Nikolay Raevsky - Later Years and Family

Later Years and Family

In 1794, Raevsky married Sofia Alexandrovna Konstantinova, the granddaughter and heiress of the scientist Mikhail Lomonosov. Sofia brought with her a substantial dowry, consisting of an estate at Oranienbaum with over six thousand serfs. The Raevskys had six children, two sons and four daughters. After the Napoleonic Wars ended, Raevsky settled with his family at Boltyshka, an estate left to him by his stepfather. Boltyshka was a large estate near the banks of the Dnieper River in Kirovohrad Oblast, Ukraine; the land was fertile and there were over ten thousand serfs to cultivate it.

In May 1821, during a visit to the Caucasus, Raevsky befriended a young Alexander Pushkin and traveled with him to the Crimea. Pushkin would form close friendships with Raevsky's sons, his sons-in-law, and his half-brother, Vasily Davydov – all members of the Southern Society that helped plot the Decembrist Revolt of 1825. The General’s eldest son, Alexander, served as the model for the protagonist of Pushkin’s poem The Demon. While Raevsky's daughter Maria’s youthful frolics inspired Pushkin to write some of the most famous lines in Russian literature ("Eugene Onegin", I-XXXIII).

Raevsky’s favorite child, Maria, was wed at the age of nineteen to Prince Sergey Volkonsky, a wealthy, liberal aristocrat, who had fought alongside General Raevsky during the Napoleonic Wars. Raevsky’s eldest daughter, Ekaterina, married the wealthy young General Mikhail Fyodorovich Orlov, also a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars.

Once interested in discussion of liberal reforms, western democracy, and the teachings of the Enlightenment philosophers, by 1825 Raevsky had abandoned his youthful idealism, rejecting the notion that Russia could be anything other than an absolute monarchy. Both of Raevsky’s sons and his son-in-law, Mikhail Orlov, withdrew from the Southern Society long before the Decembrist Revolt occurred, and took no part in the uprising. Raevsky’s half-brother, Vasily Davydov, and Prince Volkonsky, remained in the Society. They were arrested along with their fellow conspirators days after the uprising in December 1825, and were taken to Saint Petersburg. They were held for several months, interrogated, tried, and sentenced to hard labor and exile in Siberia. Against her father’s wishes, Maria fought for the right to accompany her husband to Siberia, and managed to personally persuade the Emperor to allow her to share Prince Volkonsky’s exile. The Volkonskys would remain in Siberia for more than thirty years. They were only allowed to return to European Russia after the death of Nicholas I, having received a pardon from his son, Alexander II. Maria’s courage, and that of the other Decembrist wives, was romanticized by Nekrasov in the poem "Russian Women".

Raevsky died at Boltyshka four years after the Decembrist Revolt, a broken and embittered man, of pneumonia contracted while travelling to petition the Emperor for leniency on his daughter’s behalf. As he lay dying, he is said to have looked at a portrait of his daughter Maria and whispered: ‘’That is the most remarkable woman I have ever known in my life.’’