On December 13, 1890, in St. Petersburg, the police searched the apartment of Lieutenant Bartenev at No. 119 Kirillovskaya Street. They found Ekaterina Grigorievna Barteneva and her son Viktor 1 there . The son, seizing the moment, took some notes from the table and threw them into the oven. The police came to their senses when only a handful of ash remained from the papers. The gendarmes demanded to know what it was. "A notebook with poems by Ryleev, Ogarev and some other poets," Viktor replied. - I recorded them 3-4 years ago... I copied it from a manuscript that, I don't remember from whom, I took out for a while. " 2 The gendarmes were not interested in the poems of those who were no longer alive. They were looking for evidence of Barteneva's connection to the revolutionaries.
Reading through the archive documents today, you find all the new touches of her biography. The known seems to be revealed in a different light, if you look at it through the prism of the described police search. There is an opportunity to see how a short but intense duel between a revolutionary woman and the police unfolded. Among the documents found during the search was a manuscript that began with the words: "Only the first issue of Narodnoe Delo was published with Bakunin's participation." The manuscript was fragmentary: there was no beginning, no end. The police did not ask, however, whether the first part of the manuscript existed or where it went. More than 30 years later, the Leningrad historian I. S. Knizhnik-Vetrov received from Barteneva's youngest son pages entitled "The Story of one Childhood" 3: the Autobiography of Ekaterina Grigoryevna.
She told how she grew up in a poor noble family, having received a typical upbringing for that time; recalled the governess who gave her a good knowledge of foreign languages; vividly drew a way of life with contrasts of poverty and luxury; determined the importance of acquaintance in childhood with the life of serfs for the formation of he ...
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