April 11, 1893
In St. Petersburg, at the age of 72, she died. Avdotya Panaeva — a writer and the poet's common-law wife Nikolai NekrasovShe left behind invaluable information about the lives of famous 19th-century writers and novels about the difficult fate of women in Russia.
I began to observe everything that was done and said around me too early.
She was born on August 12, 1820, into a family of famous actors, Yakov and Anna Bryansky. From childhood, she grew up surrounded by famous people: their home was visited by Pushkin, Lermontov, Glinka.
At 19, she secretly married an aspiring writer. Ivan Panaev and became the hostess of a literary salon—the most popular in St. Petersburg. Among her regular guests were Belinsky, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Goncharov, Tolstoy, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Herzen и ChernyshevskyI stayed with them too. Alexandr Duma.
Her living room, or rather dining room, was the Russian Olympus for 20 years. (Korney Chukovsky)
Her marriage to Panayev fell apart within the first year, when her husband began cheating. Avdotya eventually responded to Nekrasov's long courtship and became his mistress.
For a time, the three of them shared an apartment, causing gossip among St. Petersburg's high society. But this didn't stop Panayev and Nekrasov from publishing the magazine "Sovremennik."
The "Panaevsky cycle" of poems written by Nekrasov became a discovery in poetry: a "prose of love" appeared, which brings more suffering than joy to those who love.
Along with running the salon, Panaeva proofread magazine articles, wrote fashion reviews, and published over 20 of her own works, primarily about complex family relationships and the plight of women raised as male property. Her first novella was banned by censors, who deemed it "immoral and an undermining of parental authority."
She buried her husband in 1862, and a year later she broke up with Nekrasov and married the writer Apollona GolovachevaAfter his death, she raised her daughter alone. To earn a living, she published her memoirs.
The days go by, I'm getting old. My only joy is to wrap myself in a fur coat and ride in a troika with the risk of breaking my neck.