002. Sof'ja Alekseevna / Софья Алексеевна

N. N. Golicyn (231-33) lists Carevna Sof'ja Alekseevna (1657-1704), daughter of tsar Aleksej Michajlovič and elder half-sister of Peter the Great, as one of the earliest female authors in Russia. In his very brief outline of Sof'ja Alekseevna's dramatic biography, Golicyn notes that she ruled with Peter from 1682 to 1689, became a nun under the name of “Susanna” in 1698, and died, a nun of highest rank, in Moscow's Novodevičij Convent, where she was buried.[1]

Golicyn skips over many well-known details: Sof'ja Alekseevna was the regent of Russia during the early years of young Peter's reign and entered into open (and armed) conflict with him in an attempt to become sovereign herself. The Carevna's defeat in 1689 was followed by her incarceration in the Novodevičij Convent; she took monastic orders only a decade later in 1698 -- in the wake of an unsuccessful rebellion by the Strel'cy (members of the musketeer regiments that constituted Russia's standing army) in which some of her ardent supporters were involved.[2]

According to N. N. Golicyn, Sof'ja Alekseevna authored the lines of verse that appear beneath this engraved portrait of her ally and associate, the prince Vasilij Vasil’evič Golicyn. 

The brief text celebrates V. V. Golicyn's virtues and those of his clan by rhetorically addressing the figure of the horseman represented on the family crest:

На Пречестный Клейнот Гербовный Князей Голицынов

(On the Most Honorable Heraldic Emblem of the Princes Golicyn)

Камо бѣжиши Воине избранный,
Многажды славне честiю вѣнчанны?
Трудов сицевых и воинской брани,
Вѣчной ти славы до текше престани,
Не ты но образ Князя преславнаго
Во всяких странах, здѣ начортанаго,
Отнынѣ будет славою сiяти,
Честь Голицынов вездѣ прославляти.

(We await your translations, Gentle Readers.)

N. N. Golicyn bases his claim that Sof'ja Alekseevna wrote these lines on two sources, A. F. Malinovskij (1837) and N. A. Polevoj (1846); the latter, available online, is hardly decisive, however, merely stating that the verse in question was written "they say, by Sofija." Polevoj in turn lists other sources, but these add little concrete information.[3] In short, while we cannot disprove Sof'ja Alekseevna's authorship of these eight lines, there is no "hard evidence" that she wrote them or, indeed, that she wrote anything more literary than "two letters to [V. V.] Golicyn in cipher from the time of the second Crimean campaign", as Lindsey Hughes puts it in her monograph Sophia (175). 

N. N. Golicyn also raises the issue of whether or not Sof'ja Alekseevna wrote for the stage, a rumor that has been surprisingly persistent in literary history and was even reproduced by Nikolaj Karamzin, who claims in his Pantheon of Russian Authors (Пантеон российских авторов, М., 1801, 159) to have read one of her manuscripts. Some have alleged that Sof'ja Alekseevna also translated foreign theatrical texts and that she performed on stage as an actress. Golicyn sets forth the sources for these rumors in some detail and then discounts them. In his view, which Hughes corroborates, the Carevna had neither the education nor the cultural inclination sufficient for such activities.

How literate was she? In an era when education was scarce even among the male elite, Sof'ja Alekseevna far exceeded the norm. While women of the tsar's family were generally raised within the confines of the imperial terem and exposed only to bits of learning, Sof'ja Alekseevna was able to profit from a new wave of interest in education on the part of her father that carried her, together with her brothers, well beyond the basic literacy that had previously constituted the instruction of imperial heirs. More specifically, she seems to have benefited from some contact with the monk and scholar Simeon Polockij, whom her father introduced into the household as tutor to his heir (the Carevna's brother Aleksej and, after his death in 1670, her brother Fёdor). She certainly knew Simeon Polockij's writings, which ranged from complex tracts on religious themes to poems for the tsar's children, and was gifted with copies of them that had been specifically dedicated to her; she also appears to have read Polish (Hughes, Sophia, 32-35).

That said, a more credible report of Sof'ja Alekseevna's pen-wielding indicates that she once put her hand to copying out a manuscript of the Gospels, and perhaps even to illustrating it "with pen and ink drawings of the evangelists, and decorative vignettes and letters", for "this particular piece of handiwork seems more in keeping with what we already know of the 'Pious Carevna' than acting in plays or translating Molière" (Hughes, Sophia, 176). In point of fact, ground-breaking enthusiasm for the theater belonged to her younger half-sister, Natal'ja Alekseevna, the subject of our next post.

However doubtful one remains about Sof'ja Alekseevna's authorship, her influence on subsequent women writers is clear. She served as a point of reference for Catherine the Great and an inspiration for the poets Evdokija Rostopčina (1811-1858) and Marina Cvetaeva (1892-1941), a triad whose relation to the Carevna has been explored by Miriam Finkelstein.[4] Rostopčina dedicated to Sof'ja Alekseevna a narrative poem entitled "The Nun" (Монахиня, 1844), which also depicts the Carevna as a writer of verse. Here are a few lines in Hughes's translation (Sophia, 242):

     By internecine strife,
     I rose to power; by internecine strife
     I fell again. Young Peter, my half-brother,
     To manhood grown, began to threaten me
     And here am I, in this mute convent cell
     Interred... a passionate woman of the world
     Against her will condemned to take the veil
     And dedicated forcibly to God.

Cvetaeva considers Sof'ja Alekseevna's legacy in three separate verses from 1920: "God, hearken to your obedient slave!" (Бог, внемли рабе послушной!), "There are heroic deeds..." (Есть подвиги...), and "To Peter" (Петру). Sof'ja Alekseevna also appears in the verse of the poet Lidija Kologrivova (died 1915; see Rydel). We look forward to your translations of these poems. 

Another woman writer that may be linked to Sof'ja Alekseevna's cultural heritage is Elena Ivanova Apreleva (née Blaramberg, 1846-1923), a member of the Turgenev circle who wrote under the pen name "E. Ardov." Apreleva served as one of Il'ja Repin's models for his famous painting of Sof'ja Alekseevna at Novodevičij in 1689. In Repin's preparatory study (on the left), Apreleva demonstrates the posture and gaze that were later used to characterize the incarcerated Carevna in the painting's final version (1879, on the right). Here Sof'ja Alekseevna is faced with Peter's execution of the Strel'cy, one of whom hangs dimly outside her barred window and with the concomitant loss of any hope that she will ever regain power.

FURTHER READING:

Finkelstein, Miriam. Im Namen der Schwester: Studien zur Rezeption der Regentin Sof'ja Alekseevna bei Katharina der Großen, Evdokija Rostopčina und Marina Cvetaeva [In the Sister’s Name: Studies on the Reception of the Regent Sof'ja Alekseevna by Catherine the Great, Evdokija Rostopčina, and Marina Cvetaeva]. Slavistische Beiträge, vol. 468. Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, 2011. A brief review of this book may be found here.

Hughes, Lindsey. Sophia, Regent of Russia 1657-1704. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990.

Rydel, Christine A. "Lidiia Aleksandrova Kologrivova", in Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, ed. Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal, Mary Zirin. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 309.

Zirin, Mary. "'E. Ardov'", in Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, ed. Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal, Mary Zirin. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 37-39.

NOTES:

[1] Golicyn spells Sof'ja Alekseevna's first name "Sofija" (as many do) and erroneously gives the year of her birth as 1658. The title "Carevna" (sometimes spelled "tsarevna") means "daughter of the tsar."

[2] On Sof'ja Alekseevna, see Hughes, Sophia, especially 32-35 (on the Carevna's education) and 172-76 (on the question of her authorship).

[3] N. N. Golicyn sources are A. F. Malinovskij, in Труды и Летописи Общества Истории и Древностей, т. 7 (1837, ч. 1), 84, which we have not yet read, and N. A. Polevoj, whose comment, quoted above, appears at the conclusion of a biographical sketch of V. V. Golicyn in Обозрение Русской Истории до единодержавия Петра Великого (СПб., 1846), 34 (note 107).
Polevoj's own sources include the same Malinovskij (though he cites pages 68 and 85); and A. V. Tereščenko, Опыт обозрения жизни сановников, управлявших иностранными делами в Росии (СПб., 1837), т. 1, 178, who simply avers that "Carevna Sofija composed" these lines without explaining his source. Polevoj also cites N. I. Novikov's journal The Ancient Russian Library (Древняя Российская Вивлиофика, 1791, ч. 17, 205 ff.), which contains various details and documents relating to V. V. Golicyn.

[4] See Finkelstein, Im Namen der Schwester ("Further Reading" above). Our sincere thanks to Professor Finkelstein for her generous sharing of bibliographical details and texts. Rostopčina's narrative poem was first printed as "Монахиня. Историческая сцена" (The Nun: A Historical Scene) in Moskvitjanin (1843, č. 5, n. 9, 1-15) and then in the two-volume edition of her works published in 1890 (Сочинения графини Е. П. Ростопчиной, 2 т., СПб, 196-211).

ILLUSTRATIONS:

1. This detail from the 'Eagle' portrait of Sof'ja Alekseevna, available on Wikipedia, was painted in roughly 1689 by an unknown artist. Crowned with scepter and orb, she is represented here at the peak of her imperial ambitions; the inscription encircling her image reads "The most illustrious and sovereign, by the grace of God, Great Sovereign Lady, Pious Carevna and Great Princess Sof'ja Alekseevna, Autocrat of all the Great and Little and White Russias" (Hughes, Sophia 142).

2. This engraved portrait of V. V. Golicyn, made in or before 1689, is available on the website of the Puškin Museum in the section dedicated to 18th- and early 19th-c. engravings. The question of whether or not Sof'ja Alekseevna authored the poem to Golicyn displayed beneath his picture has a curious parallel in debates about who actually produced the engraving. Specifically, there is a long history of attributing this portrait to Leontij Tarasevič, a claim first made by D. A. Rovinskij in the late 1800s (see, for example, his Detailed Dictionary of Russian Engraved Portraits (Подробный словарь русских гравированных портретов, v. 1 [SPb., 1886], 605-06) and still repeated today, аlthough specialists at the Puškin Museum currently regard this portrait to be more likely the work of Aleksandr Tarasevič on the basis of a monogrammed "AT" that appears on one version of it. We are very grateful to Oleg Antonov, Curator of Russian Graphics at the Museum, for this information.

3. Repin's portraits are available on the Russian Wikipedia pages dedicated, respectively, to Il'ja Repin and to Elena Apreleva.