Sof'ia Vladimirovna Engel'gardt
Sof'ia Vladimirovna Engel'gardt, born in 1828 as Sofiia Vladimirovna Novosil'tseva, was a notable Russian writer from a distinguished family that faced significant hardship. After the death of her parents during her childhood, Engel'gardt and her sisters were raised by affluent relatives in Moscow, where they received a Francophilic education. Engel'gardt's literary career began in the mid-1850s, producing a variety of short stories, novellas, and plays that often displayed her keen psychological insight and a nuanced understanding of social dynamics. Her writing gained attention for its ironic narrative and rich characterizations, particularly in depicting male psychology and the tensions within the Moscow gentry during a time of socio-political change.
Engel'gardt was an active member of the literary community, being elected to the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature in 1859. Her work evolved to reflect the significant reforms following the abolition of serfdom in 1861, ultimately illustrating the societal shifts that occurred during and after Czar Nicholas I's reign. Despite a decrease in publication frequency in the 1870s, Engel'gardt remained influential, completing notable translations, including the works of Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. With a total of thirty-four published pieces by the end of her career, Engel'gardt's stories offer insights into a society that would undergo drastic transformation following the Russian Revolution of 1917.
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Sof'ia Vladimirovna Engel'gardt
Fiction Writer and Translator
- Born: 1828
- Died: 1894
Biography
Sof’ia Vladimirovna Engel’gardt was born Sofiia Vladimirovna Novosil’tseva in 1828 and was one of five children born to Vladimir Vasil’evich Novosil’tsev and Avdot’ia Aleksandrovna Novosil’tseva (n�e Novikova). What little is known about Engel’gardt’s family derives from a memoir, Semeinye zapiski (family notes, 1862), written by the eldest Novosil’tsev daughter, Ekaterina Vladimirovna Novosil’tseva, an author who wrote under the pen name T. Tolycheva. Tolycheva writes that the family’s once-extensive properties had dwindled to a large home on the outskirts of Moscow and a few scattered estates by the time of Engel’gardt’s childhood. Engel’gardt’s father died of cholera when she was two, and her mother died six years later. Engel’gardt and her three sisters were taken in by wealthy Moscow relatives. Engel’gardt herself writes of the children’s straightlaced and Francophilic upbringing and education by governesses in the semiautobiographical short story “Vospominaniia na dache” (reminiscing at a summer house), published in the moderate Moscow journal Russkii vestnik (the Russian messenger) in 1874. The narrator is shocked to encounter an actor speaking Russian in a neighbor’s drawing room when she can hardly “assemble two Russian phrases.” Although Engel’gardt’s editors had to correct her grammar when she first started publishing, she quickly mastered her native tongue. Her writing displays her sensitivity to adage, aphorism, idiom, and colloquial speech. Engel’gardt married Vladimir Egorovich Engel’gardt, who was acting state councilor in the civil service. From the mid-1850’s, however, it seems that she lived alone or with other members of her immediate family in Moscow and supported herself at least partially by writing.
Between 1853 and 1856, Engel’gardt’s first literary efforts, four fictional works (short stories and povesti, or novellas) and two short plays, were published in Otechestvennya zapiski (notes of the fatherland). In these early works, deglamorized versions of the svetskaia povest’ (society tale), Engel’gardt employs an ironic narrative voice and a great variety of psychological types and ethnographic settings. Her portrayals of male psychology are unusually adept. In 1859 Engel’gardt was elected to membership in the Obshchestvo Liubitelei Rossiiskoi Slovesnosti (society of lovers of Russian literature). Between 1859 and 1884, seventeen of her tales appeared in Russkii vestnik, established by Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov in 1856. Despite Engel’gardt’s sympathy for the liberal ideals championed by Russian radicals beginning in the 1840’s, her stories depict the later generation of reactionaries as cynical men who do not practice the socialist ideals that they preach. Her work often chronicles the effect of the dissolution of Czar Nicholas I’s reign on Moscow gentry. Following the abolition of serfdom in 1861, Engel’gardt displays an increased historicism: her stories more directly reflect the ensuing waves of reform and reaction. Engel’gardt’s rapid rate of publication slowed in the 1870’s, though she did complete a translation of Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin’s dramatic works, which appeared in Paris in 1875. Although she never collected the thirty-four works of short fiction published between 1853 and 1892, Engel’gardt’s tales, with their exceptional investigations of individual psychology, provide a glimpse of a society irrevocably lost after the 1917 revolution.