Evdokiia Petrovna Rostopchina
Evdokiia Petrovna Rostopchina, born Evdokiia Petrovna Sushkova on December 23, 1811, in Moscow, was a notable Russian poet and writer. Following the death of her mother when she was just six years old, she was raised by her grandparents and pursued an irregular education that included a strong interest in languages and literature. Despite societal pressures that discouraged her from writing, she began composing poetry secretly at a young age. Rostopchina married Count Andrei Fedorovich Rostopchin in 1833 and they had three children, but her writings often reflected a discontent with the constraints of marriage and societal expectations for women.
Her literary career flourished in the 1830s, gaining recognition after the death of acclaimed poet Alexander Pushkin. She published her first collection of poetry in 1841, which was critically successful. However, her career faced challenges when her politically charged poem "Nasil'nyi brak" led to her banishment from St. Petersburg by Czar Nicholas I. After spending years in exile and returning to Moscow, her later works received a lukewarm reception, and by the 1850s, her style was perceived as outdated. Despite this, Rostopchina's poetry continued to resonate, with many of her lyrics set to music by prominent composers like Tchaikovsky and Glinka, ensuring her legacy within the Russian literary and musical traditions.
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Evdokiia Petrovna Rostopchina
- Born: December 23, 1811
- Birthplace: Moscow, Russia
- Died: December 3, 1858
- Place of death: Moscow, Russia
Biography
Countess Evdokiia Petrovna Rostopchina was born Evdokiia Petrovna Sushkova in Moscow on December 23, 1811, to Petr Vasil’evich Sushkov and Dar’ia Ivanovna Pashkova. After her mother’s death from tuberculosis in 1817, Rostopchina was sent to live with her maternal grandparents. Her education was irregular; however, she read eagerly and managed to learn French and German, and later some English and Italian. By age fourteen Rostopchina was writing poems in secret, as her family did not deem the pursuit fitting for an unmarried girl. Indeed, after her poem “Talisman,” a love lyric, appeared in the St. Petersburg almanac Severnye tsvety na 1831, she was persuaded not to publish again until after she married.
In 1833, at the insistence of her family, she wed Count Andrei Fedorovich Rostopchin and moved to his estate in the village Anna. Between 1837 and 1839, the couple had three children, two daughters, Ol’ga and Lidiia, and a son, Viktor. Rostopchina’s fiction from the 1830’s, including the short stories “Chiny i den’gi” (1835; “Rank and Money,” 1985) and “Poedinok” (1838), both published in Syn otechestva i Severnyi arkhiv, makes reference to women compelled by family and society to marry against their will, which suggests that Rostopchina herself was unhappy in marriage. However, she presided over a fashionable literary salon and knew many of the leading writers and publishers of her time. Her standing as a poet increased after poet Alexander Pushkin’s death. The journal Sovremennik published her poem “Chernovaia kniga Pushkina” in 1839. Her first collection of poetry, Stikhotvoreniia grafini E. Rostopchinoi, appeared in 1841 and was a critical success.
From 1845 to 1847, Rostopchina and her family spent time in France, Italy, Germany, and Austria. During this period her poem “Nasil’nyi brak” was published anonymously in the journal Severnaia pchela. An allegory about Russia’s subjugation of Poland, the poem led to Rostopchina’s banishment from St. Petersburg by Czar Nicholas I once she was revealed as its author. She lived in Moscow until the czar’s death in 1855. By the 1850’s, Rostopchina’s poetry was considered old-fashioned; the publication of her multivolume collected of poems, issued between 1856 and 1859, was poorly received. In Moscow, Rostopchina wrote a number of dramatic verse pieces and novellas which were not as popular as her earlier poems. Her unrhymed novel in verse, Dnevnik devushki, was serialized in 1866 and republished in an abridged form in 1991. Other works remained in print and in anthologies well into the twentieth century. Many of Rostopchina’s poems, entitled “Slova dlia muzyki,” (words for music), have lived on; they were set to music by such composers as Aleksandr Sergeevich Dargomyzhsky, Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, Anton Grigor’evich Rubinstein, and Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky.