Yekaterina Vorontsova-Dashkova

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Yekaterina Vorontsova-Dashkova : biography

March 17, 1743 – January 4, 1810

She travelled in Ireland, where she can be seen watching a review of the Irish Volunteers in a picture by Francis Wheatley in November 1779. She was friends with Georgiana Shipley, daughter of Jonathan Shipley, in London. She met Benjamin Franklin in Paris on 3 February 1781., THE PHILOSOPHICAL AGE p.129, THE PHILOSOPHICAL AGE p.58-61

Exhibitions

"The Princess and the Patriot: Ekaterina Dashkova, Benjamin Franklin and the Age of Enlightenment" exhibition was held in Philadelphia, U.S.A., from February to December 2006. Benjamin Franklin and Dashkova met only once, in Paris in 1781. Franklin was 75 and Dashkova was 37. Franklin and Dashkova were both evidently impressed with each other. Franklin invited Dashkova to become the first woman to join the American Philosophical Society, and the only one to be so honored for another 80 years. Later, Dashkova reciprocated by making him the first American member of the Russian Academy. The correspondence between Franklin and Dashkova was the highlight of the exhibition.

Sources

  • , Volume 96, Part 1, Editor Sue Ann Prince, American Philosophical Society, 2006, ISBN 978-0-87169-961-9
  • Woronzoff-Dashkoff, A. Dashkova: A Life of Influence and Exile. American Philosophical Society: Philadelphia, 2008.
  • , Editors Jehanne M. Gheith, Alexander Woronzoff-Dashkoff, Translator Kyril FitzLyon,Duke University Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0-8223-1621-3
  • , Great Women Travel Writers: From 1750 to the Present, Editors Alba Amoia, Bettina Knapp, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006, ISBN 978-0-8264-1840-1

Head of Two Academies

In 1782, Dashkova returned to the Russian capital, and was at once taken into favor by the empress, who strongly sympathized with her in her literary tastes, and especially in her desire to elevate Russian to a high place among the literary languages of Europe.

Immediately after her return, the princess was appointed Director of the Imperial Academy of Arts and Sciences (known now as the Russian Academy of Sciences). Theoretically the head of the Academy was always its President; however, Count Kirill Razumovsky, who had been appointed President in 1746 (when he was just 18) played only a nominal role in the Academy, and the actual leadership in the Academy, such as there was, belonged to successive Directors.

Dashkova was the first woman in the world to head a national academy of sciences. Although not a scientist herself, Dashkova restored the failing institution to prominence and intellectual respectability. This came at a critical time in the history of science, its transformation from what was called natural philosophy, often practiced by gifted amateurs, to a professional enterprise.

In 1784 Dashkova was also named the first president of the newly created Russian Academy. In this position, too, she acquitted herself with marked ability. She launched the Russian Academy’s project for the creation of its 6-volume Dictionary of the Russian Languages, arranged its plan, and executed a part of the work herself.

In 1783 she was elected an honorary member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the first woman among this academy’s foreign members, and its second female member after Eva Ekeblad.

Shortly before Catherine’s death, the friends quarrelled over a tragedy which the princess had allowed to find a place in the publications of the Academy, though it contained revolutionary principles, according to the empress. A partial reconciliation was effected, but the princess soon afterwards retired from court.

Exile and legacy

On the accession of the Emperor Paul in 1796, she was deprived of all her offices, and ordered to retire to a miserable village in the government of Novgorod, to meditate on the events of 1762. After a time the sentence was partially recalled on the petition of her friends, and she was permitted to pass the closing years of her life on her own estate near Moscow, where she died on January 4, 1810.

Her son, the last of the Dashkov family, died in 1807 and bequeathed his fortune to his cousin Ivan Vorontsov, who thereupon by imperial licence assumed the name Vorontsov-Dashkov. Ivan’s son, Count Illarion Ivanovich Vorontsov-Dashkov, held an appointment in the tsar’s household from 1881 to 1897 before gaining wide renown as a General-Governor of Caucasus from 1905 to 1915.

Works

Besides her work on the Russian dictionary, Princess Dashkova edited a monthly magazine, and wrote at least two dramatic works: The Marriage of Fabian, and a comedy entitled Toissiokoff. Her memoirs were published in French in Paris in 1804 (Mon Histoire) and in English in 1840 in London in two volumes (Memoirs of the Princess Daschkaw, written by herself). The English version of her memoirs was edited by Mrs. W. Bradford, who, as Catherine Wilmot, had resided with the princess between 1803 and 1808, and had suggested their preparation.