Alexander Yegorovich Wrangel

Alexander Jegorowitsch Freiherr von Wrangel (also: Wrangell ; Russian Александр Егорович Врангель; born March 23, 1833 on the Verino estate near Narva , Ingermanland (today: Estonia ); † September 25, 1915 in Dresden ) was a Russian lawyer and diplomat. Wrangel is known to posterity primarily as a close personal friend of Fyodor Dostoyevsky .

origin

Alexander Wrangel, from the Wrangel family , was the eldest son of Egor (Hans Georg Hermann) Ermolajewitsch Freiherr von Wrangel (1803-1868) and his wife Daria (Dorothea) Alexandrovna, nee. Rausch von Traubenberg (1807-1851).

Life

Wrangel grave in the Trinity cemetery in Dresden

He attended the Alexander Cadet Corps and then received private lessons. 1847-1853 he attended the Alexander Lyceum in Petersburg. In 1853 he entered the civil service and was posted to Semipalatinsk (Siberia), where he had worked as a public prosecutor since 1855.

In November 1854 Wrangel met Dostoyevsky, who was more than 11 years his senior, who had to do military service in Semipalatinsk from 1854 to 1859 after being detained in Omsk . Wrangel admired Dostoevsky's work and the two men became friends. Dostoyevsky was exempt from living in the barracks and shared a dacha on the outskirts with Wrangel . Wrangel used his professional contacts to improve the conditions in which Dostoevsky lived.

In the spring of 1857 Wrangel returned to Saint Petersburg and expected to be sent again to Siberia soon, but was sent to take part in an expedition as secretary of the commander of a squadron of the Russian navy that took him to China from 1857 to 1859 and Japan led. From 1859 he worked in the Foreign Ministry. Wrangel went to Bucharest in 1861 as secretary of the Russian consul general . In 1863 he was appointed chamberlain and went to Copenhagen as secretary of the legation , where Dostoevsky, with whom he had always been in contact by letters, visited him in 1865.

After his departure in 1866, Wrangel worked as a farmer on his Lithuanian estate. From 1874 onwards he made extensive trips to Germany and Italy. In 1876 he returned to the service of the Russian Foreign Ministry and went to Montenegro in 1877 and to Herzegovina in 1878 for his employer .

1879-1897 Wrangel was the Russian consul general in Danzig . In 1882 he was appointed Real Council of State and in 1897 Real Privy Council. In the same year he went to Dresden and Braunschweig as Minister- Resident and served there as envoy from 1898 to 1907.

family

Wrangel had been married to Anna Schaffhausen-Schönberg-Eck-Schaufuss (1839-1921) since 1861. The marriage produced four children: Olga (* 1862), Georg (1863-1916), Katharina (1865-1867) and Nikolaus (1869-1927).

His nephew Pyotr Nikolaevich Wrangel (1878-1928) was the last Commander-in-Chief of the White Army in the Russian Civil War (1918-1922).

literature

Kenneth A. Lantz: The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia . Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004, ISBN 0-313-30384-3 , pp. 471 f . (English). ( limited online version in Google Book Search)
Jan Brokken: Siberian Summers with Dostojewski - Novel of a Friendship, Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2018, ISBN 978-3-462-04996-1 , (Original: De Kozakkentuin, Dutch 2015)

Web links

Baltic Historical Commission (ed.): Entry on Alexander Jegorowitsch von Wrangell. In: BBLD - Baltic Biographical Lexicon digital
Wrangel af Ludenhof nr 55 Wrangels Genealogy (Swedish)

Individual evidence

↑ Aleksandr Vrangel: About Dostevsky's Army Service and Exile in Sibiria . In: Peter Sekirin (Ed.): The Dostoevsky Archive . Firsthand Accounts of the Novelist from Contemporaries' Memoirs and Rare Periodicals. McFarland, Jefferson, North Carolina 1997, ISBN 0-7864-0264-4 , pp. 119 ff . ( limited online version in Google Book Search - USA )
↑ The description of the city comes from this time: “In my time, Semipalatinsk was something between town and village. All the houses were made of wood. The population numbered five to six thousand, including the garrison and the Asian merchants. About three thousand Kyrgyz lived on the left bank of the river. There was an Orthodox church, seven mosques, a department store where the caravans stopped, a barracks, a hospital and an administration building. There was only one district school at educational establishments. The only shop in town sold everything from ordinary nails to Parisian perfumeries; there was no bookstore because there was no one who bought books. No more than ten to fifteen residents of the city subscribed to newspapers; that was no wonder either, because at that time the people in Siberia were only interested in cards, gossip, drinking and business. ” From the memories of Baron Wrangel 1854–1865. in: FM Dostojewskij: Letters. Piper, Munich 1920, 260.

personal data
SURNAME	Wrangel, Alexander Egorovich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Врангель, Александр Егорович (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Russian diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH	March 23, 1833
PLACE OF BIRTH	Verino near Narva , Ingermanland
DATE OF DEATH	September 25, 1915
Place of death	Dresden

[1] Aleksandr Vrangel: About Dostevsky's Army Service and Exile in Sibiria . In: Peter Sekirin (Ed.): The Dostoevsky Archive . Firsthand Accounts of the Novelist from Contemporaries' Memoirs and Rare Periodicals. McFarland, Jefferson, North Carolina 1997, ISBN 0-7864-0264-4 , pp. 119 ff . ( limited online version in Google Book Search - USA )

[2] The description of the city comes from this time: “In my time, Semipalatinsk was something between town and village. All the houses were made of wood. The population numbered five to six thousand, including the garrison and the Asian merchants. About three thousand Kyrgyz lived on the left bank of the river. There was an Orthodox church, seven mosques, a department store where the caravans stopped, a barracks, a hospital and an administration building. There was only one district school at educational establishments. The only shop in town sold everything from ordinary nails to Parisian perfumeries; there was no bookstore because there was no one who bought books. No more than ten to fifteen residents of the city subscribed to newspapers; that was no wonder either, because at that time the people in Siberia were only interested in cards, gossip, drinking and business. ” From the memories of Baron Wrangel 1854–1865. in: FM Dostojewskij: Letters. Piper, Munich 1920, 260.