Blank Family - Srul (Alexander) Blank

Srul (Alexander) Blank

Srul Moshevich Blank (Russian: Сруль Мошевич Бланк) also spelled Israil Moiseevich Blank (Russian: Израиль Моисеевич Бланк) baptized Alexander Dmitrievich Blank (Александр Дмитриевич Бланк); (1804 - 17 July 1870) was a Russian medical doctor and a landowner, the younger son of Moshe Blank and a grandfather of Vladimir Lenin.

According to the mainstream theory, Srul was born in Starokonstantinovo and converted to Orthodox Christianity together with his brother in Saint Petersburg in 1820. He was baptized Alexander, after his godfather Actual Privy Counsellor Alexander Ivanovich Apraksin, and got the patronymic Dmitrievich after his brother's godfather, Dmitry Baranov. 24 July 1824 Alexander enters the Saint Petersburg Academy of Medical Surgeons.

On 19 July 1824, Alexander Blank graduated from medical school with a diploma as surgeon-obstetrician. He worked in the town of Porechye Smolensk Governorate. Soon, he returned to Saint Petersburg and worked as a police medical doctor, then in the Naval Department; in 1837, he started to work in Mariinsky Hospital. In 1842, he moved to Perm, then Zlatoust.

In 1847, he retired from the practice of medicine and bought the estate of Kokushkino or Yañasala (now Lenino-Kokushkino) in Tatarstan with 39 male serfs, where he lived until his death in 1870. In 1887-1888, Vladimir Lenin was exiled to his grandfather's estate.

Alexander Blank was a doctor of the great Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko. In 1837, in Saint Petersburg, he reportedly saved Shevchenko (then a young pupil of artist Shiryayev) from a dangerous illness. Later, in 1850s, during his exile to Nizhny Novgorod, Shevchenko was afflicted with an "indecent illness out of his romance with actress Pekunova" (most probably a sort of a sexually transmitted disease). Shevchenko sent for the retired doctor Alexander Blank who was able to cure him.

Alexander Blank married twice. His first wife was Anna Großschopf (Анна Ивановна Гроссшопф). They had one son, Dmitry, who committed suicide at the age of 19 because of a gambling debt and five daughters: Anna, Lyubov, Yekaterina, Maria and Sofia. Each of the five daughters married a school teacher and left five to ten children. The fourth daughter, Maria married Ilya Ulyanov and became mother of Vladimir Lenin.

Anna Großschopf's ancestors came from Northern Germany and that branch of family produced many notable Germans that were discovered to be blood relatives of Vladimir Lenin. Among them are Nazi field marshal Walter Model, German archeologist Ernst Curtius, President of Germany Richard von Weizsäcker and many others

In 1838, Anna Großschopf died and Alexander Blank married the widow of a government official of XII class, Yekaterina Ivanovna Essen (1842). The second marriage was childless.