Anna Petrovna Kern

Who was Anna Petrovna Kern?

Anna Petrovna Kern, née Poltoratskaya, was a Russian socialite and memoirist, best known as the addressee of what is probably the best known love poem in the Russian language, written by Pushkin in 1825.

Anna was born in Oryol at the mansion of her grandfather, the local governor. She was brought up in Livny, Russia. On 8 January 1817 she was married by her parents to the 56-year-old General Kern, whom she professed to detest thoroughly.

After they settled in Saint Petersburg, Anna flirted with a number of Romantic poets, but her chief claim to fame was a love affair with Alexander Pushkin in the summer of 1825, during her stay with relatives in Trigorskoe, a manor adjacent to Mikhailovskoe, where the great poet was living in exile.

"Lately, our land has been visited by a beauty, who sings the Venetian Night in a heavenly way, in the manner of the gondolier's cantillation", Pushkin wrote to his friend Pyotr Pletnev. Kern was one of many liaisons in Pushkin's life and she would not have become the most famous of his mistresses were it not for the poem that Pushkin put between the pages of the second canto of Eugene Onegin which he presented to her on the day of their parting.