How a Russian prince lost his WIFE in a card game
At first, she was offended, but then, she married her lover.
In the mid-18th century, the Golitsyn princely family was, as we would say today, on the Forbes list of the wealthiest. Their ancestral estates were located in the western and southeastern parts of the Moscow region and they owned nearly 100 villages.
In his book ‘Remarkable Eccentrics and Originals’, historian Mikhail Pylyaev described Alexander Golitsyn (1769-1817), one of the family members, as follows: "This Golitsyn owned 24,000 serfs and a vast fortune, which he squandered: he lost part of it at cards and spent the rest on unheard-of extravagance. Every day, he treated his coachmen to champagne, lit guests' pipes with large banknotes, threw handfuls of gold into the street for the cabbies to crowd around his entrance and so on."
Maria Vyazemskaya
His wife was the young and beautiful Maria Vyazemskaya (1772–1865), nicknamed ‘Juno’ for her beauty. The young couple married in 1789. But, their life together was not a success. The generally accepted opinion is that the prince was a despot in family life. However, he enjoyed dressing his wife in the latest fashions and taking her to all the balls, boasting of her attractiveness.
At one of the balls, Count Lev Razumovsky fell in love with her. He was a bright and educated man, who was passionate about science and reading and had a deep appreciation for art. He was one of the first to install a winter garden in his home. His feelings soon became mutual and he began looking for ways to rescue Maria Grigoryevna from her difficult marriage. Razumovsky initially wanted to challenge Prince Golitsyn to a duel, but then came up with another plan. One night at a card game, the count offered the compulsive gambler, who had lost everything, a chance to wager… his wife. Golitsyn, a passionate gambler, agreed. And lost.
Lev Razumovsky
Lev Razumovsky took Maria Grigoryevna with him, but refused to take the money he had won from Golitsyn. Despite the joy of her liberation, Maria Grigoryevna was deeply offended that she, born Princess Vyazemskaya, had been gambled away as a serf girl. This scandalous story was the talk of every household in Moscow and St. Petersburg. However, it was precisely because of the widespread publicity that the church agreed to the annulment of her marriage to Golitsyn. And before long, society was already accepting the new Countess Maria Razumovskaya.
Incidentally, it was she who commissioned artist Karl Bryullov to paint his famous work, ‘The Last Day of Pompeii’.
