Poetry
Russian Women
Русские женщины
Nikolay Nekrasov · 1873
Opening lines
Покоен, прочен и легок
На диво слаженный возок;
Сам граф-отец не раз, не два
Его попробовал сперва.
Comfortable, sturdy and light,
The carriage is wondrously well made;
The count, her father, more than once
Tried it out himself beforehand.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from ru.wikisource.org
Synopsis
A princess takes leave of her father and sets out for Siberia, where her husband, one of the conspirators of December 1825, has been sentenced to hard labour. After two months on the road, she reaches Irkutsk, where the governor tries to make her give up: he describes the penal colony to her, tells her that she will lose all her rights and will have to march in stages with the convicts. The second part takes the form of memoirs that another princess writes for her grandchildren: her childhood near Kiev, a marriage advised by her father, then the discovery of the plot.
Context
The first part was written in July 1871 and appeared in April 1872 in the Otechestvennye zapiski; the second, written the following summer, appeared there in January 1873, both in versions toned down for the censors. For the second, the poet drew on the memoirs of Princess Volkonskaya, which had remained with her son Mikhail: she had written them in French, and the son read them aloud to him, translating as he went, over a few evenings. The two husbands are real figures, Princes Sergey Trubetskoy and Sergey Volkonsky.
Who it is for
Two poems that can be read separately; it is better to know what the uprising of December 1825 was. No French translation, an old English translation.
Prizes and reception
Counted among the author's best-known poems and among his best, one of those in which the dramatic element is most marked.