Sofia Kovalevskaya

Born January 15, 1850

Poor, unfortunate Vasily Vasilyevich Korvin-Krukovsky. My heart goes out to him. He worked so hard to help his family flourish, and, at least in his eyes, it all went to waste.

The Korvin-Krukovsky noble line can be traced back to the fifteenth century, qualifying the family for a place in the venerable sixth book of the nobility, which listed Russia’s oldest and most distinguished families. For ten years, Vasily and his brothers waged a campaign for recognition of their ancient lineage. Only after years of letters to the Heraldry Department was their claim recognized. By then, Vasily had risen to the rank of general.

Vasily’s brothers led quiet lives on their rural estates, and Vasily also yearned to live out his retirement in nature’s bosom, recovering from the vicissitudes of military life. His father’s lands had gone to his older brothers, and he had only inherited money. So, as he neared retirement, he acquired an estate and got to work renovating it. Or, to be more exact, while Vasily Kovrin-Krukovsky continued serving in Kaluga, his brother Semyon worked on readying a family nest for Vasily’s retirement.

Meanwhile, Vasily married the high-society noblewoman Elizabeth Schubert, a talented pianist who was the daughter of General Schubert (a famous geographer and geodesist) and the granddaughter of a famous mathematician and astronomer.

The couple’s first child, a son, died in childhood, but in 1843 the couple had a daughter, Anna, and then, in January 1850, another daughter, Sofia, followed by a son, Fyodor, five years later. Three years after Sofia’s birth, Vasily retired, moved his family to the country, and began to buy up adjacent lands in order to expand his domain. He was looking forward to serene country life. The children were a source of joy for their parents, and no expense was spared on their education.

The daughters, however, had no desire to live the way their parents thought they should. The first to rebel was Anna. She was drawn to books that proper young ladies were not supposed to touch: books by philosophers and some crackpot “nihilists” who denied the existence of God and called for Revolution. Worse yet, in 1864 Anna, without her parents’ knowledge, published two stories in a journal published by Dostoyevsky and may even have had an affair with the writer.

The relationship with Dostoyevsky did not go anywhere – the two were just too different – but soon afterward Anna announced that she wanted to study abroad, since there was no higher education available to women in Russia. Her father grudgingly agreed, and Anna left for Geneva to (horrors of horrors!) study medicine. A year later the parents received some truly tragic news: their daughter had married a Frenchman named Victor Jaclard, who had been exiled from France for revolutionary activity.

After this catastrophe, it is hardly surprising that Vasily categorically refused to give Sofia the permission she needed from him (or a husband) to obtain a passport. But by the 1860s, the time had passed when Russian parents could completely control their daughters. Sofia Korvin-Krukovskaya married the paleontologist Vladimir Kovalevsky and left with him for Germany. This turns out to have been an early and crucial step on her path toward becoming a brilliant mathematician.

The year 1870 saw the collapse of Napoleon III’s Second Empire, and Anna and Victor were able to move to Paris, which would soon be gripped by revolution, with Victor and Anna playing a very active role. The Kovalevskys also traveled to Paris where, in the spring of 1871, a new radical government came to power: the Paris Commune. 

What consternation General Korvin-Krukovsky must have felt when he found out that both his daughters were involved in the revolutionary unrest in France, that Anna and her husband had wound up in prison after the fall of the Commune, and that Victor faced execution and Anna a life sentence of hard labor.

Vasily and his son Fyodor had to resort to connections and bribery to enable the Jaclards to escape. This, however, did nothing to dampen their revolutionary fervor. They moved to London, and from there to Switzerland and Russia. Wherever they went, they traveled in revolutionary circles and translated books of “seditious content.”

From Vasily’s perspective, Sofia’s fate was not much better. At least she was engaged in science, not revolution. Her family life, however, was a bit strange. The marriage had started out as a fiction, but, as sometimes happened in those days, the young couple, who had married only so that the bride could escape her parents’ will, began to develop tender feelings for one another. Sofia’s female peers, all emancipated young ladies, were indignant to learn that she was foolish enough to love her husband. The marriage indeed grew into a genuine one, and the Kovalevskys even had a daughter.

Vasily Korvin-Krukovsky died in 1875 and thus did not live to learn of his daughters’ subsequent fate. He was spared knowledge of Anna and Victor’s expulsion from Russia and of Sofia’s loss of her husband to suicide. He also did not live to see Sofia’s groundbreaking career.

After her husband’s death in 1883, Sofia settled in Sweden and soon became a towering figure in mathematics, winning numerous awards and attaining worldwide fame, even becoming a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

She taught at Stockholm University, where within a year after arriving she was lecturing in Swedish. The first female professor of mathematics, she was also the first woman in modern Europe to attain a full professorship (and the first woman to earn a doctorate). While in Sweden, in addition to mathematics, Sofia took up writing, both in Russian and Swedish. Her works clearly drew on her own experiences and those of her friends. The protagonist of her novel The Nihilist Girl is a young woman who marries a revolutionary whom she barely knows. The work was only partly based on her and her sister’s life: her protagonist does not go abroad, and winds up following her husband into exile and forced labor.

Incidentally, Anna is thought to be the prototype for Aglaya Yepanchina, the feisty general’s daughter in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.

In that novel, General Yepanchin does not understand his daughters’ aspirations, but manages to reconcile himself to them. There is no evidence that General Korvin-Krukovsky ever did. It is easy to understand how he might have been disappointed in his older daughter – but Sofia? It is hard for parents today to understand how he could have failed to be proud of a daughter who demonstrated a passion for learning and both the tenacity and brilliance to reach the pinnacle of one of the most thoroughly male-dominated fields of knowledge.

But the estate he worked so hard to build? It went to ruin.

Apparently none of his children were made for the life of the Russian provincial nobility.