Konstantin Balmont - Family

Family

There is an element of controversy regarding Konstantin Balmont’s (and his second name’s) origins. The common knowledge is that his father Dmitry Konstantinovich Balmont (1835—1907) was a nobleman of a Scandinavian (probably Scottish) ancestry. In his 1903 short autobiography the poet wrote:

According to our family legend, my ancestors were sailors, either Scottish or Scandinavian, who came to Russia and settled there. My father’s father was a Navy officer and a hero of Turkish War noted by Tzar Nikolay the First for bravery. My mother’s ancestors were Tatars, the first in the line being Prince Bely Lebed (White Swan) of the Golden Horde. That was the probable reason for her two distinctive qualities: unruliness and tempestuousness which I inherited…

There is a less exotic alternative version of this, championed by the poet's second wife Yekaterina Andreeva. According to her Memoirs, Balmont’s grand-grandfather on his father’s side Ivan Andreevich Balamut (a Ukrainian surname, meaning “rabble-rouser”) served as a cavalry sergeant in Catherine the Great’s Imperial Guard regiment (Andreeva insisted she saw the original parchment-written document that's been kept in the family archives). A landowner in Kherson, Southern Ukraine, Ivan Balamut has got his name somehow modified into Balmont. This second version has its own detractors, though. According to T. Alexandrova, an authority on M.Lokhvitskaya and Balmont, "It would be more than natural for a foreign name to be transformed by common people of rural area into a folkish, recognizable version, but certainly not vice versa".

Dmitry Konstantinovich, Vera Nikolayevna and all of their relatives pronounced the surname as Ba′lmont, first syllable stressed. The poet insisted that he personally (and officially) changed his surname into Balmo′nt and asked to pronounce it thus. He cited "a certain woman’s whimsy" as the only reason for this change.