Nadezhda Durova is also known as Alexander Durov, Alexander Sokolov, Alexander Andreevich Alexandrov, "Kavalerist-devitsa". She was a woman who served as a man-soldier in the Russian cavalry during the Napoleonic wars.
Background
Nadezhda was born on 17 September 1783 in Kiev. Her parents were Nadezhda Aleksandrovich and Andrei Durov, a hussar captain. Nadezda's mother wanted to give her husband an heir, instead of that Nadezda was born, who she immediately disliked. The child was healthy and strong, but noisy. Once, on the way to the new location of the regiment, the girl cried so loudly that she lost her temper: she grabbed the baby from the hands of the nurse and threw it out the carriage window. After this almost fatal case, Durov gave his daughter in charge of his comrade, flanking hussar Astakhov. In his family, Nadezhda Durova was brought up to five years. The regimental life surrounded by men formed the character of a lively boy in a girl.
When she came back to the family, her mother did her best to eradicate the “Astakhov hussar upbringing”: forcing her daughter to weave lace, sew, knit. She severely punished the girl for spoiled needlework.
A few years later, her father realized that Nadya was unhappy, so he gave her a Circassian stallion Alkida. But Nadezhda Aleksandrovich forbade the girl to ride, considering this hobby as not female. Not wanting to obey maternal tyranny, Durova ran away to the stable at night, sat on Alkida and galloped through the fields until dawn.
Career
With hair cut short, wearing her uniform, and riding Alcides, Durova persuaded a Cossack troop to let her travel with them to Grodno, Lithuania, wherein the spring of 1807 Russian cavalry regiments were preparing to renew the war against Napoleon, who had taken most of Poland the year before. Officers seeking recruits had no incentive to inquire closely into the childish appearance or lack of credentials of young volunteers, and Durova was accepted as a cadet in the Polish Horse Konnopol'skiij regiment. In Durova's first battle at Guttstadt, East Prussia, that June, she portrays herself as both bewildered and fascinated by the spectacle. There she performed the feat that won her the St. George Cross by preventing two French dragoons from hacking down an unhorsed Russian officer. Her rescue of a soldier at Friedland two weeks later, however, brought reprimand rather than reward: her commander told her that her "bravery was scatterbrained and... compassion witless." Fearing further foolhardiness, he sent her to the wagon train "in order to preserve a brave officer... in times to come," but it was the worst punishment Durova could imagine.
The campaign ended with the Treaty of Tilsit, and Durova entered the peacetime routine of regular drills and menial chores. Billeted separately from peasant soldiers, she was able to maintain her masquerade as a man. During this period she was left inconsolable by Alcides' death in a freakish accident: he accidentally impaled himself on a fence post while frisking.
In December 1807 Alexander I alerted to the presence of a woman in his army by her father's appeal to locate her and send her home, ordered Durova to be brought to St. Petersburg for a personal interview. Deeply moved by her impassioned plea to remain in the cavalry, Alexander granted Durova a commission as a cornet in the Mariupol' Hussars and the glory and burden of bearing his name: "You will call yourself... Aleksandrov... and I will never forgive you for even the shadow of a spot on it." Perhaps regretting that impulsive gesture, he turned all further dealings with Durova over to his war minister. Rumors about a woman officer soon spread, but the absolute monarch had declared Durova an honorary man, and apparently nobody ever dared question her right to serve. She continued to dress as a man and did not advertise the fact that she was female, which undoubtedly made her daily life in the army much easier.
From January 1808 to April 1811 Durova's regiment was assigned to guard the newly defined Russian borders with Napoleon's Duchy of Warsaw and Austrian Galicia. A long narrative Durova inserted into "Notes" indicates that by 1811 her position in the Mariupol' Hussars had become untenable because of the stubborn infatuation her colonel's daughter had conceived for the enigmatic "Aleksandrov." Durova asked to be transferred and was assigned to the Lithuanian Uhlans, serving in the same region. After the Napoleonic invasion on June 1812, her largely Polish regiment was assigned to the rear guard and clashed repeatedly with troops on the French side that included Poniatowski's Poles. Durova's official service record lists "active combat" throughout the period of Russian retreat - at Mir, Dashkova, Smolensk, Gzhatsk, and Kolotsk Monastery. At Borodino, the Russians' last-ditch stand before Moscow, she was struck in the leg by a cannonball. Durova herself remarks on the irony of her change in attitude over the five years since her first battle: suffering from pain and cold (careless with money, she rarely managed to be properly equipped and warmly clothed), she was only too happy to head for the once-detested wagon train. On 29 August 1812, she was promoted to lieutenant.
After the Russians surrendered Moscow to the French in early September, Durova sought out the commander in chief, Mikhail Kutuzov, told him "all," and asked to be assigned to his staff. Before long he sent her home to Sarapul to recuperate from the contusion of her leg. She missed Napoleon's headlong flight from Russia that winter and her hopes of a brilliant career with Kutuzov were dashed by his death on April 1813. She rejoined the Lithuanian Uhlans in western Russia and was assigned to pasture the emaciated regimental horses. Judging by the ecstatic tone of her description, that idyllic summer was the happiest she had known since Alcides' death. Durova's journals skip lightly over her participation in mopping-up actions in Poland and Bohemia and the siege of Hamburg in 1813-1814. Her last two years in the cavalry were marked by growing frustration. She enjoyed life in Germany and grumbled about having to return to Russia to take charge of a squadron quartered in a muddy village near Vitebsk. Her account of detached duty in Petersburg in the winter of 1815 indicates how antipathetic the post-Napoleonic army under Aleksei Arakcheev's rigid discipline was to her rebellious spirit. In 1816 she retired as a staff captain and apparently returned home.
Achievements
Nadezhda Duriva was the only woman to hold the Russian Cross of St. George for valor before the early twentieth century. Her major contribution to military history, however, came as much from the pen as from the sword: in 1836-1841 she published remarkable journals and sensational fiction drawn from experiences of the nine years she had served in the Russian cavalry two decades earlier. In particular, two autobiographical works are drawn from her sporadic diaries, The Cavalry Maiden (1836) and Notes (1839), are classic accounts of the alarms of the Napoleonic Wars interspersed with what Tolstoy called the "obligatory and blameless idleness" of peacetime military life.
Durova despised danger, cowardice, and never complained of the pain and hardships of camp life. Her philosophy was simple: "Fearlessness is the first and necessary quality of a warrior; with fearlessness, the greatness of the soul is inseparable, and when these two great virtues are combined, there is no place for vices of low passions."
Quotations:
"The hussars screamed in horror, jumped off their horses and lifted me up, all bloodied and showing no sign of life; they carried me back to the carriage, but the priest jumped up to them, took me from their hands and, shedding tears, laid it on his saddle. To the amazement of all, I returned to life and, beyond my aspirations, I was not mutilated; only from a strong blow did blood come from my mouth and nose."
"Two feelings, so opposite - love for my father and aversion to my gender - excited my young soul with equal strength, and I, with firmness and constancy little characteristic of my age, began to consider a plan to leave the sphere designated by nature and the customs of the female sex."
Personality
In 1836 Durova emerged from provincial obscurity when, perennially short of money despite a government pension, she sold her account of the 1812 retreat to Aleksandr Pushkin's magazine Contemporary. Throughout her retirement Durova signaled masculine independence by wearing military-style jacket and boots, bobbing her hair, and referring to herself in masculine terms. Her writings are in a feminine voice, however, and a few of her stories are narrated by a woman cavalry officer. In 1841, apparently disillusioned with her literary celebrity and frustrated in hopes of making a substantial income as an author, Durova abruptly disappeared. She spent the rest of her life in Elabuga, where she was known as an amiable, animal-loving eccentric.
Physical Characteristics:
Nadezhda Durova was medium height, the skin of sea color. The shape of the face was long, features were ugly. She had a haircut, like a man’s. Her manner was masculine: she was sitting on the couch ... and holding onto a long forelock and smoking.
Quotes from others about the person
"If the author wants him to sign them, I had to sell them in the manuscript so that he could charge them a price. If the booksellers do not agree, then I will probably buy them. The fate of the author should be strong, the overall impression." - Aleksandr Puskin
Interests
Writers
Aleksandr Pushkin
Connections
In 1801, the eighteen-year-old Durova married Vasily Chernov, a noble assessor of the 14th grade, of course, not out of love. Immediately after this, the young family went to Irbit. In 1803, a son Ivan was born to Nadezhda. Family life was unbearable, so she soon ran away from her husband and son, without even mentioning them in the memoirs "Notes of a cavalry girl."
