The portrait of the Russian writer, memoirist Avgusta Pavlovna Sozonovich was painted in 2008 by the artist Gennady Ratanov commissioned by the Yalutorovsk Museum for display in the memorial house of M.I. Muravyov-Apostol. The portrait was drawn from a photograph by an unknown photographer, the original of which is kept in the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore, and a photocopy is in the funds of the Yalutorovsk Museum Complex. The picture was taken in Tver in 1860.
Avgusta Pavlovna is the daughter of Pavel Sozonovich, an officer of the Uhlan regiment of the Bugskii military settlement, who was sent to hard labor in Siberia for insulting a superior officer. After some hard labor, he settled in Yalutorovsk, where he married a local woman. Avgusta was born in Yalutorovsk in 1833. After the death of his wife, Pavel Sozonovich was afraid that he would not be able to cope with raising his four-year-old daughter and gave her to Matvey and Maria Muravyov-Apostol to be raised. The couple did not have their own children.
The girl was homeschooled, graduated from a school opened by the Decembrist Ivan Yakushkin. Later, Avgusta Sozonovich herself would teach at this very school. She also painted. Her painting, which depicts the house where the Decembrist Ivan Pushchin lived in Yalutorovsk, has survived.
In 1856 Sozonovich, along with Muravyov-Apostol, left for the European part of Russia. We know that in the 1860s she lived in St. Petersburg, where she earned money by tutoring and translating. In 1877-1878, Avgusta Sozonovich was at the Russian-Turkish war as a sister of mercy, and after returning from the war she looked after the old and blind Decembrist. She also put down on paper the memories of Muravyov-Apostol. Avgusta Pavlovna never got married and had no children.
Sozonovich knew the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and his wife Anna Grigorievna. It was to her that Avgusta Sozonovich passed on the memoirs of Matvey Muravyov-Apostol, which were published in the Russian Archive and Russian Starina magazines. At the end of her life, Sozonovich wrote two memoirs about the Decembrists: ‘Notes… regarding the article by K.M. Golodnikova. State Criminals in Kurgan and From Memories.’
Avgusta Pavlovna is the daughter of Pavel Sozonovich, an officer of the Uhlan regiment of the Bugskii military settlement, who was sent to hard labor in Siberia for insulting a superior officer. After some hard labor, he settled in Yalutorovsk, where he married a local woman. Avgusta was born in Yalutorovsk in 1833. After the death of his wife, Pavel Sozonovich was afraid that he would not be able to cope with raising his four-year-old daughter and gave her to Matvey and Maria Muravyov-Apostol to be raised. The couple did not have their own children.
The girl was homeschooled, graduated from a school opened by the Decembrist Ivan Yakushkin. Later, Avgusta Sozonovich herself would teach at this very school. She also painted. Her painting, which depicts the house where the Decembrist Ivan Pushchin lived in Yalutorovsk, has survived.
In 1856 Sozonovich, along with Muravyov-Apostol, left for the European part of Russia. We know that in the 1860s she lived in St. Petersburg, where she earned money by tutoring and translating. In 1877-1878, Avgusta Sozonovich was at the Russian-Turkish war as a sister of mercy, and after returning from the war she looked after the old and blind Decembrist. She also put down on paper the memories of Muravyov-Apostol. Avgusta Pavlovna never got married and had no children.
Sozonovich knew the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and his wife Anna Grigorievna. It was to her that Avgusta Sozonovich passed on the memoirs of Matvey Muravyov-Apostol, which were published in the Russian Archive and Russian Starina magazines. At the end of her life, Sozonovich wrote two memoirs about the Decembrists: ‘Notes… regarding the article by K.M. Golodnikova. State Criminals in Kurgan and From Memories.’
