Elisabeth Bagréeff-Speransky

Elisabeth Bagréeff-Speransky (also Elizaveta Mikhailovna Speranskaya; Russian: Елизавета Михайловна Сперанская; 5 September 1799 O.S./16 September 1799 (N.S.) – 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, Kyiv, and Novgorod Oblast, 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 Alexander Frolov-Bagreev, 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 Velyka Burimka 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 Rodion Nikolaevich Cantacuzène, 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.