Henriette Razumovskaya's Death Letter to Vasily Zhukovsky and Its Consequences for the Court Fate of the Poet

The article aims to clarify information about the court biography of Vasily Zhukovsky, who, as a tutor of the heir to the throne, was close to the imperial family and used this position to facilitate the fate of the convicted Decembrists. The material of the study was the documents of the State Archive of the Russian Federation relating to Zhukovsky's participation in the case of Nikolai Turgenev, who did not appear for trial and was sentenced in absentia to death: a death letter from Countess Henrietta Razumovskaya (who took an active sympathetic part in the fate of the Turgenev brothers) to Zhukovsky and a memorandum by Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich in the case of Nikolai Turgenev. In the article, these two documents are first published in full in the French original and in a modern translation. The publication is accompanied by a biographical commentary based on the materials of Zhukovsky's diary, his unpublished letter to Emperor Nicholas I, and letters to Alexander Turgenev, which detail facts related to the history of Zhukovsky's presentation of Nikolai Turgenev's acquittal note to Emperor Nicholas I. It is believed that the cause of the first serious conflict was the <Note on N.I. Turgenev> that Zhukovsky filed to the emperor. This note was first published from a draft autograph with notes in Volume 12 of Zhukovsky's Collected Works edited by A. S. Arkhangelsky, and, later, from the same autograph in Volume 13 of his Complete Works and Letters. However, the study revealed that what the emperor received was not a note by Zhukovsky, but an acquittal note by Nikolai Turgenev with a cover letter from the poet and a death letter from Henrietta Razumovskaya attached to Turgenev's note. The latter served as a direct impetus for the poet's appeal to the emperor with a petition for the political criminal. The result of the study was the first reconstruction of the sequence of events that caused the first serious conflict between Zhukovsky and the emperor: the impetus for the first appeal of the poet to Nicholas I with a petition for a political criminal was the death letter of Countess Razumovskaya. The negative outcome of his petition was due to the verdict of Grand Duke Konstanin Pavlovich. The emperor requested that the grand duke familiarized himself with Turgenev's note, and Konstanin Pavlovich found, as is clear from his memorandum, Zhukovsky's actions not consistent with his high status of the heir's mentor. Thus, the article reveals the causes of the first crisis in the court fate of Zhukovsky, which directly reflected on the official forms of recognition of the poet's merits: it was as a result of this petition that Zhukovsky did not receive another award and promotion, and the death letter from Henriette Razumovskaya to Zhukovsky became the first link in the chain of direct petitions to Nicholas I for those who had problems with the government and a kind of "baptism" of Zhukovsky as a liberal public figure.