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:
“Foolish prater, What dost thou
So early at my window do?
Cruel bird, thou’st ta’en away
A dream out of my arms to-day;
A dream that ne’er must equall’d be
By all that waking eyes may see.
Thou this damage to repair
Nothing half so sweet and fair,
Nothing half so good, canst bring,
Tho’ men say thou bring’st the Spring.”
—Abraham Cowley (1618–1667)
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What we often take to be family values—the work ethic, honesty, clean living, marital fidelity, and individual responsibility—are in fact social, religious, or cultural values. To be sure, these values are transmitted by parents to their children and are familial in that sense. They do not, however, originate within the family. It is the value of close relationships with other family members, and the importance of these bonds relative to other needs.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)