Of all the Decembrists, none was closer to the court than Volkonsky. His mother, the Princess Alexandra, could be found in the Winter Palace, smiling in attendance on the Dowager Empress, at the same time as he sat, just across the Neva river in the Peter and Paul Fortress, a prisoner detained at His Majesty's pleasure. Nicholas was harsh on Volkonsky. Perhaps he felt betrayed by the man he had once played with as a boy. Thanks to the intervention of his mother, Volkonsky was spared the death sentence handed down to the other leaders. But twenty years of penal labour followed by a lifetime of compulsory settlement in Siberia was a draconian enough punishment. The prince was stripped of his noble title and all his medals from the battlefields of the wars against France. He lost control of all his lands and serfs. Henceforth his children would officially belong to the category of 'state peasants'.55
Count Alexander Benckendorff, the Chief of Police who sent him into exile, was an old school friend of Volkonsky. The two men had been fellow officers in 1812. Nothing better illustrates the nature of the Petersburg nobility, a small society of clans in which everybody knew each other, and most families were related in some way.* Hence the shame the Volkonskys felt on Sergei's disgrace. None the less, it is
* In 1859 Volkonsky's son Misha would marry the granddaughter of Count Benckendorff. One of his cousins would marry Benckendorff's daughter (S. M. Volkonskii, O dekabristakh: po semeinum vospominaniiam, p. 114).
hard to comprehend their attempt to erase his memory. Sergei's elder brother, Nikolai Repnin, disowned him altogether, and in the long years Volkonsky spent in Siberia he never sent him a single letter. A typical courtier, Nikolai was worried that the Tsar might not forgive him if he wrote to an exile (as if the Tsar was incapable of understanding the feelings of a brother). Such small-minded attitudes were symptomatic of an aristocracy which had been brought up to defer all values to the court. Sergei's mother, too, put her loyalty to the Tsar before her own feelings for her son. She attended the coronation of Nicholas I and received the diamond brooch of the Order of St Catherine on the same day as Sergei, with heavy chains around his feet, began the long journey to Siberia. An old-fashioned lady of the court, Princess Alexandra had always been a stickler for 'correct behaviour'. The next day she retired to her bed and stayed there, crying inconsolably. 'I only hope,' she would tell her visitors, 'that there will be no other monsters in the family.'56 She did not write to her son for several years. Sergei was profoundly wounded by his mother's rejection: it contributed to his own rejection of the mores and the values of the aristocracy. In his mother's view, Sergei's civil death was a literal death as well. 'Il n'ya plus de Serge,' the old princess would tell her courtly friends. 'These words', Sergei wrote in one of his last letters in 1865, 'haunted me throughout my life in exile. They were not just meant to satisfy her conscience but to justify her own betrayal of me.'57
Maria's family was just as unforgiving. They blamed her for her marriage and attempted to persuade her to use her right to petition for its annulment. They had reason to suppose that she might do so. Maria had a newborn son to think about and it was far from clear whether she would be allowed to take him with her if she followed Sergei to Siberia. Besides, she did not appear to be entirely happy in the marriage. During the past year - only the first year of their marriage - she had hardly seen her husband, who was absent in the south and preoccupied with the conspiracy, and she had complained to her family that she found the situation 'quite unbearable'.58 Yet Maria chose to share her husband's fate. She gave up everything and followed Sergei to Siberia. Warned by the Tsar that she would have to leave her son behind, Maria wrote to him: 'My son is happy but my husband is unhappy and he needs me more.
It is hard to say exactly what was in Maria's mind. When she made her choice she did not realize that she would be stripped of the right to return to Russia if she followed Sergei - she was told only when she reached Irkutsk, on the border between Russia and the penal region of Siberia - so it is possible that she was expecting to return to Petersburg. That indeed was what her father thought. But would she have turned back if she had known?
Maria acted out of her sense of duty as a wife. Sergei appealed to this when he wrote to her from the Peter and Paul Fortress on the eve of his departure for Siberia. 'You yourself must decide what to do. I am placing you in a cruel situation, but chere amie, I cannot bear the sentence of eternal separation from my lawful wife.'60 Such a sense of duty was ingrained in Maria by her noble upbringing. Romantic love, though by no means uncommon, was not a high priority in the conjugal relations of the early nineteenth-century Russian aristocracy. And nor does it seem to have played a major role in Maria's decision. In this sense she was very different from Alexandra Muraviev, the wife of the Decembrist Nikita Muraviev, who came from a rather less aristocratic background than Maria Volkonsky. It was romantic love that compelled Alexandra to give up everything for a life of penal exile in Siberia - she even claimed that it was her 'sin' to 'love my Nikitishchina more than I love God'.61 Maria's conduct, by contrast, was conditioned by the cultural norms of a society in which it was not unusual for a noblewoman to follow her husband to Siberia. Convoys of prisoners were frequently accompanied by carts carrying their wives and children into voluntary exile.62 There was a custom, moreover, for the families of officers to go along with them on military campaigns. Wives would speak about 'our regiment' or 'our brigade' and, in the words of one contemporary, 'they were always ready to share in all the dangers of their husbands, and lay down their lives'.63 Maria's father, General Raevsky, took his wife and children on his main campaigns - until his young son was injured when a bullet pierced his breeches as he gathered berries near the battlefield.64
It has also been suggested that Maria was responding to the literary cult of heroic sacrifice.65 She had read Ryleev's poem 'Natalia Dolgoru-kaya' (1821-3), which may indeed have served as the moral inspiration for her own behaviour. The poem was based on the true story of a young princess, the favourite daughter of Field Marshal Boris Shereme-
tev, who had followed her husband, Prince Ivan Dolgoruky, to Siberia when he was banished there by the Empress Anna in 1730.*
I have forgotten my native city, Wealth, honours, and family name To share with him Siberia's cold And endure the inconstancy of fate.66
Maria's doting father was convinced that the reason she followed Sergei to Siberia was not because she was 'a wife in love' but because she was 'in love with the idea of herself as a heroine'.67 The old general never stopped suffering over his beloved daughter's voluntary exile - he blamed Sergei for it- and this led to a tragic break in their relationship. Maria felt her father's disapproval in his infrequent letters to Siberia. No longer able to suppress her anguish, she wrote to him (in the last letter he received before his death) in 1829:
I know that you have ceased to love me for some time, though I know not what I have done to merit your displeasure. To suffer is my lot in this world - but to make others suffer is more than I can bear… How can I be happy for a moment if the blessing which you give me in your letters is not given also to Sergei?68
On Christmas Eve Maria said farewell to her son and family and left for Moscow on the first leg of her journey to Siberia. In the old capital she stopped at the house of her sister-in-law Princess Zinaida Volkonsky, a famous beauty and close friend of the late Emperor Alexander, called by Pushkin the 'Tsarina of the arts'. Zinaida was the hostess of a dazzling literary salon where, unusually for that time, no Fench verses were declaimed. Pushkin and Zhukovsky, Viazemsky and Delvig, Baratynsky, Tiutchev, the Kireevsky brothers and the Polish poet Mickiewicz were all habitues. On the eve of Maria's departure there was a special evening where Pushkin read his 'Message to Siberia' (1827):