Dorothea of ​​Ficquelmont

Dorothea von Ficquelmont ( Josef Kriehuber , 1849)

Dorothea von Ficquelmont , born Countess Dorothea von Tiesenhausen , called Dolly , ( Russian Дарья Фёдоровна Фикельмон , maiden name Russian Дарья фон Тизенгаузен ; born October 14 ^{. Jul} / 26. October  1804 ^greg. In St. Petersburg ; † 10. April 1863 in Venice ) was a Russian lady-in-waiting , author and salonnière .

Life

Dorothea von Tiesenhausen was the daughter of Alexander I. Ferdinand von Tiesenhausen's wing adjutant and his wife Jelisaweta Michailowna née Kutusowa and granddaughter of Field Marshal Mikhail Illarionowitsch Kutusow . She spent her childhood together with her older sister Katharina in Reval with her grandmother Katharina von Tiesenhausen, after the father died of injuries in the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805 .

In 1811 Dorothea's mother married Major General Nikolai Fjodorowitsch Chitrowo, who was then appointed Russian Chargé d'Affaires to the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1815 and settled with his family in Florence . Despite limited financial resources, Chitrovo held large receptions with a ball or theater performance twice a week , as Fyodor Gavrilovich Golovkin recalled. The Chitrowo family belonged to the Ferdinand III family . near and Dorothea von Tiesenhausen, called Dolly, befriended Maria Anna , who in 1817 the son of Leopold Ferdinand III. got married. The family of the book collector and poet Dmitri Petrovich Buturlin was one of the many acquaintances of the young Countess Dolly Tiesenhausen . At the beginning of 1817, the chargé d'affaires in Tuscany was closed for reasons of savings and Chitrowo was retired. He received a small pension on the condition that he continued to live in Tuscany. He sold his property to pay debts and rented a modest apartment. The family's friendships remained. In May 1819 Chitrowo died and left behind only debts, so that the family got into a very difficult financial situation. In 1820 the mother and her beautiful daughters traveled to Naples and Central Europe in search of marriage candidates. The mother had the talent to build friendly relationships with representatives of the top aristocracy , such as the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III. and as the future King of the Belgians, Prince Leopold Georg Christian Friedrich von Sachsen-Coburg-Saalfeld . Dolly was struck by her unusual intuition to foresee the future, so that the Austrian Empress Karoline Auguste called her the Florentine Sibyl .

In 1820 Dolly Tiesenhausen met the Austrian ambassador in Florence, Karl Ludwig von Ficquelmont , who proposed to her in January 1821. The mother informed her grandmother in Reval by letter and also the Emperor Alexander I, who was at a congress in Ljubljana and congratulated her. The wedding took place in June 1821. Since Ficquelmont had been ambassador to the court of King Ferdinand I of the two Sicilies since March 1821 , the Ficquelmont family now lived in Naples with their mother-in-law and sister-in-law Katharina. Despite the difficult and tense political situation after the suppression of the uprising in 1820/1821, Dolly Ficquelmont and her mother quickly integrated into Neapolitan society.

Dolly Ficquelmont read a lot in German , English , Italian and mainly French , including ancient classics and contemporary works on political and historical issues, especially works by Adolphe Thiers and Augustin Thierry . She met the son Ferdinand Acton (1801-1837) of the former Neapolitan Prime Minister (and favorite of Queen Maria Karolina ) John Acton know.

In 1822 the mother Jelisaveta Michailovna Chitrovo traveled with her two daughters Katharina and Dolly to the Verona Congress to introduce their daughters to Alexander I and to get a pension for themselves, but Katharina's illness prevented this. The mother then traveled to St. Petersburg with her daughters in June 1823, and a private visit came to Alexander I. There was a lengthy exchange of letters between Alexander I and Dolly Ficquelmont, which Alexander greatly admired. The mother received a pension and a piece of land in Bessarabia .

Since Dolly Ficquelmont initially remained childless, she took on Maddalena, a girl from a poor Italian family, as a pupil and goddaughter. In 1825 she gave birth to her daughter Elisabeth Alexandra (1825–1878) in Naples, whose godparents were Empress Elisabeth Alexejewna and Alexander I.

Dolly Ficquelmont (Pushkin, 1829)

At the end of 1828, Karl Ludwig von Ficquelmont von Metternich was sent to St. Petersburg to explore the possibilities for a Russian-Austrian rapprochement. At the end of June 1829 Dolly Ficquelmont traveled with her husband to St. Petersburg, as she described in her diary . They lived there in a house rented by the Austrian embassy. In the spring of 1830 it was announced in Vienna that Emperor Nicholas I wanted Karl Ludwig von Ficquelmont as the Austrian ambassador in St. Petersburg. Dolly Ficquelmont was interested in literature and music, in religious-philosophical questions and in politics. Her friends were Pyotr Andreevich Vyazemsky , Alexander Ivanovich Turgenev and Ivan Ivanovich Koslow . Her salon was frequently visited by Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin . She provided friends with books that were banned from being imported into Russia.

The Ficquelmont couple spent the summer and autumn of 1835 in Austria and in August took part in the commemoration of the anniversary of the Battle of Kulm , which was attended by Emperor Ferdinand I , Emperor Nicholas I and King Friedrich Wilhelm III. participated and a Russian memorial was inaugurated and a mass grave was laid for the fallen. In October Dolly Ficquelmont received the Order of Saint Catherine and a diamond bracelet with her portrait from Empress Alexandra Fjodorovna . She was now a Russian lady-in-waiting.

In May 1838, the sick Dolly Ficquelmont traveled to southern Europe with her husband, who had been on vacation, and her mother and sister in order to be treated in the milder climate. Her mother returned to St. Petersburg from Genoa , and her husband continued to work in St. Petersburg. In May 1839, her mother died in St. Petersburg and was buried by her son-in-law, who then visited his wife in Aix-les-Bains . Karl Ludwig von Ficquelmont was called to Vienna in 1839, then returned to St. Petersburg and was finally recalled in July 1840. In Vienna he received the honorable but unimportant post of Minister of State and Conference.

When the Ficquelmonts were in Venice in 1847, Karl Ludwig von Ficquelmont was summoned to Vienna and commissioned to go there because of the revolutionary demonstrations that were beginning in Milan in connection with the Risorgimento . In October 1847 the Ficquelmonts traveled to Milan, where they felt the tense relationship between the Austrians and the local aristocracy. Ficquelmont's cook was fatally injured during the armed uprising in the winter of 1848. At the beginning of March 1848 Ficquelmont became chairman of the Austrian military council, so that he traveled to Vienna, where he became foreign minister of the Kolowrat government during the March Revolution . His wife stayed in Venice, where the Repubblica di San Marco was proclaimed. Dolly Ficquelmont was arrested twice. With the help of the British consul, she managed to leave Venice on a British warship from Trieste . Only after a month did she come to Vienna with her daughter and her son-in-law, Prince Edmund Clary and Aldringen (1813–1894).

After Ficquelmont was forced to resign on May 4, 1848, the Ficquelmonts lived with their daughter and son-in-law in Teplice , where the Clary and Aldringen family lived. After the murder of Franz Philipp von Lamberg and Ficquelmont's cousin Theodor Baillet de Latour by insurgents, the Ficquelmonts spent a lot of time in Venice. There they bought a house in early 1855, which was then the Palazzo Clary-Ficquelmont . After the death of her husband in 1857, Dolly Ficquelmont published the Pensées et réflexions morales et politiques du comte de Ficquelmont ministre d'Etat en Autriche , which appeared in Paris in 1859 . She sifted through his handwritten notes and comments on questions of philosophy and politics and published them in a separate volume.

Dolly Ficquelmont was buried in the Clary and Aldringen family crypt in Dubí near Teplice. The letters from the Ficquelmonts to Katharina von Tiesenhausen were published in Paris in 1911. Dolly Ficquelmont's original diary (10 tetrads) is kept in a branch of the State Archives in Děčín . Manfred von Clary and Aldringen was Dolly Ficquelmont's grandson.

Web links

Literature by and about Dorothea von Ficquelmont in the bibliographic database WorldCat

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} PomniPro: Фикельмон Дарья Фёдоровна - Биография (accessed August 11, 2019).
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j} Раевский Н. А .: Портреты заговорили . In: Избранное . Художественная литература, Moscow 1978.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Бочаров И., Глушакова Ю .: … Когда б имел я сто очей, то все бы сто на вас глядели . In: Итальянская Пушкиниана . Современник, Moscow 1991, ISBN 5-270-00630-8 , p. 342 .
4. ↑ ^{a b} Dolly Ficquelmont: Дневник 1829-1837. Весь пушкинский Петербург . Минувшее, Moscow 2009, ISBN 978-5-902073-66-6 , p. 49 .