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Alexander Andreevich Alexandrov (born Nadezhda Andreyevna Durova; 17 September 1783 â 21 March 1866) was a Russian cavalry soldier and writer who participated in the Napoleonic Wars. Alexandrov was assigned female at birth, but solely presented as a man in adulthood.
At twenty-three, Alexandrov fled his home, and enlisted in an uhlan (light cavalry) regiment, dressing as a male soldier and taking on the name Alexander Sokolov. He served from 1806 to 1816, and received the Cross of St. George for bravery. After his service, he published a memoir, originally titled, "Notes of Alexsandrov", one of the earliest autobiographies in the Russian language. To his outrage, publishers disregarded the chosen name and title, re-titling it "Notes of N.A. Durova", and eventually The Cavalry Maiden.
Historians have traditionally regarded him as a female wartime cross-dresser, while several modern scholars describe him as a transgender man.
Alexander Andreevich Alexandrov was born Nadezhda Andreyevna Durova on 17 September 1783 to Nadezhda Ivanovna Durova, the daughter of a wealthy landowner from Poltava, and Andrei Vasilyevich Durov, a major in the Imperial Russian Army. Sources differ about the place of his birth, identifying it variously as the Vyatka Governorate of the Russian Empire, an army camp near Kyiv, or Kherson.
According to Alexandrov's later memoirs, his mother had hoped for a son and was disappointed at the birth of a daughter. He recounts an incident in which, after an infant cried through the night, she threw the child from the window of a moving carriage, nearly killing him. After this incident, his father placed him in the care of soldiers in his regiment. As a child, Alexandrov learned military drills and marching commands, and an unloaded firearm became one of his favourite toys.
After his father retired from active service, Alexandrov continued playing with broken sabres and alarmed his family by secretly taming a stallion that others considered unmanageable.
In 1801, when he was about seventeen years old, he married a Sarapul judge, Vasily Stefanovich Chernov, a man seven years his senior. Their son, Ivan Vasilievich Chernov, was born on 4 January 1803.
On 17 September 1806, at the age of twenty-three, Durova left home without informing his family of his intention to enlist. Adopting male dress and identity, he set out to join the Imperial Russian Army under the name Alexander Sokolov. At the time he had been married for five years. From this point forward he lived and served publicly as a man.
Alexandrov had grown up in a military environment as the child of an officer in the Imperial Russian Army and spent much of his childhood among soldiers, horses, and military travel. In later memoirs he wrote that he felt more comfortable in that world than in the domestic expectations placed on women of the period. By the early nineteenth century he had become dissatisfied with family life, including his marriage and the restrictions of provincial society. Military service offered both an escape from those circumstances and the chance to pursue the equestrian and martial life he had admired since childhood.
To support the disguise, Alexandrov dressed in a Cossack cavalry uniform before travelling to enlist. Presenting himself as a young nobleman named Alexander Sokolov, he successfully entered the army in the Polish Uhlan Regiment, a light cavalry unit of the Imperial Russian Army.
His enlistment took place during the War of the Fourth Coalition, when Russian forces were fighting Napoleon. Within months of joining the regiment, Alexandrov was deployed with Russian troops in the 1806âÂÂ1807 campaign in East Prussia, beginning a military career that would last roughly a decade.
As "Alexander Sokolov", he fought in the major Russian engagements of the 1806âÂÂ1807 Prussian campaign. During two of those battles, he saved the lives of two fellow Russian soldiers. The first was an enlisted man who suffered a concussion falling off his horse in battle. Alexandrov provided first aid under heavy fire, and brought him to safety as the army retreated around them. The second was an officer, unhorsed but uninjured. Three French dragoons were closing on him. Alexandrov couched his lance and scattered the enemy. Then, against regulations, he let the officer borrow his own horse to hasten his retreat, which left Alexandrov himself more vulnerable to attack.
During the campaign, he wrote to his family explaining his disappearance. They used their connections in a desperate attempt to locate him. Rumors of an Amazon warrior in the army reached Tsar Alexander I, who took a personal interest and summoned him to the palace at St. Petersburg, where he was awarded the Cross of St. George and promoted to cornet of the Mariupol Hussar Regiment. The tsar also granted him the surname "Alexandrov".
In an era when Russian officers were expected to grow a mustache, Alexandrov's youthful appearance harmed his chances for promotion. He transferred away from the hussars to the Lithuanian Uhlan Regiment in order to avoid the colonel's daughter, who had fallen in love with him. He saw action again during Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812. He fought in the Battle of Smolensk. During the Battle of Borodino, a cannonball wounded him in the leg, yet he continued serving full duty for several days afterwards until ordered away to recuperate. He retired from the army in 1816 with the rank of stabs-rotmistr ("staff riding master"), the equivalent of captain lieutenant.
Aleksandrov entered the literary world nearly twenty years after leaving military service in 1816. By the mid-1830s, at about fifty-three years of age, he was living quietly when a chance meeting with the poet Alexander Pushkin led to the publication of memoirs based on his experiences during the Napoleonic Wars.
The timing was favourable. The 1830s formed part of the Golden Age of Russian literature, when writers such as Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, and Vasily Zhukovsky were reshaping Russian prose and poetry. At the same time, Russian readers were increasingly drawn to accounts of the Napoleonic Wars, which were still within living memory. Veterans of the campaigns of 1805âÂÂ1815 began publishing recollections of their service, and military memoirs became a popular literary genre.
During their meeting, Pushkin learned that Aleksandrov had preserved notebooks describing daily life in the cavalry during the campaigns. Seeing their literary potential, he encouraged Aleksandrov to prepare them for publication. Aleksandrov revised the material for print and expanded it with recollections of childhood and early military life. Like many memoirs of the period, the narrative blends personal memory with literary shaping. Scholars including Ruth Averbach and Ona Renner-Fahey have noted that the memoir simplifies parts of the author's early biography. The narrative presents the author as younger than the documented birth date would suggest and largely omits discussion of the marriage to Vasily Chernov in 1801 and the birth of their son.
Pushkin published the memoir in 1836 in his literary journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary), one of the leading Russian journals of the period. Aleksandrov had hoped to publish the work under the title Notes of Aleksandrov. Pushkin instead printed it as Notes of N. A. Durova. In the preface he explained the unusual circumstances of the memoir and identified the cavalry officer Aleksandrov as having been born Nadezhda Durova. The revelation that the decorated officer had been born female drew curiosity among readers and literary circles. It also angered Aleksandrov, who had hoped the memoir would appear under his adopted name. Writing to Pushkin in protest, he complained:<blockquote>"The name which you called me, dear sir Aleksandr Sergeevich, in the preface haunts me! Is there no remedy for my grief? You called me by that name that makes me shudder, and soon 20,000 people will read it and call me by it too!"</blockquote>When the memoir later appeared in book form, editor and publisher Ivan Butovskii retitled it The Cavalry Maiden, a title that highlighted the unusual story behind the author. Despite disagreements over the title and presentation, the book attracted wide attention.
The memoir gave Russian readers a vivid first-hand picture of cavalry life during the Napoleonic campaigns. Aleksandrov described long marches, camp life, and moments of combat from the perspective of a junior officer moving through the ranks. The direct, conversational voice of the narrative, combined with the extraordinary circumstances of the author's life, made it one of the most distinctive military memoirs published in Russia in the nineteenth century.
The success of the memoir encouraged Aleksandrov to continue writing. During the late 1830s and 1840s, he published several works of fiction and autobiographical prose. One of the best known was A Year of My Life in St Petersburg (1838), written about two years after the memoir and describing visits to the imperial capital and encounters with the literary world. Other stories and short novels drew on provincial Russian life, military culture, and themes of honour, service, and social identity.
Although Aleksandrov never achieved the literary prominence of contemporaries such as Nikolai Gogol or Mikhail Lermontov, The Cavalry Maiden secured a lasting place in Russian literature. It is now regarded as one of the earliest autobiographical works in Russian prose and remains an important historical source on cavalry service in the Russian army during the Napoleonic Wars.
Alexandrov continued to wear male clothing for the rest of his life, continued to use his male name, and spoke using masculine grammar.
He died in Yelabuga on March 21, 1866, and was buried with full military honors. His son, Ivan Durov, had died 10 years prior, in 1856.
Alexandrov's gender identity has been the subject of debate. Many historians and feminist scholars have described him as a cross-dressing woman, while some modern scholars say Alexandrov is better understood as transgender. In "Notes", he describes himself with terms of androgyny, describing himself both as a bogatyr and as an Amazon warrior. One of his prose stories, Nurmeka, revolves around a male-to-female cross-dresser, leading to speculation that this was an expression of a trans identity.
In his personal life, Alexandrov rejected femininity, and behaved as a man. After leaving the army, he continued to prefer the masculine name Alexander Alexandrov, which he used with the approval of Tsar Aleksander I. Public records recording him as Aleksandrov include his military pension accounts, his will, and the record of his death in the parish registry books.