impregnable - or rather, she is available to everyone except him. Wulf follows her from Trigorsky to Riga - and their stormy romance unfolds there. By modern standards, such a relationship is incest, but then marrying cousins was in the order of things, respectively, and having them as mistresses. However, Anna nowhere and never uttered the word "I love" in relation to Pushkin - although she was undoubtedly pleased to flirt with the famous poet.
In 1827, she finally separated from her husband for good, broke free from the prison confinement of her disgusted marriage and, probably, experienced an upsurge of feelings, an unquenched thirst for love, which made her irresistible.
Anna's appearance, apparently, does not convey any of her known portraits, and yet she was a universally recognized beauty. And in St. Petersburg, “in freedom”, she blooms incredibly. She captivates with sensual charm, which is beautifully conveyed in the enthusiastic poem of the poet A. I. Podolinsky “Portrait”, written by her in an album in 1828::
"When, slender and light-eyed,
She stands in front of me
I think: the hour of the prophet
Brought down from heaven to earth!
The braid and curls are dark-haired,
The outfit is casual and simple,
And on the chest of a luxurious beads
Luxuriously fluctuate at times.
Spring and summer combination
In the living fire of her eyes,
And the quiet sound of her speeches
Gives birth to bliss and desire
In my yearning chest."
On May 22, 1827, after being released from exile, Pushkin returned to St. Petersburg, where, as A.P. Kern writes, they met every day in his parents' house on the Fontanka embankment. Soon, Anna Kern's father and sister left, and she began to rent a small apartment in the house where Pushkin's friend, the poet Baron Delvig, lived with his wife. On this occasion, Kern recalls that "once, introducing his wife to one family, Delvig joked:" This is my wife, "and then, pointing to me:" And this is the second.
She became very friendly with Pushkin's relatives and with the Delvig family, and, thanks to Pushkin and Delvig, she entered the circle of people who make up the color of the nation, with whom her living subtle soul always dreamed of communicating: Zhukovsky, Krylov, Vyazemsky, Glinka, Mitskevich, Pletnev, Venevitinov , Gnedich, Podolinsky, Illichevsky, Nikitenko.
Anna Petrovna played her part in introducing the young Sophia Delvig, with whom she became very friendly, to gallant amusements. Pushkin's mother Nadezhda Osipovna called these two ladies "inseparable". Delvig's brother Andrey, who at that time lived in the poet's house, frankly disliked Kern, believing that she "wants to quarrel with Delvig with his wife for an incomprehensible purpose."
At that time, a young student Alexander Nikitenko, a future censor and professor at St. Petersburg University, who rented an apartment in the same house with her, met Anna Petrovna Kern. He almost fell into the net of an irresistible seductress. Kern struck him at the first meeting. In May 1827, he gave in his "Diary" a wonderful portrait of her: 
... And at the same time, Pushkin finally had the opportunity to take "galant revenge." In 1828, in February, a year and a half after writing the lines "I remember a wonderful moment," Pushkin boasted in a letter to his friend Sobolevsky, not embarrassed in expressions and, moreover, using the vocabulary of janitors and cabbies (sorry for the ugly quote - but what is, is): "You don't write to me about the 2,100 rubles I owe you, but you write to me about m-me Kern, whom, with the help of God, I'm the other day..." Apparently, Pushkin wrote such a frank and rude message about intimacy with a once passionately beloved woman, because he experienced the strongest complex due to the fact that he had not been able to get this intimacy earlier, out of a sense of rivalry with the same Wulf - and he certainly needed to convey to friends that this fact happened, even if belatedly. In no other letter in relation to other women did Pushkin allow such rude frankness.
Subsequently, Pushkin would write to Alexei Vulf sarcastically: "What is Anna Petrovna, whore of Babylon, doing?" And Anna Petrovna enjoyed her freedom. Her beauty became more and more attractive
This is how she writes about herself in her diary: “Imagine, I just glanced in the mirror, and it seemed to me something insulting that I am now so beautiful, so good-looking. I will not continue to describe my victories to you. - admiration."
Pushkin on Kern: "Do you want to know what Mrs. K ... is? - she is graceful; she understands everything; she is easily upset and just as easily consoled; she has timid manners and bold actions - but at the same time she is wonderfully attractive."
The poet's brother, Lev Sergeevich, is also fascinated by the beauty and dedicates a madrigal to her:
"How can you not go crazy,
Listening to you, admiring you;
Venus ancient sweetheart,
Showing off with a wonderful belt,
Alcmene, mother of Hercules,
With her in a row, of course, it can become,
But to pray and love
Them as hard as you
They need to hide you from you,
You broke their shop!”
... General Kern continued to bombard various authorities with letters, demanding assistance in returning the lost wife to the bosom of the family. The girls - three daughters - were with him before they entered Smolny ... Her Excellency the general, who had escaped from her husband-general, nevertheless used his name ... and, apparently, the money she lived on.
In 1831 Pushkin got married. Soon Delvig dies. Sofya Delvig gets married very quickly and unsuccessfully. All this radically changes the usual life of Anna Kern in St. Petersburg. “Her Excellency” was no longer invited, or not invited at all, to literary evenings, where talented people known to her firsthand gathered, she lost contact with those talented people with whom, thanks to Pushkin and Delvig, her life brought her together ... In front of the beautiful general the specter of poverty perceptibly arose. The husband refused her monetary allowance, apparently in this way trying to return her home. One by one, her two youngest daughters and mother die. Deprived of all means of subsistence, robbed by her father and relatives, she tried to sue her mother's estate, in which Pushkin unsuccessfully tried to help her, tried to earn extra money with translations - and Alexander Sergeevich also helped her in this, albeit grumbling.
In 1836 Kern's family circumstances took a dramatic turn again. She was in complete despair, because by the time she graduated from the Smolny Institute, General Kern appeared as her daughter Ekaterina, who intended to take her daughter to him. The matter was settled with difficulty. ... On February 1, 1837, in the Stables Church, where Pushkin was buried, Anna Kern, along with everyone who came under the vaults of the temple, "wept and prayed" for his unfortunate soul. And at this time, an all-consuming mutual love had already overtaken her ...
..."I remember the haven of love, where my queen dreamed of me... where the air was saturated with kisses, where her every breath was a thought of me. I see her smiling from the depths of the sofa, where she was waiting for me...
I have never been so completely happy as in that apartment!!... She came out of that apartment and slowly walked past the windows of the building, where I, clinging to the window, devoured her with my eyes, capturing her every movement with my imagination, so that after, when the vision will disappear, indulge yourself with an intoxicating dream! ... And this gazebo in Peterhof, among fragrant flowers and greenery in the mirrors, when her gaze, burning me, ignited ... "
For the sake of love, the young man lost everything at once: a predetermined future, material well-being, a career, the location of his relatives. This was the love that Anna Kern had been looking for for so long. In 1839, their son Alexander was born, to whom Anna Petrovna gave all her unspent maternal tenderness. In 1841, Anna Kern's husband, General Ermolai Fedorovich Kern, died at the age of seventy-six, and a year later Anna Petrovna formally married A.V. Markov-Vinogradsky and becomes Anna Petrovna Markova-Vinogradskaya, honestly refuses a decent pension assigned to her for the deceased General Kern, from the title of "Excellency" and from the material support of her father.
And flowed years of true happiness. A. Markov-Vinogradsky was, as they say, a loser, possessing no talents other than a pure and sensitive heart. He did not know how to earn his daily bread, so the family had to live in poverty and even live with various friends out of mercy. But he could not breathe in his Anette and filled the diary with touching confessions: “Thank you, Lord, for the fact that I am married! Without her, my darling, I would languish, bored. Everything is boring, except for my wife, and I am so used to her alone that she has become my necessity! What a happiness to return home! How warm, good in her arms. There is no one better than my wife".
And she wrote to her relative E. V. Markova-Vinogradskaya already more than ten years of their life together: "Poverty has its joys, and we are always happy, because there is a lot of love in us. For everything, for everything, I thank the Lord! Perhaps, under better circumstances, we would be less happy."
They lived together for almost forty years in love and in terrible poverty, often turning into poverty. After 1865, Anna Kern and her husband, who retired with the rank of collegiate assessor with a meager pension, lived in terrible poverty and wandered around in different corners with relatives in Tver province, in Lubny, in Kyiv, in Moscow, in the village of Pryamukhino. Anna wrote memoirs and sacredly preserved Pushkin's relics - letters. And yet they had to be sold - at a meager price. By the way, earlier the composer Mikhail Glinka simply lost the original poem "I remember a wonderful moment" when he composed his music on it (" he took Pushkin's poems from me, written by his hand, in order to set them to music, and he lost them, God forgive him!"); music dedicated, by the way, to Anna Kern's daughter Ekaterina, with whom (daughter) Glinka was madly in love. By the time of the sale, Ekaterina had married the architect Shokalsky, and she almost did not remember her passion for Glinka.
In 1864 Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev visited the Markov-Vinogradsky family: “I spent the evening at a certain Madame Vinogradskaya, with whom Pushkin had once been in love. He wrote in honor of her many poems, recognized as one of the best in our literature. In her youth, she must have been very pretty, and now, with all her good nature (she is not smart), she retained the habits of a woman who is used to being liked. She keeps the letters that Pushkin wrote to her like a shrine. She showed me a semi-faded pastel depicting her at 28 - white, blond, with a meek face, with naive grace, with amazing innocence in her eyes, smile ... she looks a bit like a Russian maid a la Parasha. If I were Pushkin, I would not write poetry for her.
She seemed very eager to meet me, and since yesterday was her angel's day, my friends gave her me instead of a bouquet. She has a husband twenty years younger than her: a pleasant family, even a little touching and at the same time comical. (Excerpt from Turgenev's letter to Pauline Viardot, February 3 (15), 1864, letter No. 1567)".
In January 1879, in the village of Pryamukhino, "from cancer in the stomach with terrible suffering," as his son writes, A.V. Markov-Vinogradsky, husband of Anna Kern, and four months later, on May 27, 1879, in inexpensive furnished rooms on the corner of Tverskaya and Gruzinskaya in Moscow (her son moved her to Moscow), at the age of seventy-nine, Anna Petrovna Markova-Vinogradskaya ended her life path ( Kern).
... She was supposed to be buried next to her husband, but strong torrential rains, unusual for this time of year, washed out the road and it was impossible to deliver the coffin to her husband at the cemetery. She was buried on a churchyard near the old stone church in the village of Prutnya, located six kilometers from Torzhok. A well-known mystical story about how "her coffin met with a monument to Pushkin, which was imported to Moscow."
The son of the Markov-Vinogradskys, who had been in poor health since childhood, committed suicide shortly after the death of his parents. He was about 40 years old, and he was, like his parents, completely unadapted to life. Katenka Shokalskaya-Kern lived a long and quiet life and died in 1904.
The stormy and difficult earthly life of Anna Petrovna was over. Until now, people bring fresh flowers to her modest grave, and newlyweds from all over the area come here to swear eternal love to each other in the name of the one who, albeit not for long, was so dear to the great love of life Pushkin.
At the grave of A.P. A large granite boulder stone was installed on the core, a white marble board with carved four lines of the famous Pushkin poem was fixed on it ...
Anna Petrovna Kern (February 11 (22), 1800, Oryol - May 16 (27), 1879, Torzhok; nee Poltoratskaya, by her second husband - Markova-Vinogradskaya) - Russian noblewoman, best known in history for the role that she played in the life of Pushkin. Memoir author.
Father - Poltoratsky, Pyotr Markovich. Together with her parents, she lived in the estate of her maternal grandfather I.P. Wulf, the governor of Oryol, whose descendant D.A. Wulf is her great-nephew.
Later, parents and Anna moved to the county town of Lubny, Poltava province. Anna's entire childhood was spent in this city and in Bernov, an estate that also belonged to I.P. Wolf.
Her parents belonged to the circle of wealthy bureaucratic nobility. His father is a Poltava landowner and court adviser, the son of M.F. Poltoratsky, the head of the court singing chapel, well-known back in Elizabethan times, married to the wealthy and powerful Agafoklea Alexandrovna Shishkova. Mother - Ekaterina Ivanovna, nee Wulf, a kind woman, but sickly and weak-willed, was under the supervision of her husband. Anna herself read a lot.
The young beauty began to "go out into the world", looking at the "shining" officers, but her father himself brought the groom to the house - not only an officer, but also General E.F. Kern. At this time, Anna was 17 years old, Ermolai Fedorovich - 52. The girl had to put up with it and in January, on the 8th, 1817, the wedding took place. In her diary, she wrote: "It is impossible to love him - I have not even been given the consolation to respect him; I will say frankly - I almost hate him." Later, this was also expressed in relation to children from a joint marriage with the general - Anna was rather cool towards them (her daughters Ekaterina and Anna, born in 1818 and in 1821, respectively, were brought up at the Smolny Institute). Anna Petrovna had to lead the life of the wife of an army campaigner of the Arakcheev times with the change of garrisons "according to the appointment": Elizavetgrad, Derpt, Pskov, Old Bykhov, Riga ...
In Kyiv, she becomes close to the Raevsky family and speaks of them with a sense of admiration. In Dorpat, her best friends are the Moyers, a professor of surgery at the local university, and his wife, "Zhukovsky's first love and his muse." Anna Petrovna also remembered the trip to St. Petersburg in early 1819, where she heard I. A. Krylov in the house of her aunt, E. M. Olenina, and where she first met Pushkin.
However, in 1819 a certain man flashed through her life - from the diary you can find out that she called him "rosehip". Then she began an affair with a local landowner, Arkady Gavrilovich Rodzianko, who introduced Anna to the work of Pushkin, whom Anna had encountered fleetingly earlier. He did not make an "impression" on her (then!) He even seemed rude. Now she was completely delighted with his poetry. biography a. core pushkin
In June 1825, having already left her husband, on her way to Riga, she looked into Trigorskoye, the estate of her aunt, Praskovya Alexandrovna Osipova, where she again met Pushkin (the Mikhailovskoye estate is located nearby). Pushkin at that time wrote the famous madrigal poem Kern "I remember a wonderful moment ...". Anna at that moment was flirting with the poet's friend (and Osipova's son, her cousin) Alexei Wulf, and in Riga a passionate romance happened between them (Wulf also courted her sister Lisa Poltoratskaya).
Pushkin's letters to Kern in French have been preserved; they are at least no less parodic and playful than they are marked by a serious feeling, corresponding to the character of the game that reigned in Mikhailovsky and Trigorsky. Anna Petrovna only two years later, already in St. Petersburg, entered into a fleeting relationship with the poet; Pushkin reacted to this event ironically and in a rather rude tone mentioned what had happened in a letter to his friend S. A. Sobolevsky. In another letter, Pushkin calls Kern "our Babylonian harlot Anna Petrovna."
In her later life, Kern was close to the family of Baron A.A. Delvig, to D.V. Venevitinov, S.A. Sobolevsky, A.D. Illichevsky, A.V. Nikitenko, M.I. Glinka (Mikhail Ivanovich wrote beautiful music for the poem "I remember a wonderful moment"), but dedicated it to Ekaterina Kern, Anna Petrovna's daughter), F.I. Tyutchev, I.S. Turgenev.
However, after Pushkin's marriage and Delvig's death, the connection with this social circle was severed, although Anna remained on good terms with the Pushkin family - she still visited Nadezhda Osipovna and Sergey Lvovich Pushkin, "Lion", to whom I turned his head, "and of course same, with Olga Sergeevna Pushkina (Pavlishcheva), "confidante in matters of the heart", (in her honor, Anna will name her youngest daughter Olga).
Anna continued to love and fall in love, although in "secular society" she acquired the status of an outcast. Already at the age of 36, she fell in love again - and it turned out to be true love. The chosen one was a sixteen-year-old cadet of the First Petersburg Cadet Corps, her second cousin Sasha Markov-Vinogradsky. She completely stopped appearing in society and began to lead a quiet family life. Three years later she gave birth to a son, whom she named Alexander. All this happened outside of marriage. A little later (at the beginning of 1841) old Kern dies. Anna, as a general's widow, was entitled to a decent pension, but on July 25, 1842, she officially married Alexander and now her last name is Markova-Vinogradskaya. From that moment on, she can no longer claim a pension, and they have to live very modestly. In order to somehow make ends meet, they have to live for many years in a village near Sosnovitsy in the Chernigov province - the only family estate of their husband. In 1855, Alexander Vasilyevich managed to get a place in St. Petersburg, first in the family of Prince S.A. Dolgorukov, and then the clerk in the department of appanages. It was hard, Anna Petrovna moonlighted as a translator, but their union remained unbreakable until her death. In November 1865, Alexander Vasilievich retired with the rank of collegiate assessor and a small pension, and the Markov-Vinogradskys left St. Petersburg. They lived here and there, they were haunted by horrendous poverty. Out of necessity, Anna Petrovna sold her treasures - Pushkin's letters, at five rubles apiece. On January 28, 1879, A. V. Markov-Vinogradsky died in Pryamukhino (“from stomach cancer in terrible pain”), and four months later (May 27) Anna Petrovna herself died, in “furnished rooms”, on the corner of Gruzinskaya and Tverskoy (she was brought to Moscow by her son). They say that when the funeral procession with the coffin was passing along Tverskoy Boulevard, the famous monument to the famous poet was being erected on it. So for the last time the Genius met his "genius of pure beauty."
She was buried in a churchyard near the old stone church in the village of Prutnya, which is 6 kilometers from Torzhok - the rains washed away the road and did not allow the coffin to be delivered to the cemetery, "to her husband." And after 100 years in Riga, near the former church, a modest monument to Anna Petrovna was erected with an inscription in an unfamiliar language.