Early Life
Nadezhda Durova was born in an army camp at Kiev, the daughter of a Russian major. Her father placed her in the care of his soldiers after an incident that nearly killed her in infancy when her abusive mother threw her out the window of a moving carriage. As a small child, Durova learned all the standard marching commands and her favorite toy was an unloaded gun.
After her father retired from service, she continued playing with broken sabers and frightened her family by secretly taming a stallion that they considered unbreakable. In 1801, she married a Sarapul judge V.S. Chernov and gave birth to a son in 1803. Some accounts claim that she ran away from her home with a Cossack officer in 1805. In 1807, at the age of twenty-four she disguised herself as a boy, deserted her son and husband, and bringing her horse Alkid, enlisted in a Polish uhlan regiment under the alias Alexander Sokolov.
Durova was fiercely patriotic and considered army life to be freedom. She enjoyed animals and the outdoors. She felt she had little talent for traditional women's work. In her memoirs, she described an unhappy relationship with her mother, warmth toward her father, and nothing at all about her own married life.
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