Anna Simenovna Tchernoevitch

ANNA SIMENOVNA TCHERNOEVITCH (1772–1810) was the daughter of a Serbian General, Simon Tchernoevitch, who was in the service of the Austrian Army and later the Russian Army, and Elizabeth Kachkine. She married Ivan Matveivitch Mouravieff-Apostol on 19 April 1790 and gave birth to three of the Decembrists.

She was quite literary and in 1791 published a French translation of “Examples to Mothers or the Adventures of the Marquis of Bezires.” In 1805, after her husband retired from his post as Ambassador to Madrid and she decided to take up residence in Paris, Napoleon approved her move despite the state of aggression between France and Russia.

In 1809, upon reaching the Russian border and seeing the joy in her children’s eyes to see their homeland, she told them: “I have something dreadful to tell you. You will now learn about something up until now unknown to you: slavery.” She so disliked the practice that she had never spoken of it to her children until that moment.

Madame Mouravieff-Apostol died in Moscow on 28 March 1810 and was buried in the Novodevitchy Cemetery. During her twenty years of marriage, she bore three sons and four daughters.