Anna Olenina (married to Andro) was born in St. He was one of the brightest representatives of the Petersburg aristocracy. The daughter of Alexei Olenin, head of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, sang beautifully and composed plays, spoke several foreign languages, entered the circle of the most famous creative people of her time (the Olenins’ house was one of the best centers of the social life of the capital), Mikhail Glinka’ He studied music with him. She became a bridesmaid at the imperial court at the age of 17.
Olenina went down in history as the muse of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin; It is believed that some of the poet’s works, including His Eyes, You and You and I Loved You, were dedicated to him. And also – as a girl whom Pushkin considered his wife, but was rejected.
Pushkin in love
Pushkin first met his future muse in the house of the Olenins, when the youngest daughter of the head of the Academy of Arts and the director of the Imperial Public Library was still a child. After returning from exile in Mikhailovsky in 1827, the poet again became a frequent guest of the Olenins, and soon he returned to St. Petersburg began to talk about the fact that he was in love with 19-year-old Annette.
“On the 21st, in the evening, I went with Mickiewicz to the Olenins in a village of about 17 versts in Priyutino. There we also found Pushkin with his loving grimaces. The village is quite beautiful. But mosquitoes make this place hell. <…> It’s hard not to wave at all for a moment; You are involuntarily dancing on Kamarinskaya. There’s no way I could live here even for a day. <…> Pushkin was covered with pimples, and when surrounded by mosquitoes he kindly cried out: Prince Vyazemsky wrote “Sweet” about Pushkin’s visits in 1828.
According to the well-known Pushkinist Pavel Shchegolev of the early 20th century, the poet of that time was constantly drawing anagrams for the name and surname of Olenina – Aninelo, Etenna, Aninelo. “On one page, we even came across a carefully crossed-out but still readable introduction to ‘Annette Pouschkine’,” Shchegolev wrote.
But Anna Olenina herself, apparently, did not share Pushkin’s feelings. She mentioned in her diaries that she was attracted to another person whose identity she did not reveal. About the classics, he wrote in 1828: “God did not reward him with an attractive appearance because he had bestowed the only Genius on him. His face was expressive, of course, but a certain malice and mockery overshadowed the intelligence in his blue, or rather, glassy eyes. The Arabian profile he had borrowed from his mother’s generation did not decorate his face, adding to it his terrible sideburns, disheveled hair, claw-like nails, short stature, artificial demeanor, and his arrogant look at the women he put forward with love. the peculiarity of the temperament of natural, necessary and boundless pride – these are all the virtues of body and soul that the world gave to the Russian Poet of the 19th century.
Olenina took into account the information gleaned from the rumors: That Pushkin was a “bad son” and a “depraved man”. The muse gave the poet such an appraisal: “Clever, sometimes amiable, very jealous, unbearably proud and rude.”
Olenina guessed, of course, from her views on her legs that Pushkin had feelings for her. “Among the poet’s oddities was his particular passion for small legs; In one of his poems he admitted that this passion was more important to him than beauty itself. Annette was linking two things with an agreeable appearance: she had sometimes beautiful, sometimes rustic eyes, but her feet were really small, and almost none of the high society young ladies could wear her shoes. Pushkin noticed this dignity in her, and her greedy eyes followed the leg of young Olenina along the bright parquet, ”the girl wrote in her diary in July 1828, telling the story in the third person.
The poet’s matchmaking
The poet’s alleged courtship with Olenina, with whom he went to his parents Alexei Nikolaevich and Ekaterina Markovna, is known from the somewhat confusing statements that Annette left in her diary. They do not speak of the will of the hand and the heart, but it is quite clear what the reaction of the parents, especially the mother, was: Pushkin received an unequivocal refusal.
In September 1828, Anna Olenina spoke in her diary of a conversation she had with her close family friend, Prince Sergei Golitsyn, who often visited her home.
“After he was broken, he told me that this concerns the poet. She begged me not to change my behavior, reproached my mother for being harsh with her and said that she could not reason in such a way, ”Olenina wrote. And he added that the writer was discussing his arrogance with the prince – shortly before that, the room scrapper Shterich conveyed to the girl the words that Pushkin allegedly said about matchmaking: “I only get along with my relatives, but I will get along with the girl I will.” However, Golitsyn told Olenina that the poet’s words assured that he did not say this: this statement was distorted by malicious people, as the prince claimed.
Pushkin’s failure led him to stop visiting the Olenins at the end of 1828. In 1829, the poet is no longer mentioned in Anna’s diary.
Olenina’s marriage
Olenina married quite late – in 1840, at the age of 32. By that time, both Pushkin and her mother were gone, and the girl’s father began to bear the burden, since her youngest daughter was still alone. In 1839, Alexei Olenin married her to Colonel Fyodor Alexandrovich Andro. The marriage, of course, did not take place out of love, the colonel in family life limited the intellectual, educated Olenina to the duties of mother and spouse.
The couple lived in Warsaw and they had four children. After Fyodor Alexandrovich died, Anna Andro went to live with her son in the Volyn province, and then to the estate of her youngest daughter (two older girls lived in Paris). Anna Andro brought with her an archived chest from Warsaw, which she kept from her husband, who was jealous of her past, throughout her married life.
“In the circle of our unforgettable contemporaries – Karamzin, Bludov, Krylov, Gnedich, Pushkin, Vyazemsky, Bryullov, Batyushkov, Glinka, Mickiewicz, Utkin, Shchedrin and others – I drew everything that was best at that time. I have accumulated such great and beautiful memories in my memory that they are a joy for me at this time when my eyesight is weakening and my hearing is changing, and I calmly think of the near future life with hope and faith. ..” he wrote in his memoirs at the end of the years.