Ekaterina Mikhailovna Khomyakova

Biography

Ekaterina Mikhailovna belonged to the old noble Yazykov family, her father was ensign Mikhail Petrovich Yazykov (1767–1819), her mother Ekaterina Alexandrovna Yermolova (1777–1831) was the daughter of the Simbirsk noble leader A. F. Yermolov. They had three sons: Peter, Alexander, Nicholas, and three daughters: Praskovya, Alexandra and Ekaterina. She was the youngest daughter, two years after her birth her father died and Ekaterina lived only with her sick mother.

N. A. Motovilov

According to S. A. Nilus, in her early youth Ekaterina was in love with Nicolai Alexandrovich Motovilov, an associate of Seraphim of Sarov. His infatuation with her began around 1829, when he was nineteen and she was twelve. The Yazykovs' Simbirsk estates in Mokroy Bugurma and Russkaya Tsilna were located near the Motovilov estates. Two years later, N. A. Motovilov, who was in love, asked Seraphim of Sarov for a blessing for his marriage with Ekaterina. He described Ekaterina Mikhailovna to him as follows: "She is not a beauty in the full sense of the word, but very pretty. But above all I am enchanted by something gracious, divine that shines in her face, something that touches the human soul in a way that many beauties do not have in themselves".

According to Motovilov, Ekaterina Mikhailovna lived with her mother "as in a convent — she always read her morning and evening prayers, and as her mother was very religious and pious, there were often prayers and all-night services at her bedside. Having been brought up for more than ten years by such a God-fearing mother, she herself became like a nun. This is what I like most about her".

Motovilov's conversation with Seraphim of Sarov took place in October 1831, and then the elder revealed to the young man that he was destined for another bride — Elena Ivanovna Milyukova (b. 1823), at that time still a minor niece of Martha Diveyevskaya, whom, according to Seraphim of Sarov's prediction, he was to marry. Father Seraphim instructed the ardent young man in this way:— According to a new Synod decree, no man under 18 and no girl under 16 can marry. Shouldn't you wait eight or ten years for your God-ordained bride? How can you marry her now? You can't, she's still very young,' he gently explained to his companion, but Motovilov insisted.

— Who are you talking to me about? — he asked me.

— About Ekaterina Mikhailovna Yazykova.

— Ah!' he said. — Well, I am not talking about her, poor me, I am talking about the bride God has destined for you, and she, I assure you, your God, will not be more than eight years and a few months old.Nevertheless, for some time N. A. Motovilov continued to expect reciprocity from Ekaterina and planned to marry her. In May 1832, when Ekaterina was 14 years old (and he thought she was 16-17), he proposed to her, disobeying the elder, and received a final refusal, because she was already married to A. S. Khomyakov. The fact that Ekaterina Mikhailovna was already engaged to Khomyakov in 1832 was not directly mentioned by Motovilov in his notes: "And when it was refused to me in the hand of Ekaterina Mikhailovna Yazykova and General Mandryka in the house of her aunt Praskovia Alexandrovna Berh said to me that she was already engaged, then I had a stroke and I couldn't feel my hands nor feet, and my old disease affected me stronger".

Marriage

According to V. I. Melnik, Ekaterina Mikhailovna fell in love with Alexei Stepanovich Khomyakov immediately and irrevocably. Her letters to her brother were full of sentimental enthusiasm for her lover: "Oh Lord, I love him, if only he knew how much I love him!" Their love was mutual from the start, and their marriage began without any previous affairs.

This is the subject of a Khomyakov family legend (told by Alexei Stepanovich's biographer V. N. Lyaskovsky), according to which M. A. Khomyakova made her sons promise to keep their chastity until marriage. Khomyakov's love for Yazykova was preceded only by a strong feeling for the famous capital beauty Alexandra Osipovna Smirnova, who rejected his advances. Ekaterina Yazykova was not so royal, but Khomyakov no longer needed her. Everything he sought and valued in a woman he found in his wife.

Different sources report different information, whether Alexei Stepanovich and Ekaterina Mikhailovna's meeting and closeness got immediately or gradually (Khomyakov was 13 years older than his wife and could visit the Yazykovs when she was still a child). Some biographers claim that Khomyakov married Yazykova, "with whom he had long been passionately in love".

If he had been in love from the moment of his engagement in 1832, as V. I. Melnik and some others mention, there would be no contradiction. However, most biographers agree that their meeting and mutual interest occurred only in the winter of 1835-1836, i.e. six months before the marriage. In addition, there is information that as early as 1834 A. S. Khomyakov was courting Z. N. Poltavtseva, a relative of Prince P. V. Dolgorukov, but was rejected by her, which also contradicts the version of a long-standing love affair with the young Khomyakov.

Khomyakov's biographer V. N. Lyaskovsky wrote at the end of the 19th century: "Through the poet N. M. Yazykov, who belonged to the Kireevsky circle, Alexei Stepanovich met his sister Katerina Mikhailovna, and on 5 July 1836 they were married ... in the house church of the Counts Panin on Nikitskaya in Moscow".

Valery Alekseev gives a different account of the circumstances of E. M. Khomyakova's marriage, without mentioning her engagement to A.S. Khomyakov in 1832. After the death of Ekaterina's mother in 1831, her older sister, Praskovya Mikhailovna (1807–1862), who was married to Pyotr Alexandrovich Bestuzhev, the leader of the nobility of the Syzran region of Simbirsk Governorate, took care of her upbringing. The Bestuzhevs lived on their estate in Repyovka, Syzransky uyezd, until the summer of 1835. In the autumn of the same year, the Bestuzhev family moved to Moscow with Ekaterina Mikhailovna. Perhaps the initiative to move the Bestuzhevs from the deep provinces to Moscow did not come from them, but from Nicolai Yazykov.

Khomyakov family

This marriage was a happy one. The couple had a succession of children. By 1850 there were already nine, and the family idyll was broken only by the death of the first two sons, Stepan and Fyodor, from diphtheria (according to other sources, from scarlatina), who died on the same day at the end of October 1838. Ekaterina Mikhailovna immersed herself in the household and the children's education, while fully sharing her husband's beliefs and being a reliable support for him in all family matters.

Ekaterina Mikhailovna was an obedient daughter-in-law to her imperious and energetic mother-in-law, Maria Alekseevna Khomyakova, whose wayward character caused her a lot of trouble. To Alexei Stepanovich, she was embodiment of the ideal wife. While in his youth A.S. Khomyakov's spiritual ideal had been his mother, later this role passed to Ekaterina Mikhailovna. He admitted being no less devoted to his wife than to his mother. As an admirer of the English language, he called Ekaterina Mikhailovna Kitty at home.

As a thinker, Khomyakov found strength and inspiration for his creative work in his family. The church historian and biographer of A. S. Khomyakov, N. M. Bogolyubov, wrote that in the 1837 poem The Late Lamp was Burning the poet described the influence of his wife on his creative inspiration. A contemporary researcher of Khomyakov's work, V. A. Koshelev, considers this poem to be the most intimate in his lyrical legacy and in its semantics comparable to Boris Pasternak's famous poem Winter's Night: "A candle glowed upon the desk, / A candle glowed...', where the image of the lamp-candle goes back to the Gospel of Matthew.

Outwardly modest and unassuming, Ekaterina Mikhailovna could have been a very ordinary woman. Modern researchers write: "There was nothing sharp about her, nothing that made an impression". She was the embodiment of the ideal woman". V. N. Lyaskovsky —the biographer of A.S. Khomyakov— wrote: "She was good-looking, but not strikingly beautiful; intelligent, but her intelligence was not shouted about; full of intellectual interests and educated, but without any pretensions to scholarship".

Ekaterina Mikhailovna's religious beliefs are revealed in a letter from A. S. Khomyakov to I. S. Aksakov:

One day two ladies were talking all evening about miracles; my late wife, who was present, came back in a bad temper, and when I asked her what she was unhappy about, she told me the whole conversation. I still couldn't understand what made her so unhappy. She replied: 'It seems that they have never noticed how many miracles God is doing inside of us, that they are so concerned about external miracles.

The house on the Sobachya Square

The Khomyakov family lived in a rented flat on the Arbat, in the Nechaeva House, opposite the Nikola Yavleny Church. In 1844 the Khomyakovs bought their own house from Prince B.A. Lobanov-Rostovsky on the corner of Sobachya Square and Nikolopeskovsky Lane, which became "famous for its literary and philosophical salon".

From Ekaterina Mikhailovna's letter we can learn some details: "I bought Princess Lobanova's house in the dog park. I paid 90 thousand rubles for it, but it is a very nice and big house... You can imagine how happy I am. I bought the house, it is nice, I spent almost all my money on it, but there is still something left". An entourage of Moscow Slavophiles soon formed around the Khomyakov family: Aksakovs, Kireyevskys. N. M. Yazykov, M. P. Pogodin, S. P. Shevyryov, Y. F. Samarin, the Sverbeyevs, etc. were also frequent guests. Most of them were connected not only by a spiritual and class community of interests, but also by extensive family ties.

The Kireyevskys were related to Khomyakov's mother, née Kireyevsky. The Sverbeyevs were also related to Khomyakov. The Valuyevs and the Panovs were related to the Yazykovs. The Aksakovs and Samarins were related to both the Khomyakovs and the Yazykovs. Later, P. A. Florensky ironised this rootedness of the Slavophiles in the atmosphere of kinship relations of the cultural nobility: "...they would like to see the whole world organised in a kinship way, as one big tea party of friendly relatives, gathered in the evening to talk about some good subject".

Thanks to his wife's kinship, Khomyakov gained one of his most loyal and diligent followers in the Slavophile doctrine - Dmitri Valuyev. He was Ekaterina Mikhailovna's nephew, the son of her elder sister Alexandra Mikhailovna. The young man was orphaned at an early age and lived first with the Kireyevsky-Yelagins, then with the Sverbeyevs, then with the Khomyakovs. Dmitri was a gifted young man and one of the most ardent Slavophiles of the early generation. Khomyakov had the kindest feelings for him. He treated Dmitri like a son and wrote to him: "Your loving father, A. Khomyakov". Alexei Stepanovich said to N.M. Yazykov: "Valuyev is not only dear, but necessary. He speaks less than all the others, he is almost alone in this".

But Ekaterina Mikhailovna treated her nephew differently. She said that Dmitry tortured her translations for the Library of Education, asking her three times a day if she was working (the Library of Education was founded by Valuyev in 1843). Ekaterina Mikhailovna was also unhappy that her nephew had completely torn her husband away from poetry, while D.A. Valuyev accused Khomyakov of working too little and wasting his energy on trifles instead of finishing the Notes on World History. But his activity was short-lived, he died at the end of 1845.

Countryside life

In addition to the Moscow house, the Khomyakovs owned the Bogucharovo estate in Tula and the Lipitsy estate (now Lipetsy). Lipitsy became their favourite retreat. On 19 October 1842, Khomyakov wrote to his wife: "What beautiful weather, how clear, how quiet, how sunny! The river is frozen and almost completely covered with ice, pure and transparent, like English crystal; the sun during the day and the month at night so and cast it in silver and gold, and in the middle of the stream runs blue, blue, like Alpine lakes... Here you would admire your Lipitsy! Perfect Georgia! After his wife's death, Khomyakov recalled Lipitsy in a letter to Y. F. Samarin: Katya loved it even more than I did; she said she would not give it up for Richmond, which was her favourite place abroad" (Ekaterina Mikhailovna was travelling with her husband in Germany, France and Great Britain in the summer of 1847).

They also visited the North Caucasus, Kislovodsk, many times on holiday. Their daughter Ekaterina Alekseevna later founded the Holy Trinity Serafimovsky convent near Pyatigorsk in 1907.

Legacy

The preserved correspondence of Ekaterina Mikhailovna includes 779 letters to brothers, sisters and other relatives. Of these, only a small number of letters of historical and literary interest have been published. The rest of the letters are devoted to Ekaterina Mikhailovna's everyday life, and references to major figures in the history of Russian culture are incidental. Letters dedicated to N. V. Gogol, excerpts of which were published in 1952 in the 58th volume of Literary Heritage — Pushkin. Lermontov. Gogol.

Letters about A. S. Pushkin were published in full in the journal Iskusstvo in 1928. The director of Moscow's Museum of Household Culture of the 1840s, B. V. Shaposhnikov, wrote that although Khomyakova spent her entire life surrounded by poets, writers and public figures, in his opinion she did not play a prominent role in the society that surrounded her.

For Shaposhnikov, a Pushkin scholar and art historian, Khomyakova's letters were interesting not because they revealed an unknown side of the poet, but because, in his opinion, everything connected with Pushkin in one way or another has an enduring value in the history of culture. Shaposhnikov published seven of Khomyakova's letters. He was particularly interested in the reactions of Moskvoretskiye citizens to Pushkin's death, about which Ekaterina wrote with disapproval: "My for Moskvoretskiye aunts are angry, how could G[osudar] do so much for his family. It is not worth it, they say, he is a godless man, he was never converted in his life, and what he wrote nobody knows".

After the revolution, Ekaterina Mikhailovna's letters became part of the Museum of the 1840', opened on the initiative of the Khomyakovs' daughter Maria Alekseevna (1840–1919), who died shortly afterwards. From 1919 to 1929 the museum was located in the building of the Khomyakovs' ancestral home on Dog's Square. In 1929 the exhibits of the museum, including the letters of E. M. Khomyakova, were transferred to the State Historical Museum, and the museum in the Khomyakov house ceased to exist.

E. M. Khomyakova's album with poems by N. M. Yazykov and other poets has been preserved. M. Khomyakova's album with poems by N. M. Yazykov and other poets; the album contains a caricature of N. V. Gogol by an unknown artist.

Friendship with N. V. Gogol

The Yazykov family loved Gogol's work even before they met him in person. N.M. Yazykov wrote to his sisters Ekaterina and Praskovya in Repyevka from Yazykovo on 28 June 1835: "I am very glad that you like Gogol's novels — they are wonderful! God grant him good health, he alone will be more important than all modern French literature, even more than Balzac! I don't like Balzac. We are talking about the novels of the collection Mirgorod, which the Yazykov brothers read. Nicolai Yazykov first met Gogol in 1839, and Ekaterina in 1840. From Gogol's letter to Yazykov dated 10 February 1842 we can learn about his attitude towards the Khomyakov family: "I love them, I rest my soul spending time with them".

On the other hand, Gogol had known the Yazykov family since the mid-1830s. In 1835 Gogol met Lyudmila Dmitrievna Kozhina, née Yazykova, at a Moscow literary salon (she was a cousin of the poet N. M. Yazykov). She was often visited by V. A. Zhukovsky, V. F. Odoevsky and M. S. Schepkin.

According to some reports, when Gogol arrived in Moscow in 1835, he read the newly completed Mirgorod and Arabesques at the Yazykov-Kozhiny house.

After meeting Ekaterina Mikhailovna, the writer became very attached to her. Gogol loved Khomyakova as the wife of his companion and as the sister of Yazykov. The first biographer of Nicolai Gogol, P. A. Kulish, said that "Gogol loved her <...> as one of the most worthy women he met in life". For her part, Ekaterina Mikhailovna wrote to her brother from Moscow on 16 November 1841: 'Today I had Gogol. <...> told me a lot about you, and everything is happy; it is fun to hear how he loves you, I loved him very much. <...> we want to be friends".

In another letter of 1841, Ekaterina Mikhailovna wrote: "I love Gogol: he is very kind and loves his sisters, cares for them. <...> Everyone here attacks Gogol, saying that, listening to his conversation, one cannot assume anything extraordinary in him; Ivan Vasilyevich Kireevsky said that it is almost impossible to talk to him: he is empty. It makes me very angry. They have who does not shout, he is a fool". In a letter to his brother in the spring of 1842, she wrote: "On the third day Gogol came to dine with us. I am very fond of him: he is not as deep as others, and that makes his company much more cheerful".

Disease and death

А. A. Kara-Murza recounts the following episode from the apparently untroubled life of the Khomyakov family. In the summer of 1850, Alexei Stepanovich lost his wedding ring in Bogucharovsky Pond. He ordered the water to be dredged to find the ring, but the ring was not found. Ekaterina Mikhailovna, being superstitious, took the loss of the ring as a bad omen and worried about her husband. Nothing special happened to him, but a year and a half later she caught a cold, a complication in the form of typhoid. The disease progressed rapidly: Ekaterina Mikhailovna was ill for several days and died suddenly on 26 January 1852 at the age of 34. As she was pregnant again at the time, her death took two lives at once.

Not much is known about the history of E.M. Khomyakova's illness. Vera Sergeevna Aksakov, daughter of Sergei Timofeyevich Aksakov, wrote to Gogol's mother about her son's last days: "After half of January (1852) <...> we found him quite awake; but at that time Khomyakov's wife, Yazykov's sister, with whom Nicolai Vasilyevich was so friendly, became ill. Ekaterina Mikhailovna was four months pregnant at the time. Different sources state the duration of Khomyakova's illness differently: three days, several days. V.S. Aksakova wrote that everyone was very disturbed and upset by her illness. At some point she seemed to be getting better, and then the Aksakovs set a day for the performance of Little Russian songs — Sunday 27 January. Gogol was to attend and invited O.M. Bodiansky. But the patient's condition deteriorated again, and on Saturday she died.

There was another eyewitness who told about E.M. Khomyakova's illness — Vladimir Ivanovich Khitrovo (1806–1866), a maternal relative of A. S. Khomyakov. According to him, the illness lasted about a week. He wrote:Suddenly, on the 26th of January, we received a message from Sobornaya Square that Katerina Mikhailovna was dangerously ill: she had caught a cold, had a fever, and had also had a miscarriage, and now she was without hope... Alexei S. Stepanovich had changed so much that he amazed me, he had become an old man of sixty, and he said that there was no hope that Katerina Mikhailovna would live. She has received the Blessed Sacrament and is waiting for the end; she has already begun to rave... she caught a cold while walking in her garden, she got a fever and inflammation in her chest, and now, they say, she is on her last breath. 27th (Sunday). At noon we went to visit the sick woman at the Khomyakovs' house. When we reached the veranda, my heart froze: on the veranda we were told the fatal news that Ekaterina Mikhailovna had died yesterday at 11.30 a.m.!...

A. S. Khomyakov after his wife's death

Alexei Stepanovich was devastated by the sudden death of his wife. He shared his mother's grief, despite the fact that in recent years Khomiakova senior had accused her son of lacking filial love, which, according to V. I. Khitrovo, was due to maternal jealousy: "She wants him to love no one but her". At the funeral, Alexei Stepanovich himself carried the coffin to the grave with relatives and friends. A. P. Elagina reported the death of E. M. Khomyakova to V. A. Zhukovsky:I arrived in Moscow immediately after the funeral of Khomyakova, with whom we were friends. It is impossible to see Alexei Stepanovich's grief without awe — only a Christian can grieve like that, but God grant him that he may bear it and not fall. — He is deeply grieved, he has changed, he has lost a terrible weight and has turned yellow, but he prays cheerfully and works with all his strength. When he could no longer write, he reread what he had written or painted a portrait of the deceased in oils. He listens to all the services, morning and evening, and he is also busy with the children, but they are so young! They jumped around their mother's coffin, they were happy to see her dressed up, and they say that she flies with and around God.For a long time after the loss he was unable to come to his senses and take care of the household, which remained in a state of desolation all this time. In a letter to A. D. Bludova in 1855, he wrote that he had been sitting in his corner for more than three years.

His thoughts took a penitential turn. He came to the conclusion "that widowhood is a spiritual monasticism, that it is necessary to live in a more spiritual purity, that is, not to cling in the heart to any woman, but to remain faithful to her until the grave".

Khomyakov remained true to his principles and lived as a widower until the end of his life. Yu. F. Samarin, who was in close contact with Alexei Stepanovich, testified that Khomyakov's life was divided: "During the day he worked, read, talked, went about his business, gave himself to everyone who cared about him. But when night came and everything was quiet around him, another time began for him...". Samarin said that at night Khomyakov prayed for the dead with barely controlled sobs. Alexei Stepanovich told Archbishop Gregory (Postnikov) of Kazan: "The other day, by God's will, in the sixteenth year of our marriage, I buried my wife, young, beautiful, kind, the only love of my life and the greatest happiness that earthly life can give".

Gogol's grief process

N. V. Gogol took the death of Ekaterina Mikhailovna harder than anyone else. Dr Tarasenkov noted that 'her death did not so much affect her husband and relatives as it did Gogol... Here, perhaps for the first time, he saw death face to face..." In fact, it was not the first death Gogol had to face. The writer experienced a similar mental trauma after the death of his beloved Alexander Pushkin in 1837. In 1839, literally in Gogol's arms, the young Joseph Mikhailovich Vielgorsky died, whose relationship with Gogol inspired the work Nights at the Villa. The writer had just suffered the loss of his friend N. M. Yazykov, who died on the eve of 1847. But none of the previous losses had such fatal consequences as the death of E.M. Khomyakova. Dr Tarasenkov's comparison is based on the fact that if Khomyakov could somehow restrain himself and hide his feelings, Gogol indiscriminately gave in to the feeling of grief. In recent years, the writer's fear of death had only increased, and Khomyakova's death only aggravated his earlier depression.

Khomyakova's death "somehow shook Gogol. He saw it as an omen for himself". The events since 26 January are often recounted by Gogol scholars in the form of a chronology, and their order differs slightly:

On 24 January (or 25 January) Gogol is visited by O. M. Bodiansky and finds the writer "very energetic". The friends agree to meet on the 27th at O. F. Kosheleva's for a musical evening in honour of the Malorussian song.

Saturday, 26 January. Death of E.M. Khomyakova. Gogol later confessed to the Aksakov sisters that "he was afraid to inquire about her health that day and only waited for a message from the Khomyakovs, which did not come slowly".

Monday, 28 January. The first funeral service at the Khomyakovs' house (from the words of V. I. Khitrovo) Gogol could barely stand the service until the end, trying not to look at the deceased. After the funeral he said to Khomyakov: "It's all over for me"; to S. P. Shevyryov: "Nothing can be more solemn than death. Life would not be so beautiful if there were no death". Gogol went to the Aksakov sisters to find out where E.M. Khomyakova was to be buried. When he found out that she was to be buried next to her brother N. M. Yazykov in the Danilov Convent, he "shook his head, said something about Yazykov, and thought so much that we were afraid: he seemed to be completely carried away by his thoughts there, and remained in the same position for so long that we deliberately talked about something else to interrupt his thoughts".