Anna Petrovna Kern

Anna Petrovna Kern (Russian: Анна Петровна Керн, née Poltoratskaya (Полторацкая), name after second marriage: Markova-Vinogradskaya (Маркова-Виноградская)) (11 February 1800 – 27 May 1879) was a Russian socialite and memoirist, best known as the addressee of what is probably the best known love poem in the Russian language, written by Aleksandr Pushkin in 1825.

Anna was born in Oryol at the mansion of her grandfather, the local governor. She was brought up in Lubny in the Poltava Governorate (present-day Ukraine). On 8 January 1817 she was married by her parents to the 56-year-old General Kern, whom she professed to detest thoroughly.

After they settled in Saint Petersburg, Anna flirted with a number of Romantic poets, but her chief claim to fame was a love affair with Pushkin in the summer of 1825, during her stay with relatives in Trigorskoe, a manor adjacent to Mikhailovskoye, where the great poet was living in exile.

"Lately, our land has been visited by a beauty, who sings the Venetian Night in a heavenly way, in the manner of the gondolier's cantillation", Pushkin wrote to his friend Pyotr Pletnyov. Kern was one of many liaisons in Pushkin's life and she would not have become the most famous of his mistresses were it not for the poem that Pushkin put between the pages of the second canto of Eugene Onegin which he presented to her on the day of their parting.

The poem starts with the lines , and Nabokov famously ridiculed attempts to translate these magic lines into English.Aleksandr Blok metamorphosed Pushkin's poem into his own "O podvigakh, o doblestyakh, o slave...", while Mikhail Glinka set the poem to music and dedicated the result to Kern's daughter Catherine.

...
Wikipedia