Early Life and Family Background
Eberhardt was born in Geneva, Switzerland, to an aristocratic Lutheran Baltic German Russian mother, Nathalie Moerder (née Eberhardt), and an Armenian-born father, Alexandre Trophimowsky, anarchist, and ex-priest. Isabelle's mother had been married to elderly widower General Pavel de Moerder, who held important Imperial positions. After bearing him two sons and a daughter she traveled to Switzerland to convalesce, taking along her stepson and her own children, with their tutor Trophimowsky. Soon after arriving in Geneva she gave birth again, to Isabelle's half-brother Augustin, and four months later came the news that her husband had died of a heart attack. She elected to remain in Switzerland and, four years later, Isabelle was born and registered as her "illegitimate" daughter to avoid acknowledging the tutor's paternity. Although Eberhardt never acknowledged Trophimowsky's paternity, her illegitimacy caused her emotional and financial troubles later in life, preventing her inheritance and contributing to her feelings of estrangement from her siblings, who hated her father.
Despite this, Isabelle was well educated. She was fluent in French and spoke Russian, German and Italian. She was taught Latin and Greek, and studied classical Arabic and read the Koran with her father; she later became fluent in Arabic. From an early age she dressed as a man in order to enjoy the greater freedom this allowed her.
Read more about this topic: Isabelle Eberhardt
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, family and/or background:
“Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your childrens infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married! Thats total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art scientific parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“The vast silence of Buddha overtakes
and overrules the oncoming roar
of tragic life that fills alleys and avenues;
it blocks the way of pedicabs, police, convoys.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“In the true sense ones native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (18691940)