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Gitta Hammarberg The Canonization of Dolgorukaia AT AGE FIFTY-THREE Natal’ia Borisovna Dolgorukaia (1714–71) was persuaded by her son to write her memoirs. Born a Sheremeteva, she was part of the most privileged Moscow aristocracy and after a happy childhood she was betrothed to Ivan Dolgorukii, favorite of Peter II, in 1729. She married Ivan even though the large Dolgorukii family was rapidly falling from favor. They were finally exiled after Peter’s sudden death and Anna’s accession to the throne in 1730. She spent ten difficult years in Berezov, beyond the Ural mountains in Siberia, where she bore two children and remained for almost two years after her husband was removed in great secrecy for eventual execution. Dolgorukaia was released from exile and arrived with her sons in Moscow in 1740. There she suffered more humiliation in her dependence on her older brother and further hardship as she strived to educate her sons properly and to restore the good name and fortunes of the Dolgorukii family. After her older son had embarked on a military career and married she left for Kiev with her younger son, who had developed severe psychological problems. There she entered the Frolovskii convent and took the strict vows of the schema and the name Nektariia. Her younger son died two years before she herself died in 1771.1 Dolgorukaia wrote her memoirs in the convent to dispel her “gloom” and “disturbing thoughts” after her older son and his family had urged her to write “a journal about what had happened to me that was worth recalling, how I had passed my life” (33).2 The memoirs were produced as a private document and center on Dolgorukaia herself.3 She writes under certain constraints: age and maturity color her retrospective view, the intended audience knows a great deal about the topic, and her status as a nun requires pious references (appeals to God’s judgment or mercy, references to Biblical precedents),4 and prohibits such topics as the details of her engagement ceremony (39). Although Dolgorukaia, like most memoirists, tends to select situations that do her credit, at times she gives credit to past customs for her own favorable image (37, 43) and at times she admits personal foolishness (59). Her conversational style and her freely shared reactions to events point to an intimate circle of readers.5 She is writing “just as if I were talking to 93 you” (37) and her account is frequently interrupted by emotional exclamations and direct addresses to her readers.6 She may, however, also be envisioning a wider audience in references to “those who want to know” or need to be consoled (41).7 Although Dolgorukaia vows to “tell the absolute truth” (43), she frequently stresses the vagaries of memory (63, 67, 71) and she worries that her weak health may impede her description (33, 71). She justifiably takes pride in her accomplishments, but tries to downplay them according to the dictates of feminine modesty and her monastic station. She vows not to expose the vices of others, yet she does not always refrain from doing so, which makes her self-image refreshingly human. Empress Anna, for instance, is so negatively described (most terrible to look at, repugnant face, taller than most men, extraordinarily fat, 46) that Dolgorukaia’s descendants saw fit to omit the passage in the early published versions, together with nasty counterfactual references to Biron’s lowly birth (51).8 Her evaluation of her own life as a series of calamities is revealed in intermittent vows “to write of my own misfortunes” (51).9 Her misfortunes start with the sudden reversal of the Dolgorukii family’s favored status at court at the very time she was planning her marriage into that family, and continue with the family’s travails en route to Berezov. Her misfortunes sound all the more striking against the introductory description of her pampered childhood and happy betrothal. The memoirs end with the Dolgorukii family’s arrival in Berezov when her personal misfortunes had merely begun. Dolgorukaia’s text has been recognized as an important historical account of the relatively neglected period in Russian history between its two eighteenth-century “greats,” Peter I and Catherine II. It has been hailed as a linguistically rare written document using the spoken language of an educated Russian eighteenth-century woman—the kind of language that was advocated as the model for the Russian literary language. Dolgorukaia is the first private person in...

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