, the birth of Sofia on January 3rd (
Old Style date). Sofya Kovalevskaya (
née Korvin-Krukovskaya) was born in Moscow, the second of three children. Her father, Lieutenant General , served in the
Imperial Russian Army as head of the Moscow Artillery before retiring to
Polibino, his family estate in
Pskov Oblast in 1858, when Kovalevskaya was eight years old. He was a member of the minor
Russian nobility, of mixed Belarusian–
Polish descent (Polish on his father's side), with possible partial ancestry from the
royal Corvin family of Hungary, and served as Marshall of Nobility for Vitebsk province. (There may also have been some
Romani ancestry on the father's side.) Her mother, Yelizaveta Fedorovna von Schubert (1820–1879), descended from a family of
German immigrants to
St. Petersburg who lived on
Vasilievsky Island. Her maternal great-grandfather was the astronomer and geographer
Friedrich Theodor von Schubert (1758–1825), who emigrated to Russia from Germany around 1785. He became a full member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Science and head of its astronomical observatory. His son, Kovalevskaya's maternal grandfather, was General
Theodor Friedrich von Schubert (1789–1865), who was head of the military topographic service, and an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as Director of the
Kunstkamera museum. Kovalevskaya's parents provided her with a good early education. At various times, her governesses were native speakers of English, French, and German. When she was 11 years old, she was intrigued by a foretaste of what she was to learn later in her lessons in calculus; the wall of her room had been papered with pages from lecture notes by
Ostrogradsky, left over from her father's student days. She was tutored privately in elementary mathematics by Iosif Ignatevich Malevich. The physicist Nikolai Nikanorovich Tyrtov noted her unusual aptitude when she managed to understand his textbook by discovering for herself an approximate construction of trigonometric functions which she had not yet encountered in her studies. Tyrtov called her a "new
Pascal" and suggested she be given a chance to pursue further studies under the tutelage of . In 1866–67 she spent much of the winter with her family in St. Petersburg, where she was provided private tutoring by Strannoliubskii, a well-known advocate of higher education for women, who taught her calculus. During that same period, the son of a local priest introduced her
sister Anna to progressive ideas influenced by the radical movement of the 1860s, providing her with copies of radical journals of the time discussing
Russian nihilism. Although the word
nihilist (нигилист) often was used in a negative sense, it did not have that meaning for the young Russians of the 1860s (шестидесятники): Despite her obvious talent for mathematics, she could not complete her education in Russia. At that time, women were not allowed to attend universities in Russia and most other countries. In order to study abroad, Kovalevskaya needed written permission from her father (or husband). Accordingly, in 1868 she contracted a "fictitious marriage" with
Vladimir Kovalevskij, a young paleontology student, book publisher and radical, who was the first to translate and publish the works of
Charles Darwin in Russia. They moved from Russia to Germany in 1869, after a brief stay in
Vienna, in order to pursue advanced studies. ==Student years==