Goncharova, Natalya Ivanovna

Parents. The early years

Natalia was the illegitimate daughter ("pupil") of Ivan Alexandrovich Zagryazhsky and Euphrosinia Ulrika von Liphart (married to Baroness von Posse).

Euphrosinia Ulrika, daughter of the Ostsee landowner Karl Liphart and Margaret von Fittinghoff, married in 1778 to Moritz von Posse in Dorpat . One daughter was born in the marriage, Johann Wilhelmina (Jeannette) ^[2] , who in 1797 married Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich Leviz of Menard (1767-1824), the future general ^[3] .

The commander of the Kargopol Carabinieri Regiment, Ivan Zagryazhsky, met the Posse couple in January 1782 in Dorpat at a traditional winter fair. At the end of the fair, Baroness Posse left her husband and fled with Colonel Zagryazhsky. Eufrosinia Ulrika lived in Pskov , then - in St. Petersburg . Her husband, retired captain Moritz von Posse, after futile attempts to find and return his wife, filed for divorce, and on August 24, 1782, after a six-month trial, the divorce was committed ^[4] .

In his memoirs, Arapova , daughter of N. N. Pushkina-Lanskoy, tells about the appearance of her beloved Zagryazhsky in Yaropoltsy . According to her, Ivan Alexandrovich brought Ulrika to his estate, “introduced the deceived wife to his legal wife [Alexandra Stepanovna]” and soon left for Moscow , where he later lived. Alexandra Stepanovna Zagryazhskaya accepted her husband’s mistress, and after her early death she took upon herself all the cares of Natalya’s daughter. According to Arapova, Alexandra Stepanovna “made every effort to legitimize the birth of Natalia, protecting all her inheritance rights”. Natalya Ivanovna later with warmth recalled “mother Alexandra Stepanovna” ^[5] .

Petersburg

Later, Alexandra Stepanovna moved with her children to Petersburg. In the early 1800s, Natalya Ivanovna, together with half-sisters - Sofia and Ekaterina - enjoyed the patronage of Natalya Kirillovna Zagryazhskaya , the wife of their uncle, Nikolai Alexandrovich . All three sisters were admitted to the maids of honor to Empress Elizabeth Alekseevna . At the court, Natalya Ivanovna, who was distinguished by her extraordinary beauty, inherited from her mother according to family traditions, drew attention and was carried away by her favorite of Empress Okhotnikov . Perhaps this was the reason for the imminent marriage of Natalia Ivanovna with Nikolai Goncharov ^[6] . Judging by the entry in the camera-furrier magazine , the entire imperial family attended the wedding on January 27, 1807. Petr Kirillovich Razumovsky was the planted father of the groom, Natalya Petrovna Golitsyna was the mother, Ober-shenk Nikolai Alexandrovich Zagryazhsky was the planted father of the bride, and Varvara Aleksandrovna Shakhovskaya was the mother ^[6] .

Marriage

Natalya Ivanovna’s husband, Nikolai Afanasevich (1787-1865), the only son of the owner of the factories at the Polotnyany Zavod , received the rank of college assessor in 1808 and became secretary of the Moscow governor, the young couple moved to Moscow. Nikolai Goncharov’s parents left the same year, and soon his father, Afanasy Nikolayevich, went on a foreign trip. The younger Goncharov, by proxy, managed all family enterprises, which gradually fell into decay due to the wasteful life of his father, and achieved certain successes. In 1811, Nikolai Goncharov was awarded the Order of St. Vladimir IV degree "for bringing to proper order and improvement the factories in the Kaluga province of linen and writing paper" ^[7] . With the outbreak of the war of 1812, Afanasy Goncharov returned to Russia, for some time father and son managed the factories together, but in 1815 the elder Goncharov completely removed Nikolai from the management of enterprises ^[8] .

Natalia Ivanovna and Nikolai Afanasevich had seven children (Dmitry, Ekaterina , Ivan, Alexandra , Natalya, Sergey, Sofya), of which the youngest, Sofya, died shortly after birth (1818). In 1815 they left the Linen Factory in Moscow, leaving their daughter Natalya in the care of their grandfather. In Moscow, the Goncharovs lived in their own house, which together with the services occupied almost a block between Bolshaya and Malaya Nikitsky ^[9] .

Apparently, already at the end of 1814, signs of Nikolai Afanasevich’s disease began to appear. It was believed that he was "damaged in the mind", unsuccessfully falling off his horse (Arapova). Some researchers doubt the reliability of the information provided by Arapova. According to biographers Natalia Nikolaevna Pushkina, I. Obodovskaya and M. Dementiev, who studied the Goncharovs archive, he suffered from alcoholism, and probably the reason for this was the consciousness that his father was ruining his family. In one of the letters to her father-in-law, Natalya Ivanovna reports that her husband “admitted that he drank up to seven glasses of plain wine” and that he was rude to her during hard drinking. Nikolai Afanasevich behaved violently, and, for the sake of calm children, he was settled in a separate outhouse with a servant ^[10] . Relations between the spouses were restored during periods of improvement in the state of Nikolai Afanasevich, but they happened less and less. In 1817, Natalya Ivanovna wrote to the elder Goncharov: “Although, of course, my husband’s passing with me does not correspond to his former love for me in any way, but can I ever change my mind and leave him alone, truly, never can to do ” ^[11] .

At 29, Natalya Ivanovna became the head of a large family and took care of her sick husband. The father-in-law annually allocated her from the funds received as a rent for one of his factories, at first 35-40 thousand rubles, over time the amount of maintenance decreased. As her younger daughter recalled years later, and for 40 thousand a year, Natalya Ivanovna “did not make ends meet” ^[12] . However, Goncharova did not spare the money to educate the children, giving them the best possible home education. Son Ivan completed his studies at a private lyceum; the eldest, Dmitry, graduated from Moscow University ^[13] .

Family troubles hardened Natalya Ivanovna, because of her severe disposition, the children were afraid of her. All those who knew her testify to the severity and restraint of Goncharova; This is confirmed by the family correspondence of the Goncharovs. Natalia Ivanovna sought solace in religion ^[14] .

Goncharova and Pushkin

A difficult relationship has developed with Natalia Ivanovna with the husband of her youngest daughter. After much hesitation (Pushkin was not rich, had a reputation for being unreliable, it was also known that he played and lost large sums), she accepted his secondary proposal in early April 1830 and agreed to marry Natalia ^[15] . However, she did not agree to give her daughter out of pride without a dowry, for which the ravaged Goncharovs had no money ^[16] . The wedding, scheduled for May 6, was all postponed. At first, Natalya Ivanovna intended to allocate a part of the Yarolets estate to her daughter, but she abandoned this intention, as she was afraid that the Pushkins would sell it. In late August, before leaving for Boldino , Pushkin had a falling out with a future mother-in-law, he wrote to the bride: “If your mother decided to terminate our engagement, and you decided to obey her, I will subscribe to all the pretexts that she would like to put up, even if they they will be as solid as the scene she arranged for me yesterday, and as insults with which she wants to shower me. ” Returning freedom to Natalya Nikolaevna, he announced that he would only marry her or never marry her ^[17] .

As Natalya Nikolaevna recalled much later, her mother forced her to write to her fiancé dictated by “taunts,” but she always added them with postscript “after her tender lines, and Pushkin understood this” ^[17] .

Returning to Moscow, Pushkin mortgaged the estate of Kistenevo 's father and transferred part of the money to Goncharova Sr. for a dowry. These eleven thousand rubles Goncharov never returned to Pushkin. Natalya Ivanovna gave a mortgage on her diamonds as a gift for the wedding, the bride’s grandfather - a copper statue of Catherine II ^[18] .

Goncharova tried to lead the family life of her daughter, and Pushkin left with his wife in Petersburg. He planned to do this already before the wedding (“I will get married this month, six months I’ll live in Moscow, I will come to you in the summer. I don’t like Moscow life. Live here not as you want, as your aunts want. My mother-in-law is the same aunt,” he wrote Pletnev in St. Petersburg in January 1831), and the intervention of Natalia Ivanovna accelerated this event ^[19] .

Later, with the advent of the Pushkin children, the tension in relations between Natalya Ivanovna and her son-in-law somewhat subsided. In August 1833, when Pushkin drove to Yaropolets on the way from St. Petersburg to Moscow, Natalya Ivanovna accepted him “with pleasure”. Pushkin spoke about this visit in detail in a letter to his wife. The second time he visited the mother-in-law in October 1834, and she was "very grateful for his attention" ^[20] .

Recent years

In the early 1830s, Natalya Ivanovna actually left her husband, whose younger son Sergey took care of later, and moved to Yarolets, who left her in 1821 after the death of his uncle, N. A. Zagryazhsky. Her daughters, Alexandra and Catherine, after the marriage of their younger sister, also lived in the village, on the estate of Polotnyany Zavod . In letters to their relatives, they complained that they were “abandoned to the will of God”: her mother did not want to spend the winter in Moscow in order to take her daughters into the light, she herself lived for a long time in Yaropoltsa, which she loved very much.

Yaropoltsy was controlled by the tradesman in Moscow, Semyon Fedorovich Dushin, who had a huge influence on the mistress of the estate. Their relationship went beyond the usual relationship between the landowner and the steward. This connection was a source of discontent among the younger Goncharovs, who apparently believed, not without reason, that Dushin was robbing Natalya Ivanovna. For her, the death of Dushin in 1842 was a heavy blow. At her request, the manager was buried next to the manor house, at the altar of the Church of the Nativity of John the Baptist, words of thanks are written on the grave monument for the “tireless and impartial” leadership of Yaropoltsy and poems, possibly composed by Goncharova herself. On the day of death, Dushina Natalya Ivanovna wrote in her album the words of Chateaubriand : “A man whose death left in my life such a void that will not disappear over the years” ^{[21] [22]} .

Touching on the last years of Goncharova’s life, Shchegolev wrote: “... she [N. I. Goncharova] was already a parable among neighbors: she drank according to the book and was comforted by the caresses of serf footmen in turn ” ^[23] .

Natalya Ivanovna quarreled with her half-sisters because of the division of inheritances after the death of his brother Alexander and uncle, Nikolai Alexandrovich Zagryazhsky. So, having received Yaropolets, she refused the rest of the estates, for this the sisters had to pay compensation of 300 thousand rubles, however, Natalya Ivanovna never received her in full ^[24] . The last time Natalya Ivanovna met with Ekaterina Ivanovna was in March 1837 at the Polotnyany Zavod, where Zagryazhskaya accompanied the widowed Natalia Nikolaevna Pushkin. Here, a final break occurred between the sisters, perhaps Goncharova blamed Zagryazhskaya for something in connection with the events that preceded Pushkin's duel . With a special inscription on her will dated December 11, 1837, Ekaterina Ivanovna confirmed that Sofya de Mestre left all her property, and, apparently, this was a consequence of the last meeting between Zagryazhskaya and Goncharova ^[25] . Later Natalya Ivanovna bitterly wrote to her eldest son: “It is truly hard and bitter to be unjustly condemned by your closest people, especially those with whom childhood and youth passed. It would seem that these first bonds of friendship of the sisters should remain inextricable ... and yet mercenary calculations change everything - sad reality, that’s what remains for me ” ^[24] .

Natalya Ivanovna did not break off relations with her eldest daughter Ekaterina, after she went abroad with her husband , but over the years she wrote to her less and less. Shchegolev in his work “The Duel and the Death of Pushkin” argued that the descendants of Dantes kept “a lot of lengthy and sincere letters to N. I. Goncharova and her sons to Ekaterina Nikolaevna and her husband Dantes” and that this is evidence of the Goncharovs' disrespect for Pushkin's memory. It is not known whether the researcher had access to the papers of the Dantesov-Gekkernov; in the book he gives only two letters to Natalya Ivanovna Dantes: consent to his marriage with Ekaterina and wedding congratulations ^[26] . Another opinion on the attitude of Goncharova to Dantes is shared by Obodovskaya and Dementiev, who worked with the Goncharova archive. Of course, Natalia Ivanovna tried to support the eldest daughter, as it turned out, forever divorced from her homeland and family. In her letters, Goncharova did not touch on “intimate and sensitive issues”, never recalling the tragedy of 1837. According to Obodovskaya and Dementyev: “It must be assumed that they [letters] were kind, but hardly“ sincere, ”as Shchegolev says” ^[27] .

After the death of Catherine in 1843, Natalya Ivanovna invited Dantes to take her children "to be his mother." It is not known what Dantes’s response was, but Goncharova’s grandchildren from Ekaterina Nikolaevna remained in France and were raised by Dantes’s unmarried sister ^[28] .

Goncharova died on August 2, 1848 in the Joseph-Volotsky Monastery, where she annually went on pilgrimage on foot. In the monastery, she was buried. The grave of Natalia Ivanovna after the revolution was destroyed ^{[1] [29]} .

• Obodovskaya I., Dementiev M. After the death of Pushkin. Unknown letters / ed. and the author of the entry. articles D. D. Good. - M .: Soviet Russia, 1980 .-- 384 p.
• Obodovskaya I., Dementiev M. Natalya Nikolaevna Pushkina. - 2nd ed. - M .: Soviet Russia, 1987.
• Chekmaryov A. Yaropolets. The story of two estates. - M .: Design. Information. Cartography, 2007 .-- 207 p.