Anna Petrovna Kern
Encyclopedia
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, written by Pushkin in 1825.
Anna was born in Oryol
Oryol
Oryol or Orel is a city and the administrative center of Oryol Oblast, Russia, located on the Oka River, approximately south-southwest of Moscow...
at the mansion of her grandfather, the local governor. She was brought up in Livny
Livny
Livny is a town in Oryol Oblast, Russia. Population: The town apparently originated in 1586 as Ust-Livny, a wooden fort on the bank of the Livenka River, although some believe that a town had existed on the spot previous to the Mongol invasion of Rus...
, Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
. On 8 January 1817 she was married by her parents to the 56-year-old General Kern, whom she professed to detest thoroughly.
After they settled in Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...
, Anna flirted with a number of Romantic poets, but her chief claim to fame was a love affair with Alexander Pushkin in summer 1825, during her stay with relatives in Trigorskoe, a manor adjacent to Mikhailovskoe, where the great poet was living in exile.
"Lately, our land has been visited by a beauty, who sings the Venetian Night heavenly, in the manner of the gondolier's cantillation", Pushkin wrote to his friend Pyotr Pletnev. Kern was one of many liaisons in Pushkin's life and she would not become the most famous of his mistresses if it were not for a poem which Pushkin put between the pages of the second canto of Eugene Onegin
Eugene Onegin
Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse written by Alexander Pushkin.It is a classic of Russian literature, and its eponymous protagonist has served as the model for a number of Russian literary heroes . It was published in serial form between 1825 and 1832...
that he presented to her on the day of their parting.
The poem starts with the lines "Ya pomnyu chudnoe mgnovenie...", and Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
famously ridiculed attempts at the English translation of these magic lines. Aleksandr Blok marvellously metamorphosed Pushkin's poem into his own "O podvigakh, o doblestyakh, o slave...", while Mikhail Glinka
Mikhail Glinka
Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka , was the first Russian composer to gain wide recognition within his own country, and is often regarded as the father of Russian classical music...
put the poem to music and dedicated it to Kern's daughter Catherine.
"Every night I stroll through a garden and repeat in my mind: she was there - a boulder she stumbled upon rests on my desk, beside a withered branch of heliotrope; I write a lot of poems - and this, you may be sure, have all the symptoms of love..." — Pushkin wrote to Kern's sister several days after her departure. He maintained a correspondence with Kern for a year and a half, but this was largely facetious. Although Pushkin's biographers tend to idealise their relationship, it is known that he referred to her later as the "whore of Babylon
Whore of Babylon
The Whore of Babylon or "Babylon the great" is a Christian allegorical figure of evil mentioned in the Book of Revelation in the Bible. Her full title is given as "Babylon the Great, the Mother of Prostitutes and Abominations of the Earth." -Symbolism:...
" and wrote to one of his friends that "with God's help I screwed her the other day".
In 1826, Kern divorced her aged husband. Ten years later, she married her 16-year-old cousin, Alexander Markov-Vinogradsky. Her last years were spent in such an abject penury that she was constrained to sell out Pushkin's letters to her. She died in Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
and, according to an urban legend
Urban legend
An urban legend, urban myth, urban tale, or contemporary legend, is a form of modern folklore consisting of stories that may or may not have been believed by their tellers to be true...
, her funeral train passed Pushkin Square
Pushkin Square
Pushkinskaya Square or Pushkin Square in Moscow, historically known as Strastnaya Square and renamed for Alexander Pushkin in 1937, is located at the junction of the Boulevard Ring and Tverskaya Street, 2 km northwest of the Kremlin...
just in time when the famous statue of Pushkin was being erected there. This was their last meeting, so to speak.