Yelena Hahn

Yelena Andreyevna Fadeyeva was born on to a noble family in Rzhishchev (now Rzhyshchiv, Ukraine). Her parents were , privy councilor and governor of Saratov, and , member of the Dolgorukov princely family. Her mother was also a noted writer who had many publications under her belt in botany. Also among her relatives were the poet Evdokiya Rostopchina and , a friend of Mikhail Lermontov, with whom Yelena was also personally acquainted. She was also related to the famous poets and Fyodor Tyutchev. At the age of sixteen, she married Captain Peter Hahn von Rottenstern (1798–1873), a military man almost twice her age, descended from the von Hahn family, which belonged to an old Baltic-German nobility. She and her husband were often living in provincial towns. Her marriage has been seen by commentators as ‘unsatisfactory’ as her husband was ‘unimaginative’. They had three children, including future writers Helena Blavatsky (born 1831) and Vera Zhelikhovskaya (born 1835). She died of tuberculosis on 6 June 1842, aged 28, in Odessa. ==Literary activity==

In 1835, she made a partial translation of the Bulwer-Lytton novel Godolphin, which was published in Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya, then edited by her literary mentor Osip Senkovsky. In 1837 her first novel, The Ideal, was serialized under the pseudonym Zeneida R-va. While traveling in the Caucasus in 1837 she met exiled Decembrists, an experience that informed a number of subsequent works, including Memoirs of Zheleznovodsk and Utballa and Jellaleddin, published in 1838. In the following three years she published further stories: Medallion, Court of Light, Theophania Abbiaggio. In 1842 she authored Idle Gift, published in Otechestvennye Zapiski. Society’s Judgement was also published in 1842. Her concern actually seems to be the building of an imaginative world for women. Vissarion Belinsky wrote, "There are writers who live a separate life from their creations, and there are writers whose personality is closely related to their works. Reading the first, you enjoy the divine art without thinking about the artist; reading the second, you enjoy the contemplation of a beautiful human being, think about her, love her, and want to know the details of her life. Our gifted Zeneida R-va (Yelena Hahn) belongs to this second category." Hahn has been compared to George Sand due to her criticism of male society and her depiction of the position which women occupy in the world and in society. ==Notes==