Background
Anna was born in Oryol at the mansion of her grandfather, the local governor.
Anna was born in Oryol at the mansion of her grandfather, the local governor.
She was brought up in Livny, Russia. After they settled in Saint St. Petersburg, Anna flirted with a number of Romantic poets, but her chief claim to fame was a love affair with Alexander Pushkin in the summer of 1825, during her stay with relatives in Trigorskoe, a manor adjacent to Mikhailovskoe, where the great poet was living in exile. Kern was one of many liaisons in Pushkin"s life and she would not have become the most famous of his mistresses were it not for the poem that Pushkin put between the pages of the second canto of Eugene Onegin which he presented to her on the day of their parting.
The poem starts with the lines Ya pomnyu chudnoe mgnovenie, and Nabokov famously ridiculed attempts to translate these magic lines into English.
Aleksandr Blok metamorphosed Pushkin"s poem into his own "O podvigakh, o doblestyakh, o slave..", while Mikhail Glinka set the poem to music and dedicated the result to Kern"s daughter Catherine. "Every night I stroll through a garden and repeat in my mind: she was there - a boulder she stumbled upon rests on my desk, beside a withered branch of heliotrope.
I write a lot of poems - and this, you may be sure, have all the symptoms of love.." — Pushkin wrote to Kern"s sister several days after her departure. He kept up a correspondence with Kern for a year and a half, but this was largely facetious.
Although Pushkin"s biographers tend to idealise their relationship, it is known that he referred to her later as the "whore of Babylon" and wrote to one of his friends that "with God"s help I screwed her the other day".
Her last years were spent in such abject penury that she was constrained to sell off Pushkin"s letters to her. The exact place of burial in the cemetery of Prutnya cannot be determined today, but the cemetery has a symbolic tombstone. According to an urban legend, her funeral procession passed Pushkin Square just as the famous statue of the poet was being erected there.
This was their last meeting, so to speak.
