Mount Neroberg rises above the German city of Wiesbaden (the land of Hesse) – in fact, a high hill covered with forest, on which the Orthodox Church of St. Elizabeth stands out with a golden candle. Next to the temple, a year after its consecration in 1855, an Orthodox cemetery arose, where they began to bury Russian aristocrats who came to be treated for local healing waters, but did not manage to return to Russia, and after 1917 – Russian emigrants: poets, thinkers, generals, philanthropists and just exiles …
When I last visited Wiesbaden two years ago and was in this cemetery, I was struck by a modest tombstone with an Orthodox cross and the inscription: Countess Olga Aleksandrovna Merenberg (07.11.1873 – 10.08.1925). Returning home, I went to the Internet and found out that Countess Merenberg in her maiden name bore the surname Yurievskaya, and her fate, like the fate of her sisters, brothers, children and grandchildren, is closely connected with the history of the Russian state. Olga Alexandrovna was the illegitimate, but “legalized” daughter of Emperor Alexander II, who was called the tsar-liberator either for the liberation of the peasants, or for the liberation of the Bulgarians from the Turkish yoke. Her life, in my opinion, deserves a separate and detailed story.
Father and mother
Emperor Alexander Nikolaevich, as you know, led a difficult personal life. Even before his formal marriage, he had several mistresses; because of one of them, Olga Kalinovskaya, he even wanted to abdicate the throne looming in front of him. But in 1841, he nevertheless married, as expected, the German princess Maximilian Wilhelmina Augusta Sophia Maria of Hesse-Darmstadt, who became Maria Alexandrovna in Orthodoxy. At first, the marriage was happy, the emperor and Maria Alexandrovna had 8 children (including the future emperor Alexander the 3rd), which was in the order of things at that time.
But after ascending the throne in 1855, Alexander remembered the past and began to have favorites, from whom children also appeared: if you collect all the rumors and legends, then they, as they said, were illegal bastards, there were also either 8 or 9. But all these were casual and short-lived relationships, until Alexander Nikolaevich in 1865, at the age of 47, met the love of his life – 18-year-old princess Ekaterina Mikhailovna Dolgorukova. On July 1, 1866, the lovers met for the first time in private, and from that day, according to Catherine, “they met every day, crazy with happiness to love and understand each other completely.” When they happened to be away from each other, the tsar and his favorite, yesterday’s graduate of the Smolny Institute, wrote letters to each other every day. This correspondence (more than 5,000 letters) is kept in the archives, but most of it has not yet been published.
In the summer of 1871, during a trip to the waters in Ems, doctors diagnosed Catherine with anemia and recommended that she give birth to a child in order to “shake up” the body. Until then, the lovers tried to protect themselves, realizing that the presence of children would further complicate their already difficult situation. However, upon learning about the diagnosis, Alexander, according to Catherine’s recollections, “never thought about himself, but all the time about me, immediately followed the doctor’s instructions, and nine months later, God sent us a son.” Son George was born in the Winter Palace on April 30, 1872, and a year later, on October 27, 1873, daughter Olga, the heroine of our story, was born in the Crimea. Later, Catherine gave birth to another son, who died in infancy, and in 1878 her fourth child, daughter Katya.
After returning from the Russo-Turkish War in December 1877, the emperor insisted that his second family also live next to him in the Winter Palace. Three rooms were allocated for them on the third floor of the palace, right above Alexander’s personal chambers. An elevator was installed next to the king’s office. True, the children did not live in the palace all the time. For the night they were taken to their own house on Konyushennaya Street. There is evidence that Alexander loved his children from Ekaterina Dolgorukova very much, and he pampered his eldest son George. Every day he saw children, played with them, read books to them, fed them with children’s meals, and in the evenings he always came to their house to kiss and bless them at night. There is no information about who was the educator of the half-recognized children and what subjects were taught, but judging by the fact that the emperor devoted a lot of time to them, we can conclude that he approached the issue of their education quite seriously. At that time, Empress Maria Alexandrovna had long been hopelessly ill with consumption and did not get out of bed. She died on May 22, 1880. A few days later, Catherine in her letters began to persuade the emperor to get married immediately. Alexander conceded. By that time, ten assassination attempts had already been made on him (the last of them took place in February 1880, when an explosion sounded in the Winter Palace itself, arranged by Stepan Khalturin), and the tsar undoubtedly feared for his life. In the event of his death, the position of his second family would remain uncertain, and the children would be considered illegitimate and would have no rights. The wedding took place on July 6, 1880 at the marching altar, installed in one of the halls of the Tsarskoye Selo Palace.
And just after the wedding, Ekaterina Dolgorukaya received the title – Most Serene Princess Yurievskaya, which correlated with one of the family names of the Romanov boyars (although the Dolgorukovs had no direct relation to Yuri Dolgoruky); their children, born out of wedlock, were “legalized” retroactively and received the surname Yuryevskiy. Nevertheless, this marriage was considered “morganatic”, that is, unequal, according to which the “legalized bastards” did not receive any rights to the Russian throne. Despite the dislike for her and her children from the heir-crown prince, the future Emperor Alexander III and, in particular, his wife Maria Feodorovna, Catherine Yurievskaya appeared at court and even sat in the chair of the late Empress.
Alexey IGELSTROM.
To be continued
Germany says this:
Hairdressers will close again
Whether Germany will impose even more radical restrictions on Easter, it will be decided today
Hard quarantine for Easter – what will remain open
