Nadezhda durova biography for kids

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Marco Maggi: ”Russian to the Bone"20.01.2024

Proud of Our People! Mikhail Kalatozov, gravity-defying cinematographer10.01.2024

The year was 1807. Napoleon and his Grande Armée, having defeated the vaunted Prussian army the year before, was on the move again, and the Russian army was marching west to meet him. Among the multitude of Russian units was the Polish Lancer Regiment, whose recruiting parties rode alongside its line of march, trying to fill vacancies in its ranks. One rainy night in March a young man presented himself to one of those parties and politely asked to join the regiment. His only answer to the captain’s questions about his background was that he was a Russian nobleman who left his family to join the military in spite of its disapproval. The volunteer, who called himself Aleksandr Sokolov, enlisted as a ‘gentleman-ranker.’ Nobody suspected that this slim, dark-eyed man was, in fact, a young woman named Nadezhda A. Durova.

Turbulence awaited Nadezhda even before her birth on September 17, 1783. Her mother, Aleksandra Aleksandrova, was the beautiful daughter of a wealthy Ukrainian landowner. Out of many suitors, she gave preference to a dashing hussar officer, Andrei Durov. Aleksandra’s father was appalled at the prospect of his daughter marrying a Russian and a soldier to boot. He categorically forbade the union, but Aleksandra eloped.

When she found out she was pregnant, Aleksandra dreamed about the beautiful baby boy she was going to have. The first labor pains, however, came as a shock. After a very difficult birth, she demanded to see her son, only to be presented with a girl with thick, dark hair, screeching at the top of her lungs. Aleksandra turned away in disgust.

Soon after Nadezhda’s birth her father’s regiment received orders to move to another town. Since it was peacetime, married soldiers’ families were allowed to accompany them. One day on the march, Nadezhda’s mother was in a particularly foul mood. Her daughter had kept her up all night, the carriage was uncomfortable and the road was bumpy. Incen

In the sixth of our blogs, Dr Margarita Vaysman (Lecturer in Russian, University of St Andrews) examines the peculiar fate of Nadezhda Durova aka Cornet Alexandrov, the famous female cavalry officer in the Tsar Alexander I’s army, who is feted as a patriotic icon in contemporary Russia.

Keywords: military memoir, queer history in Russia, queer celebrity, Russian literature, autobiography

The celebrated memoirs of Nadezhda Durova, a female cavalry officer who, disguised as a man, served in the Russian Army during the Napoleonic wars, have been popular with Russian readers since their publication in 1836. The Notes of the Cavalry Maiden remained inaccessible to the English-speaking readers until, in 1988, not one but two translations appeared in the US.[i]

Despite the text’s availability and recent interest in queer history in Russia,[ii] the most intriguing aspect of Durova’s celebrity – her everlasting presence in the twentieth and twenty-first century Russian popular culture and even the school curriculum remains, with very few exceptions,[iii] largely unexplored.

The Cavalry Maiden

Durova’s personal story, vividly conveyed in her autobiography with a few changes, is fascinating enough  - a daughter of an army major, she left home in Sarapul, a small city in the Ural region of Russia, at the age of 23. By this time she had already married and born a son. However, in 1807, accompanied by her ferocious horse Alkid, she enlisted and joined the Russian army’s lancer regiment, the Uhlans, posing as a mail officer. Understandably concerned with maintaining her cover, she had most likely chosen this regiment as its officers were famously clean-shaven. For years, she served with this and other regiments disguised as a man using the pseudonym Aleksandr Sokolov. Durova served incredibly well in combat, and as a reward for her bravery (and because of the army-wide search her family had initiated after they received a note from her informing them of her n

Nadezhda Andreyevna Durova  (1783 –1866), also known as Alexander Durov, Alexander Sokolov and Alexander Andreevich Alexandrov, was a woman who, while disguised as a man, became a decorated soldier in the Russian cavalry during the Napoleonic wars. She was the first known female officer in the Russian military. Her memoir, The Cavalry Maiden, is a significant document of its era because few junior officers of the Napoleonic wars published their experiences, and because it is one of the earliest autobiographies in the Russian language.

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 the Polish Horse 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.

She fought in the major Russian engagements of the 1806-1807 Prussian campaign. During two of those battles, she saved the lives of two fellow Russian soldiers. The first was an enlisted man who fell off his horse on the battlefie