The Updated Memoirs of Princess Dashkova

Chapter 1

This is not my story.

This was never my story.

This will never be my story.

But I will tell it anyway.

I was young. Only nineteen years old. Too proud to call myself naive. Too intelligent to call myself ignorant.

To learn what she had already known: there is only room for one powerful woman in the history books.

The bells rung hollow across the opulent, cavernous room, echoing off handcrafted wooden staircases, the ivory sculptures, the vases painted with stories, the gold stitched books pressed together as stars from squinted eyes. I shifted in my skirts self-consciously. My fingers grazed my book protectively, its leather soft like the cheek of one of my young children. I hunched over the Historical and Critical Dictionary, startling as if I had been caught doing something illicit. I considered Pierre Bayle an old friend, although we would never meet, stranded by death and distance. I imagined we could have had marvelous discussions. I folded the book down carefully, many considered Bayle controversial, as he readily criticized the church, I enjoyed simmering in the skepticism, like an eau emanating from its pages, both as a burgeoning philosopher and a supporter of the church. I retrieved the letter at my side, delivered by a courier this morning.

Father had sent me one of his rare letters: a year late. General Roman Illarionovich Vorontsov of the noble Vorontsov family, "Roman the Slasher", had scarce contact with his third daughter, that being me, of course. I had been propelled into the hands of my uncle, Mikhail Vorontsov, at a young age, now the Imperial Chancellor. My mother passed before my third birthday. All I had left from her were the memories, not my own, imparted to me from half-minded ramblings of my father, long after the guests had left.

I read over the elegant text, congratulating me on the birth of my daughter Anastasiia, who has already surpassed a year in age. I thought of my husband, of his would be sly quirk at my father's convenient delay. I had fallen quickly and hopelessly in love with Prince Mikhail Ivanovich Dashkov, becoming Princess Yekaterina Romanovna Vorontsova-Dashkova before my sixteenth birthday. My hand cramped while writing out my full name. Our two children were born before my nineteenth. The children were both with Mikhail back in Moscow with his family. I was relieved to be out of the scrutiny of my in-laws, parsing out my poorly spoken Russian, yielding a disproportionate amount of time to the care of my children and forced to carry out card games, instead of perusing philosophical texts. I fancifully thought my books missed my company as I felt misplaced among my extended family. The prim princess they expected, apt at small talk, party planning, and pleased ignorance, was not found within me.

One thing my father did excel in was granting me an education. As a woman of the 18th century, I was lucky to be fluent in French, Russian, German and Italian, with a passion both for math and philosophy. After I attended the funeral of my godmother, Tsarina Elizaveta, I planned to return to Moscow to study mathematics at the University of Moscow. In many regards, I felt separated me from the fellow woman. Sometimes when stranded from my library, from academic society, I felt isolated.

The Winter Palace, built under the direction of my godmother, felt empty in her monumental absence. The palace felt listless. My godmother, the Empress was beloved, both for her steadfast opposition to Prussian policies and for her empathic decision to decline from any executions during her reign, but also beloved by me. To hear her speak of my mother made me love her more. For a time, I lived for the stories she relayed to me.

She was one of the first to know of my imminent marriage with Mikhail, the first to congratulate me. I remember the sway of the carriage, Mikhail's gentle hand at my back, as we broke the news to her. Her smile was much wider than the public ever saw. I was still new to life, knowledgeable, but innocent to politics. It was a time before. Before I became a wife and a mother when I had yet to experience the world, to know its tragedies.