Content listing

26 - Sophia Perovskaya, Radicalism and the Russian People
from PART THREE - THREE AND EPILOGUE
Walter Moss
Book:

Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky

Published by:

Anthem Press

Published online:

05 March 2012

Print publication:

01 March 2002, pp 162-169
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Summary

In the same month that Dostoevsky arrived in Bad Ems, Sophia Perovskaya was released from five months in prison.What crime had merited such treatment for this little twenty-year-old whose father had once been governor of St Petersburg and who was now still a member of the Council of Ministers of the Ministry of the Interior?
Not long after her father had lost his job as governor in 1866, she had gone with her mother and sister to Kilburn, the family estate in the Crimea. There they lived for over two years. In the summers, and once in the spring after a two-month university suspension for taking part in student disorders, her brother Vasily came down from St Petersburg armed with radical literature. The young Sophia longed to know more. And at the end of the sixties she got her chance. In the summer her father came to the Crimea with the news that it was necessary to sell Kilburn to help pay for his debts. The family returned to the capital, where he found a place for them, while he continued to live in his own apartment. Sophia enrolled in the newly begun classes for women being offered at the Alarchinsky gymnasium, which was located near her new lodgings on the western side of the city.
Soon she was spending hours in rooms with other women discussing the position of women in society and other social questions.Amidst heavy cigarette smoke, Sophia looked almost like a child.

16 - The Perovskys and Herzen in Geneva
from PART TWO
Walter Moss
Book:

Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky

Published by:

Anthem Press

Published online:

05 March 2012

Print publication:

01 March 2002, pp 98-102
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Summary

The civilian governor of the St Petersburg province at the time of Karakozov's attempted assassination in 1866 was the mouse-like (in looks) Lev Perovsky, the brother of the former envoy to China and the father of Sophia Perovskaya, who would one day figure so prominently in the life of Alexander II. Earlier in the decade, Lev Perovsky had been transferred from the Crimea to the capital, first as vice-governor of the province and then as governor.
Although his career seemed to be proceeding well, his family life was not so satisfying. His wife, Barbara, was not as career minded as he. She was from the countryside and not especially at ease among St Petersburg's high society. As her husband nagged her about her social failures, a split developed in the family, with the children siding with their mother. Little Sophia (or Sonia as she was generally called) also resented her father's concern that she always appear as a well-bred young lady. She liked the woods and fields too much, especially in the summer, to be worrying about keeping her dress clean.
In 1865, when she was almost twelve, the family received a telegram from Geneva, signed by a man named Poggio. The telegram informed them that Sophia's uncle Peter was hopelessly ill. He had gone to Genoa as the Russian general consul several years after returning from Peking, but then became ill and had gone to Geneva for his health.