The collection of the State Pushkin Museum features a portrait of Nikolay Fyodorovich Arendt, the personal physician of His Imperial Majesty.
Nikolay Arendt’s father was Fyodor (Theodor) Arendt, a staff physician at the Kazan Admiralty Hospital. His ancestors had emigrated from Prussia to Russia half a century prior. The family moved from Kazan to Reval and then to Moscow, where Fyodor Arendt worked as a police physician. Fyodor passed away when Nikolay was 11 years old, leaving his widow to care for their five children. As orphans, they were eligible for free education, hence, when a department of the Imperial Medical and Surgical Academy was opened in Moscow in 1801, three of Fyodor Arendt’s sons enrolled there at the expense of the government.
Nikolay Arendt completed his medical training in St. Petersburg, where he demonstrated such exceptional abilities that, upon passing his exams, he was awarded a prestigious silver set of surgical tools. That was his first accolade. Subsequently, he received additional honors, including the orders of St. Vladimir 4th and 3rd Class, St. Stanislav 1st Class, and St. Anna 2nd and 1st Class, as well as numerous other awards. During the Napoleonic wars of the 1810s, Russo-Swedish War of 1808–1809, and Patriotic War of 1812, Nikolay Arendt conducted hundreds of complex surgeries in field hospitals. He accompanied the soldiers to Paris, worked in Lyon and Reims, and helped wounded soldiers who were unable to return home due to their injuries. Upon his return to Russia, he was in charge of the St. Petersburg Artillery Hospital, which housed 900 patients. He continued to perform surgeries, supporting his young colleagues (among them was Nikolay Ivanovich Pirogov, whose lectures Arendt would later listen to with great interest), and invented a new surgical instrument — “a blunt aneurysm needle with a steel spring.” In 1829, Nikolay Arendt was appointed personal physician of Emperor Nicholas I. From then on, he would accompany the emperor on all of his travels and carefully monitor his health.
At the end of January 1837, Nikolay Arendt spent countless hours in Pushkin’s apartment at 12 Moika Street, by the bed of the dying poet. It was Arendt who conveyed the request for a pardon to the emperor on behalf of Pushkin and brought the note from the tsar, in which Nicholas I granted pardon to the dying Pushkin and promised to care for his wife and children.
