Elisabeth Bagréeff-Speransky (; ; – 4 April 1857) was a Russian noblewoman and writer. She was the only child of the statesman Mikhail Speransky and his English wife, Elizabeth Stephens. As her mother died when she was two months old, Speranskaya was raised by her grandmother Eliza (née Planta) Stephens and educated by her father. Her studies included history, composition, reading, literature, and languages – English, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Russian. In order to improve her delicate health, she spent her childhood in various places, including Saint Petersburg, Kiev, and Novgorod Governorate, but she also visited her father who was exiled from the capital from 1812 to 1821. Passing the state examination to be a home teacher in 1819, she began teaching children.
In 1822, Speranskaya married Prince , the governor of the Chernigov Governorate. The couple had three children, although the youngest died when two years old. They were not well-suited, as she was a charming, salon hostess and he was somber and taciturn. Frolov-Bagreev's failure to manage his business and their personal affairs caused a split between the couple in 1838 which remained unreconciled. She sold her jewels to repay his business debts and her father had to renegotiate Frolov-Bagreev's debts to prevent the loss of their estate at in Ukraine. Speranskaya began to travel as a means of overcoming her problems, visiting European cities, including the Dutch resort of Scheveningen, spa villages in Bavaria, Vienna and Salzburg in Austria, Lucerne in Switzerland, various places in the north of Italy. Speranskaya had begun writing in 1828, publishing stories and plays for her children and she wrote poetry on her travels.
Taking over the management of Velyka Burimka in 1842, Speranskaya built schools, orphanages, a brewery and distillery, brick works, carpentry shops, factories, and mills, and reorganized the hospital. She brought in master craftsmen to train the villagers to work in these enterprises. After four years of tiring work, the death of her surviving son, and the pending marriage of her daughter, Speranskaya traveled to Brussels, then to Basel and Geneva in Switzerland, and through Florence, Venice, and Trieste before making a pilgrimage to Egypt and the Holy Land. To prevent her new son-in-law, Prince , taking over the administration of her estate, Speranskaya returned to Ukraine in 1847 and managed Velyka Burimka for the next three years until her health failed. Traveling to Vienna to seek medical treatment, she made an arrangement for her daughter and son-in-law to manage the estate and share the profits with her. Instead, they tried to sell it and managed to reduce what they owed her, knowing she was too ill to travel and contest their actions.
As a distraction from her legal and physical problems, Speranskaya revived her role as hostess to a well-known salon and began to write, publishing under the surname Bagréeff-Speransky (or Bagréeff-Speranski). Between 1852 and 1857 she wrote thirty-two books, mostly in French and German. These included religious texts, travel sketches, stories of life in the Russian Empire, novels, plays, and children's books. Her writing was popular with European audiences and gained favorable reviews from scholars like Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer and Prosper Mérimée. Bagréeff-Speransky died in April 1857 in Vienna. She and her father were described with unfavorable caricatures in Count Leo Tolstoy's classic novel War and Peace, but modern scholarship has reviewed letters exchanged by the father and daughter which disprove Tolstoy's depiction. She was included in numerous biographical lexicons in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while in recent years interest in her life and work has been renewed.
Early life and education
Elizaveta Mikhailovna Speranskaya was born on 16 September 1799 (N.S.) in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, to Elizabeth Jane (née Stephens) and Mikhail Speransky. Stephens was the daughter of the English woman, Eliza (née Planta) Stephens, and had moved with her mother to Russia around 1789, after the death of her father Rev. Henry Stephens. Eliza served as a governess to Countess Catherine Shuvalova, who allowed the children Elizabeth, Marianne, and Francis to live with their mother. While studying with at his summer cottage, Stephens met Mikhail Speransky in 1797. Speransky was a graduate of the and had that year entered the civil service. The couple married at the end of 1798, but Stephens died from tuberculosis in November 1799, two months after their daughter's birth.
Speransky was distraught over his wife's death and buried himself in his work. He sent his daughter to live with a former nurse of the Stephens family who lived along the , opposite Aptekarsky Island. He requested his mother-in-law's help in 1801, when he was promoted to serve as an "Assistant Minister of Justice, as Governor of Finland, as Privy Councillor, and as Secretary of State" to Alexander, the new Tsar of Russia. Eliza was in Vienna when her daughter died. Her charge, , had married Franz Joseph, Prince of Dietrichstein in 1797, and relocated there. In 1801, Eliza was able to return to Saint Petersburg and moved into Speransky's house to care for Speranskaya. The following year when Speranskaya's aunt Marianne married Konstantin Zlobin, Eliza's family with Speranskaya all moved into the home of Marianne's father-in-law, .
Within six months the couple were having difficulties and Vasily, who was fond of his daughter-in-law suggested a temporary separation, sending Marianne and her family to Baldone (now in Latvia) to enjoy the sulfur water spa there. By the time they returned in the autumn, Konstantin had abandoned the family. For more than a year, Vasily tried in vain to negotiate a reconciliation, although the couple did not divorce until 1810. The Stephens family moved back in with Speransky briefly, but because of Speranskaya's delicate health, they left Saint Petersburg for Kiev (present-day Ukraine), where they remained until 1809. That year Speransky bought a house in Saint Petersburg near the Tauride Garden and the family returned as Speranskaya's health had improved. Marianne died in 1811, leaving her estate Velikopolye in the Novgorod Oblast to her niece Speranskaya. In March 1812, after her father fell out of favor with the tsar, primarily because of his inability to cooperate or ingratiate himself with Russian nobility, he was sent into exile. He left a note for Speranskaya that she and her grandmother were to join him in Nizhny Novgorod, as soon as it could be arranged. Once they were reunited, Speransky developed an educational program for his daughter, teaching her history, composition, reading, literature, and various languages. She learned German by reading the Bible and Friedrich Schiller's work on Joan of Arc and also studied the works of William Shakespeare. She gained fluency in English, French, German, and Russian and learned to read Latin and write in Italian.
In late summer 1812, Speransky was separated from his daughter and sent to the Siberian border near Perm. Despite their separation, he continued to supervise Speranskaya's education. She and her grandmother were sent back to Saint Petersburg at the end of 1813, although they visited him from time to time at Perm and later when he was moved to Speranskaya's estate Velikopolye near Novgorod. Historian Marc Raeff stated that Eliza and Speranskaya brought money for him to live on in exile, and both Raeff and William Blackwood noted that when Speransky had trouble getting missives delivered to Tsar Alexander describing his penury, Speranskaya was able to deliver a letter to the emperor, who allotted her father an annual stipend. At the beginning of 1814, Speransky requested that his daughter, whom he called Lisa or Lise, should move back to Velikopolye, where he joined her later in the year. That year, Speransky returned to government service in various provincial posts. In 1815, Speransky sent Eliza to live in Kiev, where she died at the end of the year. Speranskaya returned to Saint Petersburg, where she resided with a family friend, Maria (née Amburger) Weikard, the wife of the Shuvalova family's physician.
Marriage and family life
Speranskaya passed the state examination to be a home teacher in 1819 and began teaching children. In 1821, Speransky returned to Saint Petersburg. Blackwood states that it was because of an inappropriate love interest between his daughter and a military officer, who historian identifies as Georg Weikard. The relationship was terminated but Speranskaya became despondent and attempted suicide. Speransky began to draft plans to reorganize the provincial governments for more efficiency and took charge of finding Speranskaya a suitable husband, hosting numerous social events to allow her the opportunity to mix with society. She became the companion of , who treated her as if she were a daughter and Speranskaya resigned herself to allow her father to choose her husband. That year, she was appointed as a lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth Alexeievna, Empress of Russia.
In August 1822, Speranskaya married Prince , the governor of the Chernigov Governorate. Frolov-Bagreev was the nephew of Kochubey's husband, the brother of his mother, Agrafena Pavlovna Kochubey. Initially, they lived in Chernihiv, but in May 1824 the couple moved to Saint Petersburg when Frolov-Bagreev took a post in the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Empire. The couple were not well-suited, as Speranskaya's circle were intellectuals and artists while Frolov-Bagreev was a dull simpleton. He was described by Speranskaya's biographer, , as "" (selfish and distrustful), although he exhibited polite manners. He was often silent, behaving with an air of superiority and completely ignoring his wife. Speranskaya was a charismatic and charming hostess whose salon was attended by Saint Petersburg's celebrated artists, scientists, and statesmen. Among her frequent guests were Alexander and Karl Bryullov, Nikolay Karamzin, Adam Mickiewicz, Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, and Pyotr Vyazemsky. Pushkin remained a close friend until his death.
At the beginning of 1824, the couple had a son, whom they named Mikhail, and two years later, a daughter, Maria. During this time, Frolov-Bagreev had mismanaged funds at the bank and lost a large sum of money, which Speranskaya rectified by selling her jewels. In 1825, Tsar Alexander died and was succeeded after the Decembrist revolt by his brother, Nicholas. Speranskaya brought an English governess to help her with the children and in 1828 published her first book, (Readings for Young Children) for them. She wrote other children's stories and short plays for them and began publishing stories anonymously in local newspapers. Her second son, Alexander, was born around 1830 but died when two-years old. In 1831, Speransky borrowed money and bought his daughter an estate, , where she raised her children. The estate covered and encompassed seven villages. Devastated by her son's death, Speranskaya left the Russian Empire for the first time in 1833 and traveled to the Dutch seaside resort of Scheveningen, where she wrote poetry in English and Russian.