The Ulyanovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore named after Ivan Goncharov keeps a chain woven from the hair of Camille Petrovna Ivasheva (née Camille Le Dantu) by her husband, the Decembrist Vasily Petrovich Ivashev. This unique exhibit is part of a collection of authentic items related to the Decembrist family.
Back in the late 1950s, the Ulyanovsk Museum of Local Lore established contact with the descendants of Vasily Petrovich Ivashev. It was then that the museum received a lock of Ivashev’s hair, a lifetime photograph of Mariya Vasilyevna Trubnikova, Ivashev’s eldest daughter, and a photograph of his son, Pyotr Vasilyevich Ivashev. Between 1984 and 1986, the most valuable relics of the Ivashevs, the true gems of the collection, entered the museum. They were a box used to keep the Ivashevs’ rosary beads for a century and a half, Camille Petrovna’s hair, woven into a cord by her husband Vasily after her death in 1839, a strand of hair from their first-born, who died in Petrovsky Zavod, early drawings of their daughter Mariya and her personal belongings (a needle box and a bottle of perfume).
Vasily Petrovich Ivashev was the son of Pyotr Nikiforovich Ivashev, a participant in the war of 1812–1814 and a wealthy landowner of the Simbirsk Governorate, who owned an estate in the settlement of Undory, Simbirsk Uyezd, and Vera Alexandrovna, the daughter of the Simbirsk governor Alexander Vasilyevich Tolstoy. Vasily Petrovich Ivashev was a member of the Southern Society of the Decembrists. After the suppression of the uprising, Vasily Ivashev was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor, later the term was reduced to 15 years. Accompanied by his wife Camilla (née Le Dantu), Vasily did hard labor in Chitinsky Ostrog and Petrovsky Zavod.
In 1835, Ivashev was granted permission to move with his family to Turinsk, Tobolsk Governorate. Ivashev and Camille had four children together (the first-born Alexander died in infancy). In 1838, her mother Marie-Cécile le Dentu came to Turinsk to reside permanently. Around the same time, Vasily Ivashev built a house according to his father’s design for his family in Turinsk with money sent by him. The happy marriage of the Ivashevs was not destined to last long: in December 1839, Camilla caught a cold and passed away during premature labor, the couple’s child also died. Vasily died exactly a year later, on the anniversary of her funeral.
