Nadezhda Durova | |
|---|---|
| Надежда Дурова | |
 Portrait by Woldemar Hau, 1837 | |
| Born | September 17, 1783 |
| Died | March 21, 1866 (aged 82) Yelabuga, Russia |
Nadezhda Andreyevna Durova (Russian: Надежда Андреевна Дурова; September 17, 1783 – March 21, 1866), also known as Alexander Durov, Alexander Sokolov and Alexander Andreevich Alexandrov, was a Russian cavalry soldier and writer who participated in the Napoleonic Wars.
Assigned female at birth, he ran away from home and lived as a man while enlisting in an uhlan (light cavalry) regiment.[1] He participated in the war, and published his memoirs after his service. He is regarded as one of the first known female officers in the Russian military. He received the Cross of St. George for bravery.[1] His memoir, The Cavalry Maiden, is a significant document of its era because few junior officers of the Napoleonic Wars published their experiences, and because it is one of the earliest autobiographies in the Russian language.[2] Its title encompasses much of the historical and scholarly debate over how to refer to his gender: Alexandrov himself wanted it published as Notes of Alexsandrov under his male name, but to his distress publisher Aleksandr Pushkin changed it to the feminine Notes of N.A. Durova, and the editor of the first book edition retitled it to the even more feminine Cavalry Maiden.[3]
Aleksandr Andreevich Aleksandrov was born Nadezhda Durova on September 17, 1783,[4] into the family of a Russian major.[5][4] Some sources say he was born in Vyatka Governorate of the Russian Empire,[6] while other sources say he was born in an army camp in Kiev,[7][8] or in the city of Kherson.[4] His mother came from a family of wealthy landowners from Poltava, and married Nadezhda's father against the will of his own father; a son was desired, but instead, Nadezhda was born, much to the dismay of his mother.[9][10] His father placed him in the care of his soldiers after an incident that nearly killed him in infancy when his abusive mother threw him out the window of a moving carriage. As a small child, Durova learned all the standard marching commands and his favorite toy was an unloaded gun.[11]
After his father retired from service, he continued playing with broken sabers and frightened his family by secretly taming a stallion that they considered unbreakable.[12] In 1801, he married a Sarapul judge, Vasily Stefanovich Chernov, who was seven years his senior, and gave birth to a son on January 4, 1803.[13] On September 17, 1806,[14][4] he dressed as a man in a Cossack uniform and ran away from home,[14] enlisting in the Polish Horse Regiment (later classified as uhlans) under the alias Alexander Sokolov.[13][5]
Fiercely patriotic, Durova regarded army life as freedom. He enjoyed animals and the outdoors, but felt he had little talent for traditional women's work. In his memoirs he describes an unhappy relationship with his mother, warmth toward his father, and nothing at all about his own married life.
He fought in the major Russian engagements of the 1806–1807 Prussian campaign. During two of those battles, he saved the lives of two fellow Russian soldiers. The first was an enlisted man who fell off his horse on the battlefield and suffered a concussion. Durova gave him first aid under heavy fire and brought him to safety as the army retreated around them. The second was an officer, unhorsed but uninjured. Three French dragoons were closing on him. Durova couched his lance and scattered the enemy. Then, against regulations, he let the officer borrow his own horse to hasten his retreat, which left Durova himself more vulnerable to attack.
During the campaign, he wrote a letter to his family explaining his disappearance. They used their connections in a desperate attempt to locate him. The rumor of an amazon in the army reached Tsar Alexander I, who took a personal interest. Durova's chain of command reported that his courage was peerless. Summoned to the palace at St. Petersburg, he impressed the tsar so much that the tsar awarded Durova the Cross of St. George and promoted him to lieutenant in a hussar unit (Mariupol Hussar Regiment). The story that there was the heroine in the army with the name Alexander Sokolov had become well-known by that time. So the tsar awarded him a new pseudonym, Alexandrov, based on his own name.[15]
Durova's youthful appearance hurt his chances for promotion. In an era when Russian officers were expected to grow a mustache, he looked like a boy of sixteen. He transferred away from the hussars to the Lithuanian Uhlan Regiment in order to avoid the colonel's daughter who had fallen in love with him. Durova saw action again during Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812. He fought in the Battle of Smolensk. During the Battle of Borodino, a cannonball wounded him in the leg, yet he continued serving full duty for several days afterwards until his command ordered him away to recuperate. He retired from the army in 1816 with the rank of stabs-rotmistr, the equivalent of captain-lieutenant.[15]
A chance meeting introduced him to Aleksandr Pushkin some 20 years later. When he learned that Alexandrov had kept a journal during his army service he encouraged him to publish it as a memoir. Alexandrov added background about his early childhood but changed his age by seven years and eliminated all reference to his marriage. Durova wished to publish this as Notes of Alexandrov; however, without approval Pushkin changed the title to his feminine name, publishing it as Notes of N.A. Durova in 1836. When it was published as a book, editor and publisher Ivan Butovskii retitled it to the now famous The Cavalry Maiden.[3] Durova also wrote five other novels.[16] Durova continued to wear male clothing for the rest of his life, continued to use his male name, and spoke using masculine grammar.[17] He died in Yelabuga and was buried with full military honors.[15] His son, Ivan Durov, had died 10 years prior, in 1856.[13]
There has been a debate over whether Durova's gender identity. Much of the scholarship concerning Durova treats him as a cross-dressing woman;[18] however, Durova in his personal life rejected femininity (even expressing an aversion to the female sex),[19] and behaved as a man.[17] After his discharge from the army, his name of choice remained the masculine name Aleksandrov, which he used with the approval of Tsar Aleksander I. Public records recording him as Aleksandrov include his military pension accounts, will, and the record of his death in the parish registry books.[20] In The Cavalry Maiden, Durova describes himself with terms of androgyny, describing himself both as a bogatyr[21] and as an Amazon warrior. He was also distressed that publisher Pushkin had changed the title from his male to his former female name, Durova, writing “the name which you called me, dear sir Aleksandr Sergeevich, in the preface haunts me! Is there no remedy for my grief? You called me by that name that makes me shudder, and soon 20,000 people will read it and call me by it too!”[3] Durova was also a writer of prose, and one of his stories, Nurmeka, revolves around a male who cross-dresses as a female, leading to speculation that this was an expression of Durova's transgender identity.[19] Some modern scholars have suggested that Durova may have been an example of a transgender individual; this view is not held universally. [22][23]
Besides being a rare example of a female soldier's military memoir, The Cavalry Maiden is one of the few sustained accounts of the Napoleonic wars to describe events from the perspective of a junior officer[citation needed] and one of the earliest autobiographical works in Russian literature.
Durova became a figure of some cultural interest in Eastern Europe but remained largely unknown to the English-speaking world until Mary Fleming Zirin's translation of The Cavalry Maiden in 1988. Durova is now a subject of university syllabi and scholarly publications in comparative literature and Russian history.
