Pushkin and Anna Olenina
Anna Olenina, married to Fyodor Andro, was born in St. Petersburg into a notable aristocratic circle. She was the daughter of Alexei Olenin, who led the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, a gifted singer, and a multilingual playwright. Her home became a lively social hub, attracting artists and thinkers, and she studied music with Mikhail Glinka. At seventeen she entered the imperial court as a bridesmaid.
Olenina is remembered as the muse of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. It is thought that some of his poems, including His Eyes and I Loved You, were written for her, and a legend persists that Pushkin wished to marry her but was rejected.
Pushkin in love
Pushkin first crossed paths with Olenina at the Olenin household when the Academy head’s youngest daughter was still young. After an exile in Mikhailovsky, the poet returned to St. Petersburg and soon became linked with Olenina, who was then nineteen. Contemporary accounts describe evenings spent with the Olenins and a growing warmth surrounding the poet.
In a note from 1828, Pushkin is described as visiting the Olenins and appearing to relish the time spent in their company. The village of Priyutino near Moscow is mentioned as a social setting that shows up with humor in letters and recollections about Pushkin’s life and his connection with Olenina.
A well-known Pushkin scholar from the early twentieth century noted that the poet of that era often played with names for Olenina, crafting playful anagrams and even a crossed-out introduction to Annette Pouschkine on a page. The diaries of Anna Olenina from that period hint at a different possibility for the poet’s feelings. In her notes she mentions a person other than Pushkin as a romantic interest and keeps that identity unnamed. Archival commentary from that era describes the poet’s charm and cleverness alongside a self‑confident vanity that colored his interactions with women.
Olenina, meanwhile, formed her own judgments about the poet. Her notes describe him as clever, often amiable, and sometimes intensely proud and jealous. She also notes a certain harshness in his manners that affected how she perceived his temperament. Her reflections on his affection for her include observations about his attention to small details and the way his gaze followed her as she moved across ornate rooms, a detail she records with irony and awareness.
The poet’s matchmaking
The supposed courtship between Olenina and Pushkin is inferred from Olenina’s diary entries and the reactions of her family, especially her mother. The tone makes clear that her parents’ response, while not future-oriented, was firm and left little room for changing the couple’s prospects. In September 1828 a discussion with a family confidant, a prince who often visited, reveals tension over how the situation was unfolding. Olenina recalls feeling pressure and that the poet faced a firm refusal from the family, a memory that fades from her records as the years go by.
The episode left a mark on Pushkin, who ceased visiting the Olenins toward the end of 1828. By 1829 he is no longer mentioned in Olenina’s diary, signaling a clear end to that chapter in their lives.
Olenina’s marriage
Olenina married relatively late, in 1840, at the age of thirty-two. By then the poet Pushkin and Olenina’s mother had passed away, and her father carried new responsibilities as the family elder. In 1839 Alexei Olenin arranged a marriage for Olenina to Colonel Fyodor Alexandrovich Andro. The union was more a matter of duty than romance, with Andro assuming the role of husband and father and guiding Olenina through family life.
The couple lived in Warsaw and raised four children. After Andro’s death Olenina moved to live with her son in the Volyn region, later visiting the estate of her younger daughter who resided in Paris. She kept a personal chest from Warsaw as a keepsake from a past she held close despite a husband’s jealousy and the passing years.
In later years Olenina reflected on her circle of contemporaries—Karamzin, Bludov, Krylov, Gnedich, Pushkin, Vyazemsky, Bryullov, Batyushkov, Glinka, Mickiewicz, Utkin, Shchedrin and others. She treasured memories of that time as joyful and formative, even as eyesight and hearing faded with age, and she looked toward the future with steady hope, recalling the days that shaped her life and the broader literary and artistic world she inhabited.