Great, Semyon Afanasyevich

As historians point out, in the summer of 1771, Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich became seriously ill. Empress Catherine II and Count Nikita Panin did not depart from the patient - and at the same time, rumors spread that if the Grand Duke died, Alexei Bobrinsky, the son of Ekaterina and Orlova, would be proclaimed heir. Since there was no law of succession in Russia and the age of majority was not precisely determined, it was not clear from what point Paul could be considered as having left childhood. It was thus obvious that it would hardly be possible to postpone this moment for a long time after its 18th birthday in September 1772. It was during this period that Catherine experienced a special need to guard against attempts to enthrone him ^[2] .

At the same time, the Grand Duke’s health remained fragile, so the question of his marriage became particularly acute - it was necessary to take care of further succession to the throne: “To make sure that he was able to produce an heir, Paul was encouraged to be associated with a certain docile widow, from whom in 1772 He was born a son, known as Simeon the Great. Raised by Catherine in her own quarters (unlike Bobrinsky), he entered the service in the Russian, and then in the British fleet and died in the West Indies in 1794 " ^[2]

It is mentioned that Catherine did not want to give her mother's grandson, but in the end, at the request of Shuvalov, she gave it away. In 1780 he was placed in a closed Petropavlovsk school with orders to give "the best education." After graduating from school with the rank of sergeant of the Izmailovsky regiment, he was transferred to the Naval Cadet Corps, which he graduated in 1789. He began to serve on the ship "Do not touch me," under the command of Captain Travakin. He participated in the war with the Swedes. After the sea battle on June 22, 1790, the Great Seeds were sent with a report to Catherine II. Grandma has not seen him for 10 years.

On July 1, 1790, the Empress produced the Great Seeds as a lieutenant commander of the fleet ^[3] , and on October 17, 1793, the Admiralty Board issued a decree on which Simon and a group of other naval officers went to London to ambassador Ambassador S. R. Vorontsov for enrollment in the English fleet ^[4] .

Nikolai Grech wrote about him:

“Before entering into the first marriage of Emperor Paul, they gave him a virgin to ordain him to the sacraments of Hymen. The student showed success, and the teacher became obryuhatela. A son was born. He, I do not know why, was nicknamed Semen Ivanovich the Great and brought up zealously. When he was about eight years old, he was placed at the best in Petersburg school, Peter's school, with orders to give him the best education, and so that he did not guess the reason for this preference, they gave him comrades of children of unimportant persons; They studied along with him: Yakov Druzhinin, son of a court valet; Fyodor Maksimovich Brieskorn, son of a court pharmacist; Gregory Ivanovich Villamov, son of the deceased inspector of the classes of Peter the Great; Christian Ivanovich Miller, son of a tailor; and Ilya Karlovich Westman, I do not know whose son. After completing the science course at school, Empress Catherine II ordered young people to be placed in the Foreign College, only one of them, Druzhinina, took on as a secretary in her own room. The Great declared that he wanted to serve in the navy, entered the Naval Cadet Corps, graduated from the midshipman, received the rank of lieutenant, and assembled to go with the captain Mulovskiy to the world expedition . Suddenly (in 1793) he fell ill and died in Kronstadt . In the "Notes Khrapovitsky" said: "Received the news of the death of Senyushka the Great." When he was still in Peter’s school, his translation with the German original was printed under the title: “Insult, an oriental novel, translated by Semyon the Great, a young man diligent in science.” Andrei Andreevich Gendr in his childhood saw the Great in Kronstadt, where he rolled the child on the boat, sitting at the helm ... "

According to the Naval Ministry, Simon the Great died on August 13, 1794 during the shipwreck of the English ship Vanguard during a terrible storm in the waters of Antilles ^[5] (apparently, in the area of ​​the islands of Sint Eustatius and St. Thomas , where the storm was seen ) ^[6] . Officially considered missing.

According to the version put forward by the historian Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich , it was Semyon the Great who was the elder Fedor Kuzmich ^[7] .

• It is mentioned in the novel “ Look into the eyes of the monsters ” by Lazarchuk and Ouspensky: “Officially, midshipman Semyon the Great was considered missing in the eighteen hundred ^[8] near the Antilles during a terrible storm. There was really a storm there, but the Great himself was by that time already in a completely different place ... He spent many years in students and then assistants to the famous Ungan (priest of the Haitian voodoo cult) le Peletie on the island of Haiti (actually, that is why he later and went to the medical unit) and in the case of ungana was quite successful; and it was there that the famous necron Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorf (who entered Haitian infernal folklore under the somewhat distorted name Baron Saturday ) drew attention to him, made friends with him, brought him to Europe and introduced him to the right people. Semyon Pavlovich relatively quickly figured out the situation, sent all sorts of knights and Rosicrucians in a direction known to every Russian man - and began to look for his own special way. In this search, he inevitably stumbled upon Jacob Bruce , since all the roads in those years led to Fifth Rome. ”