The handmade white satin wallet belonged to Alexander Herzen. It was made in the shape of an envelope with four folds. On the front of the envelope, there is a black embroidered inscription that reads, “To My Dear Sir, Alexander Ivanovich Herzen, in Vladimir”. On the back, there is a faux wax seal with an ace of diamonds in the center. When the wallet is opened, one can see brown embroidered images of a castle and trees on the first fold, and below, the following inscription, “Vyatka. 1838”.

During the time of Alexander Herzen, such handmade items were very popular. The writer’s wife, Natalya Alexandrovna, was a talented embroiderer. The museum’s collection features tablecloths and wallets embroidered by her. She presented this embroidered wallet to Alexander Herzen. In a letter to her husband on November 26, 1835, she wrote, “Every piece of silk in this work was inspired by my thoughts, in every one of which you were the main subject.”

When this embroidered wallet was donated to the future Herzen Museum in 1974 by the writer’s great-grandchildren, the staff assumed that it had been made by his wife. However, later, the researcher Irena Zhelvakova, the founder of the Alexander Herzen House Museum in Moscow, identified that it was made by someone else.

The wallet was embroidered by Praskovya Medvedeva, the widow of a Vyatka official whose fate was linked with two exiled individuals — the writer Alexander Herzen and the architect Alexander Vitberg. In his book “My Past and Thoughts”, the writer described his brief infatuation with a certain Madame R in Vyatka. This was Praskovya Medvedeva. According to Alexander Herzen himself, “the mad love lasted for a month” and eventually “that outburst of passion seemed to have possessed [him] simply to make another feeling clear.” This refers to his feelings for his future wife, Natalya Zakharina.

From the correspondence between Alexander Herzen and his future wife, Natalya Alexandrovna, it is obvious that Praskovya Medvedeva was skilled at drawing and embroidery. Irena Zhelvakova discovered her drawing — the same one that was embroidered on this wallet — in the album of Alexander Vitberg’s daughter. It is kept in the collection of the State Museum of the History of Russian Literature. This allowed museum curators to identify the person who created this handmade wallet that had been kept by the writer’s French descendants for many years.