Sofya Bagdasarova has published an interesting piece on love between Romani women and Russian noblemen in the nineteenth century

Sofya Bagdasarova has published an interesting piece on love between Romani women and Russian noblemen in the nineteenth century. And here I cannot help recalling the love story of Maria Mikhailovna Shishkina, a singer in the Tula Romani choir, and Sergey Nikolayevich Tolstoy, the elder brother of Leo Tolstoy.

At one point Sergey caught the eye of the younger sister of Leo Nikolayevich's wife. A romance sprang up between Tatyana Bers and Sergey Tolstoy, one that gave the young lady great hopes. On the horizon a priest with a wedding sermon was already looming.

But Leo Tolstoy prevented the match from taking place; he was categorically against such a union, since Sergey had, after all, lived for many years with another woman and had children by her.

At the same time Tatyana Andreyevna writes something to this effect: "After all, Sergey has no one but a Gypsy woman." Just imagine: no one but some Gypsy woman, the mother of three children already (!).

Sergey Nikolayevich, for his part, wrote of his wife thus: "When I come home and see Masha, so submissive in her silent grief, my heart breaks."

In the end, having broken with Bers, Sergey married Shishkina; their union produced 11 children, and he obtained the Emperor's permission to have the children regarded as legitimate and to give them his surname.

The matrimonial fortunes of Tatyana Bers, meanwhile, somehow did not come off: she even went on a journey with a 50-year-old widower neighbour in the hope of a subsequent offer of hand and heart, and in the end settled down with a distant relative, Kuzminsky.

Centuries change, yet the number of flighty ladies wishing to accompany men of a certain age on distant travels and thereby somehow improve their position remains roughly equal to the number of people who have not read the battle scenes of "War and Peace".